How to explain complex things in simple language. What is the Higgs mechanism

To explain this issue as simply as possible, we can cite the following story as an example:

One day very an old man He left the mosque and, walking heavily, went home. He was immediately surrounded by the poor, who knew about his piety and religiosity, and began to shout vyingly: “Hajibaba, may Allah reward you, help us.” Hadjibaba turned to these poor people and said: “Go to my son the grocer, let him give you something to prepare the stew, and feed your families.”

The poor people were very happy about this, and when they came to the grocery store, they conveyed the old man’s words to the owner. The shopkeeper was a very obedient son, and until that day he had never disobeyed his father. He poured cereal into paper bags for each of the poor people, after which he politely escorted them out. The satisfied poor people went home and opened their bags along the way. Each of them joyfully exclaimed: “I have rice in my bag,” “and I have vermicelli,” “and they gave me balls of flour and curdled milk,” “and I have lentils.”

These four poor people, not remembering themselves with joy, hurried home, clutching these bags to themselves, and on the way they met one bad person. They told this man what happened. He could not bear their joy, and told them: “Immediately go to Hadjibaba and tell him: “Your son did not fulfill your order. He gave one of us rice and the other lentils. He acted on his own whim. While you ordered to give one type of food, he did not listen to you.” At first the poor people did not attach any importance to the man’s words, but then they had doubts, and they all went together to the courtyard of the mosque to wait for the old man to appear.

Seeing the old man, they approached him and said: “Your son fulfilled your order, but he did not act in accordance with your order, but at his own discretion. Hearing this from the poor, the old man was very upset, but pulled himself together and said: “Well, now we’ll check it. But my son has never disobeyed me yet.”

When they all entered the grocery store together, the old man asked his son: “Son, why did you act at your own discretion when giving food to these people, and not as I ordered you?” The son answered in a trembling voice: “No way, father. I have not violated your commands until today, and I will not violate them after.” The father said, “But these people complained to me that you acted on your own whim and gave each of them different types of food.” The son said: “No, father, I did not disobey you.

You ordered to give each of them something to prepare the stew, so I did so. I gave each of them the ingredients from which the stew is prepared. Did I give any of them zucchini, cheese, beans or yogurt? No. Because these products are not used to make stew. All the products I gave them were classified as suitable for making stew.”

Hearing this explanation, the father praised his son, and the poor people apologized, admitting that they were wrong.

This is exactly how the madhhabs arose. Because one word had several meanings. Just as the expression “anything for making stew” implies rice, lentils and other products, so some words mentioned in the Koran or Hadith have several meanings. And the imams of the madhhabs gave preference to one or another meaning of these words, and each of these meanings is correct and appropriate. Thanks to these preferences, madhhabs appeared. Thus, the emergence of different madhhabs is very logical.

Time is based on seconds, minutes and hours.

While the basis for these units has changed throughout history, their roots can be traced back to ancient state Sumer.

The modern international unit of time is determined by the electronic transition of the cesium atom. But what is this physical quantity?

Time measures the progress of events

Time is a measurement of the progression of events. Physicists define this quantity as the progression of events from the past to the present and into the future. Basically, if the system is immutable, it is outside this indicator. Time can be considered as the fourth dimension of reality, used to describe events in three-dimensional space. It is not something we can see, feel or taste, but we can measure its passage.

The arrow shows that time moves from the past to the future, and not vice versa

The hand on the clock shows that time moves from the past to the future, and not in the other direction. Physical equations work equally well whether a quantity is going forward into the future (positive time) or backward into the past (negative time). However, in the natural world this quantity has one direction. The question of why it is irreversible is one of the biggest unresolved questions in science.

One explanation is that the natural world follows the laws of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, its entropy remains constant or increases. If the Universe is considered a closed system, its entropy (degree of disorder) can never decrease. In other words, time cannot return to the exact state it was in at an earlier point. This quantity cannot move backwards.

Slowing down or speeding up

A working watch keeps time accurately. In classical mechanics it is the same everywhere. However, from Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, we know that quantity is a relative concept. The indicator depends on the observer's frame of reference. This can lead to subjective deceleration, where the time between events becomes longer (expands) the closer one of them gets to the speed of light.

Moving clocks operate more slowly than stationary clocks, with the effect becoming more pronounced as the moving mechanism approaches the speed of light. Clocks in Earth's orbit record time more slowly than those on the surface, muon particles decay more slowly as they fall, and the Michelson-Morley experiment confirmed the contraction of length and expansion of magnitude.

Parallel reality helps avoid time paradox when traveling through time

The time paradox of time travel can be avoided by traveling to a parallel reality. Travel means moving forward or backward at different times, just as you can move between different points in space. Jumping forward in time occurs in nature. Astronauts on space station undergo acceleration when they return to Earth and slow down relative to the station.

Existing problems

However, time travel creates problems. One of them is causation, or cause-and-effect relationship. Moving backwards can trigger a time paradox.

The Grandfather Paradox is a classic example in science. According to him, if you go back and kill your grandfather before your mother or father is born, you can prevent your own birth.

Many physicists believe that time travel to the past is impossible, but there are solutions to the paradox such as traveling between parallel universes or branch points.

Perception of physical quantity

Aging affects the perception of time, although scientists do not agree with this point. Human brain able to keep track of time. The suprachiasmatic nuclei of the brain are the area responsible for daily or circadian natural rhythms. Neurostimulants and drugs significantly affect its perception. Chemical substances, which excite neurons, causing them to function faster, while reducing neuronal activity slows down the perception of time.

Basically, when everything around you seems to be speeding up, the brain produces more events within a certain interval. In this regard, time really seems to fly when you're having fun. But it seems to slow down during emergency situations or danger.

Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston say the brain doesn't actually speed up, but an area like the amygdala does become more active. The Amygdala is the part of the brain that is responsible for creating memories. As it forms more memories, time seems drawn out.

The same phenomenon explains why older people seem to perceive time at a faster pace than when they were younger. Psychologists believe that the brain forms more memories of new experiences than familiar ones. Since there are fewer and fewer new memories in later life, time seems to pass faster in the older person's perception.

The beginning and end of time

More and more scientists are inclined to believe that our Universe was born as a result of a powerful explosion of a certain conventional point, at which such indicators as mass, time and space were not noted.

Astronomer Stephen Hawking and his Cambridge colleague Neil Turok suggest that there was an original idea from which the word was born. It was these two concepts that contained time and space.

It is unknown whether time has a beginning or an end. As for the Universe, time began in it. The starting point was 13,799 billion years ago when the Big Bang occurred. Evidence of this process is the relict radiation in space and the position of retreating galaxies. At this time, transitions begin to take place from one level of natural organization to another - from the nucleus to the atom, and then to the molecule, from which living matter emerged.

We can measure cosmic background radiation as microwaves from the Big Bang, but no radiation with earlier origins has been observed.

One argument about the origin of time is that if it were to expand indefinitely, then the night sky would be filled with the light of old stars.

Will there be an end to time?

The answer to this question is unknown. If the Universe expands forever, time will continue. If there is a new Big Bang, our timeline will end and a new countdown will begin. In particle physics experiments, random particles emerge from the vacuum, so it appears that the universe will not become static or timeless. Time will show…

Let's say we: - me, you and the Chronoscopist - flew on an airplane through Pacific Ocean. On the way, the three of us drank absinthe, became rowdy, broke off the door to the toilet, and for this we were thrown into the sea through the emergency exit. Luckily, a small, unnamed Polynesian island was discovered near where we fell. Once ashore, we conferred and decided to consider it a new state called the United States of Absinthe (USA).

When we were thrown out of the plane, we were naturally not given any luggage.

Therefore, all of our tangible and intangible assets are only the toilet door, which you took with you. And in general, despite the absinthe, you turned out to be the most thrifty among us: you accidentally discovered a hundred dollar bill in your wallet. Thus, in our USA there are non-financial assets - a door - and financial assets, they are also the money supply - one hundred dollars. This is all our savings. Since we have nothing else at all, we can say this: we have one material asset - a door, backed by a money supply of one hundred dollars. That is, our door costs one hundred dollars.

Having sobered up a little, we decide that we need to somehow settle down. The fastest of us was the Chronoscopist. He immediately announced that he was creating a bank and was ready to take advantage of the population’s cash savings at 3 percent per annum - well, a person can’t sit idle. You give him one hundred dollars, and he writes them down in a notebook in the “Liabilities - Deposits” section. But I didn’t slurp cabbage soup either - it’s in vain that I spent so much time investigating economic fraud - I know how to take both a door and a hundred dollars from you. I suggest you take your hundred dollars in growth at 5 percent per annum. I tear out a piece of paper from my notebook and write on it: “$100 bond at 5% per annum.” You feel like you've had enough. You take the money from the upset Chronoscopist from the deposit and give it to me in exchange for my bond.

I take your hundred dollars and deposit it back into the bank of the delighted Chronoscopist.

In an amicable way, we could calm down on this and go and do something else - shake a palm tree or dive for shellfish - earn our daily bread, so to speak. But you know - I am an irrepressible financial genius, such trifles as coconuts and oysters do not interest me. Having wandered around our island - fifty steps from south coast to the north and thirty - from west to east - I come up with a brilliant combination. I come up to you and offer to earn another percentage per annum from scratch. Take a loan from Chronoscopist Bank at 4 percent and buy another bond from me at 5 percent.

I immediately write out the second bond for one hundred dollars on a notepad and wave it in front of your nose. Without thinking twice, you run to the bank and take out a loan of one hundred dollars secured by my first bond for one hundred dollars. They are there - I deposited them there. You give me the hundred dollars you borrowed and hide the second bond in your wallet - now you have two hundred dollars worth of my bonds.

And I put one hundred dollars in the bank - now I have two hundred dollars on deposit there. The chronoscopist is jumping up and down with joy: the credit business is booming.

Do you think I'll stop there? Yeah, now – I’ve already issued you a third bond. Run to the bank for a loan secured by the second bond. Towards evening, having run around the island with this hundred bucks and torn up all the leaves from the bond notebook, we have the following picture. You have five thousand dollars worth of my bonds, and I have five thousand dollars worth of deposits in the bank. Now I feel that the time has come to take control of your door. I offer to buy it from you for one hundred dollars. But you are mischievous - there is only one door - and charge a thousand dollars. Well, a thousand dollars is a thousand dollars - after all, I have as much as five thousand dollars on deposit. On the last piece of notepaper, I send a payment order to the Chronoscopist to transfer a thousand dollars from my deposit to yours and pick up your door.

If our accounting is given to an American economist with a Harvard diploma, he will tell us that our United States has a thousand dollars of tangible assets in the form of doors, and ten thousand dollars of financial assets in the form of bonds and deposits. That is, that the value of our total property increased 110 times during the day.

What is particle physics?

Paul Sorenson

physicist

“We push little things together to break them into even smaller things until we get the smallest thing possible. This way we will know what all matter is made of.”

What is the Higgs boson?

physicist

“Everything around us is made of tiny parts, like Lego. But on their own, these cube things would move incredibly fast, like lightning. We could not live in such a world - it would be complete madness! So scientists realized that there must be something that slows everything down. Something like glue that keeps things from flying apart faster than we can blink an eye. Notice how quickly the light spreads across the room when we turn on the lamp. But most other things can't move as fast. And this glue is very difficult to see. For this, giant machines and a huge amount of energy were used - only then were we able to see it and now we know for sure that it really exists.”

What is the Higgs mechanism?

David Miller

physicist

“Imagine a cocktail party: the participating politicians are evenly distributed throughout the room, everyone is chatting with their closest neighbors. The former prime minister enters the room, and her closest colleagues immediately rush towards her, forming a crowd around her.<…>Due to the constant crowd of people around, it acquires more mass than usual, that is, it has greater inertia at the same speed of movement around the room. Once she starts moving, it will be difficult for her to stop, and once she stops, it will be difficult to start moving again. In three-dimensional space and taking into account all the relativistic complications, this is the Higgs mechanism. In order to give mass to elementary particles, we introduce an additional background field, which is locally distorted as particles move through it. This distortion—clustering of the field around the particle—gives rise to its mass.”

How does immunity work?
and what are type C lectins

Ana Lobato

immunologist

“Our body doesn’t really like guests, especially those who don’t look like friends. When someone gets inside, our cells “look” at them different types eye. Different “eyes” see different shapes and forms, so they can understand what kind of aliens they are and what to do with them. They are not like regular eyes, but act like little hands that touch objects. I study only one type of these "eyes" that "sees" strange things, like mold growing on spoiled food. But these "eyes" don't do everything alone. They have many friends and helpers, and the more of them, the better. Together they attack the stranger and eat him. After they eat, they show the leftovers to their friends so they know which bad guys are worth fighting. This is how our body protects us from disease.”

How powerful can a quantum computer be?

Umesh Vazirani

professor at the University of California

"Eat ancient legend. In my opinion, it is about Birbal, the grand vizier at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. The Emperor was so pleased with his service that he asked what gift he could give to thank him. The minister responded by wishing for rice. He asked for the first cell chessboard put one grain, on the second - two, on the third - four, etc. The treasurer began to count out the grains of rice, and before they reached the end of the chessboard, the whole granary was empty. In the same way, the quantum calculus algorithm shows an exponential increase in power.”

How to visualize a black hole?

Robert Frost

specialist
according to educational instructions

“Take a large piece of cling film, stretch it in your hands and place a small ball in the center so that it forms a deflection due to its weight. Drop a few drops of water onto the sheet and watch them roll down the film directly to the ball. This will show how gravity works. Remove the ball and let the child feel the film with his finger and understand - the more you pull it back (the heavier the object), the stronger the funnel turns out. Then ask your child to make a hole in the middle of the film, which will represent a very, very heavy object. Drops of water will slip through this hole. It turns out that black hole- this is such a heavy object that it bends space. Everything that goes into it (like drops) never comes back."

Why did the bank collapse
Lehman Brothers

(starting point of the global economic crisis of 2008)?

Nathan Myers

economist

“One guy bought 10 Snickers at the store for $1 each and sold them for $1.50 during the day at school. He thought that if it was so easy, he could sell 100 chocolates the next day. To buy 100 Snickers, he had to borrow $10 from friends. But when he came to school the next day, there was already a vending machine in the hall that sold chocolates for 75 cents. Of course, no one wanted to buy them from him for $1.50, so he also had to reduce the price to 75 cents. As a result, the money that he managed to get was not even enough to repay his debts to his friends, and they beat him up.”

How did all modern animal groups suddenly arise?

Mark Srur

paleontologist

“545 million years ago, all modern groups of animals suddenly appeared on the planet (except for sponges and jellyfish, which appeared earlier). This phenomenon, called the Cambrian Explosion, is not easy to explain because it is associated with many factors.

First, it is worth comparing the earth from the Cryogenian and Ediacaran periods. In the first one it resembled a huge snowball, and in the second it began to warm up. IN warm climate It became easier for animals to develop. Due to the fact that there was no competition between them then, they began to take on the most bizarre forms. Some evolutionary experiments have survived to us only in the form of fossils. Others were more successful, and these animals passed on information to others about how to better build their bodies.

For claritytake five identical designs
from Lego bricks

For clarity, take five identical structures made from Lego bricks. They will represent those creatures that we find at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Then add details to them randomly. Each block added will represent a successful evolutionary experiment. Even after you add three pieces to each of the structures, you will see how their types begin to differ, and the more cubes you add, the less similar the structures will be to each other.

This is an intuitive explanation of what we call developmental canalization, without delving into the scientific jungle of developmental genetics and macroevolutionary dynamics. The Lego experiment shows how thanks natural selection successful traits take root and the body structure of animals begins to differ irreversibly. This is what happened during the Cambrian Explosion, which set the stage for modern biodiversity.”

According to physicists, additional spatial dimensions, if they really exist, are collapsed. Returning to the ant example, we can twist a piece of paper so that it forms a cylinder. In this case, if the ant starts crawling in one direction, it will eventually return to the point from which it started. This is an example of a compactified dimension. If an ant crawls parallel to the length of a cylinder, it will never return to its starting point (especially if we imagine that the paper cylinder is infinitely long). This is an example of a "flat" measurement. According to string theory, we live in a world where the three familiar dimensions of space are “flat”; but there are additional dimensions that are twisted into a very small radius 10 cm at -30 degrees or even less."

Time is based on seconds, minutes and hours.

While the basis for these units has changed throughout history, their roots can be traced back to the ancient state of Sumer.

The modern international unit of time is determined by the electronic transition of the cesium atom. But what is this physical quantity?

Time measures the progress of events

The arrow shows that time moves from the past to the future, and not vice versa

Slowing down or speeding up

Parallel reality helps avoid time paradox when traveling through time

The time paradox of time travel can be avoided by traveling to a parallel reality. Travel means moving forward or backward at different times, just as you can move between different points in space. Jumping forward in time occurs in nature. Astronauts on the space station experience acceleration as they return to Earth and slow down relative to the station.

Existing problems

However, time travel creates problems. One of them is causation, or cause-and-effect relationship. Moving backwards can trigger a time paradox.

The Grandfather Paradox is a classic example in science. According to him, if you go back and kill your grandfather before your mother or father is born, you can prevent your own birth.

Many physicists believe that time travel to the past is impossible, but there are solutions to the paradox, such as travel between parallel Universes or branch points.

Perception of physical quantity

Aging affects the perception of time, although scientists do not agree with this point. The human brain is capable of keeping track of time. The suprachiasmatic nuclei of the brain are the area responsible for daily or circadian natural rhythms. Neurostimulants and drugs significantly affect its perception. Chemicals that excite neurons cause them to function faster, while reducing neuron activity slows down the perception of time.

The beginning and end of time

Astronomer Stephen Hawking and his Cambridge colleague Neil Turok suggest that there was an original idea from which the word was born. It was these two concepts that contained time and space.

We can measure cosmic background radiation as microwaves from the Big Bang, but no radiation with earlier origins has been observed.

One argument about the origin of time is that if it were to expand indefinitely, then the night sky would be filled with the light of old stars.