How does Higgs field relate to Aether theories?

Question

I am an amateur learning about the Higgs because I was interested in what the LHC's purpose is.

I read that as a particle passes through space, it is actually passing through a Higgs field and there are little Higgs particles that accumulate on the moving particle, which is where mass and momentum come from.

But that's where my main question comes from:

This all sounds similar to a "medium"; and mediums usually impart resistance on particles moving through them so the particles would slow down even in space. As far as I know, this is the reason why aether/ether theories don't work.

Please let me know.

Answer 1

The Higgs ether does not pick out a preferred velocity--- it is the same in all reference frames. Because of this, it can't impart a resistance to velocity, since any velocity is symmetric with any other. There is no Higgs drag. But it can impart a resistance to change in velocity, and this is a change mass. The most important thing is that it allows different helcities of fermions, which would be necessarily massless, to join up in pairs to make massive fermions.

Answer 2

I read that s a particle passes through space, it is actually passing through a Higgs field and there are little Higgs particles that accumulate on the moving particle, which is where mass and momentum come from.

That's one way that people try to describe the Higgs mechanism to non-specialists, but it doesn't really work like that. The Higgs boson is more like a side effect of the mechanism by which particles gain mass, not the thing that actually gives the particles mass. There aren't really little Higgs bosons latching on to particles and slowing them down.

You're right about that causing problems for physics, if that were the way it worked. It wouldn't break relativity, but it would prompt us to wonder why we haven't noticed the effect of this "cloud" of Higgs bosons. This is very similar to what people were thinking in the late 1800s, when they were wondering why they didn't notice the effect of the electromagnetic aether.

Answer 3

I think you are confusing the Higgs field with the so-called Dirac sea.

The both things give some mass to the particles.

But it is Dirac sea that has pairs of virtual particles that lake dipoles accumulate on a charged particle and increase its mass.

It is the Dirac sea that behaves more like Aether, not the Higgs field.

Answer 4

this is the same thing many physicists have said, they refer to it as the "quantum ether" the invention of the photon was key in the development of quantum physics.

After deciding light does not always behave like a wave, the general consensus was the ether stuff was not true, because the idea of the ether was about trying to find the medium that light travelled through. After we decided they behave as particles I think everyone was happy to imagine these particles zipping through a vacuum.

Key word: "Imagine"

Anyway recently everyone is drawing parallels to this quantum zero point as being like an "ether" as described yonder, i think important to make sure you understand that all of this physics is just in our head, it's just a model that we try to match reality with (or the reality that we observe, we can only comment on what we can observe).

Ultimately, We will likely never know, we cannot observe this like we can the ocean, This is theoretical physics, we are playing pin the donkey on the inner workings of the universe we have no actual way of seeing what's going on we just make up a convenient model.

Answer 5

The Higgs field is the aether.

The Michelson-Morley experiment disproved a stationary aether. The Sagnac effect disproved a completely entrained aether by the Earth. The aether is neither stationary nor completely entrained by the Earth.

Aether is displaced by matter.

Particles of matter are condensations of aether.

Aether has mass.

'Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation in NASA Hubble Image' http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/mar/HQ_12-068_Hubble_Dark_Core.html

"This technique revealed the dark matter in Abell 520 had collected into a "dark core," containing far fewer galaxies than would be expected if the dark matter and galaxies were anchored together. Most of the galaxies apparently have sailed far away from the collision. "This result is a puzzle," said astronomer James Jee of the University of California in Davis, lead author of paper about the results available online in The Astrophysical Journal. "Dark matter is not behaving as predicted, and it's not obviously clear what is going on. It is difficult to explain this Hubble observation with the current theories of galaxy formation and dark matter.""

The dark matter core does not defy explanation. The dark matter core is not a puzzle. The dark matter core is not difficult to explain. It is obviously clear what is going on.

Non-baryonic dark matter and galaxies are not anchored together. Matter moves through and displaces the aether.