Timeline for What gives mass to dark matter particles?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 7, 2019 at 22:55 | vote | accept | safesphere | ||
| May 31, 2018 at 18:06 | comment | added | knzhou | @safesphere I mean, I don't disagree that the Higgs mechanism is a very common and important way to end up with particles with mass. But I can think of several dark matter candidates that don't get mass from the Higgs off the top of my head. And even for the ones that do get mass from a Higgs mechanism, it's often a different Higgs field from the one in the SM. | |
| May 31, 2018 at 18:03 | comment | added | knzhou | @safesphere If you try to make a general principle just from one example, without knowing how the example works in full, you may be misled. Recall the cargo cultists who thought that building a runway on their island would make planes magically appear. It is kind of like seeing one Java program and thinking that every program in the world must contain "public static void main(String[] args)". | |
| May 31, 2018 at 18:01 | comment | added | knzhou | @safesphere Indeed, intuition is extremely important for doing physics. But it's important to have the intuition rooted in something, like real mathematics, so you can check it and fix it. For example, we get about a question a day here from people who reject special relativity and refuse to read the arguments supporting it, because it conflicts with their physical intuition. | |
| May 31, 2018 at 17:38 | comment | added | safesphere | I think this answer contains a misconception unfortunately caused by a popular confusion between physics and math. Physics is based on math, but is more than that. Physics is life, it has meaning. It takes intuition. All known massive particles (let's set mysterious neutrinos aside for now) acquire mass (not the amount, but the fact of having it) from the Higgs field. Apparently, any known particle can move in time, only if it interacts with a scalar field permeating the universe. Sounds like a fundamental reason, a law of nature perhaps? So can we just add mass by hand? Sure, on paper we can. | |
| May 30, 2018 at 21:30 | history | edited | knzhou | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 46 characters in body
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| May 30, 2018 at 18:36 | history | answered | knzhou | CC BY-SA 4.0 |