Oh, a bit off topic, but mind clarifying something for me? My QFT knowledge is very limited at the moment, and I'm certainly not (yet) up to the task of actually trying to really grasp the Standard Model, but...
Is it correct to say that in a sense the force carriers are, in a sense, illusory? That is, the gauge bosons are kind of an illusion in the same sense that the "force of gravity" is? From what little I managed to pick up, the idea is that instead one starts without them, but assigns certain special kinds of symmetries to the configuration space. These local (aka) gauge symmetries allow interference effects that basically amount to the forces of interaction. One can then "rephrase" those effects in a way that more looks like another quantum field interacting with, well, whatever it's interacting with?
ie, can the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces (as forces) be made to go away and turn into symmetries in configuration space in the same sense that in GR, the force of gravity goes away and all that's left is geometry of spacetime?
Or have I rolled a critical fail with regards to attempting to comprehending the notion of gauge fields/bosons?
Thanks. Again, I know it's a slight tangent, but since the subject of the Standard Model came up anyways...
Ok, I'm not touching the ECE thing; as noted, I'm not a theorist. I just measure stuff. I've taken classes in formal QFT, but I don't use it day-to-day, so it's a weak point for me. However, it seems a bit odd to describe things that can be produced in collisions and (at least in principle) fired at your enemies to kill them by radiation poisoning as 'illusory'. If you bang two electrons together, measuring the cross-section as a function of the center-of-mass energy, you will observe a classic 1/s decline interrupted by equally classic resonance bumps. Th...
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. Feel free to rid yourself of cached thoughts by doing so in Old Church Slavonic. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
If you're new to Less Wrong, check out this welcome post.