Talk:Higgs mechanism
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The way in which history is written is a strange one, especially when it comes to science... The "official" story that you can read everywhere (including here) is that the Higgs mechanism was (as the name suggests) 'originally proposed' by Peter Higgs. Slightly better-informed sources sometimes mention that the mechanism was "independently discovered by Brout and Englert". In reality, and as Higgs himself has several times pointed out: "they were clearly ahead of me",see e.g. http://www.cpa.ed.ac.uk/bulletinarchive/1996-1997/11/news/26.html
The chronological truth is indeed that the so-called Higgs mechanism was 'originally proposed' by Brout and Englert, and that Higgs 'independently discovered' the same idea.
I always wonder why the anglo-saxon scientific world is always so imperialistic, not to say revisionistic. Either it's because anglosaxons just can't remember any non-english sounding name, or they really want people to believe that every single thing in modern science has been invented either by an American or a British.
[edit] applied to photons
Why does the Higgs mechanism not give mass to photons? --63.26.56.28 17:43, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
- Actually under certain circumstances it does. (At least an absolutely similar mechanism can explain the meißner-effect in superconductors.) But in the standard model (so not in a solid but in the vacuum) you can just measure masses for the weak gauge bosons. Perhaps, there ist a good article in en:wikipedia on the electroweak theory. This ought to be the right place to turn to. :) -- 84.61.164.214 20:56, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
