Talk:1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers

This article should probably be deleted
It is yet another attempt to give credit to one team over another. Give it a rest. Seeing that Goldstone's theorem is evaded is not at all difficult, if you understand how Goldstone's theorem is proved and you see what is going on in terms of the physics of superconductivity (which breaks Goldstone's theorem just as much). This type of sniping is ridiculous. All three teams did a nice job.Likebox (talk) 18:41, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

If it's not deleted
Then it should stick to the context in 1964, not today. It was not known then that symmetry breaking theories were renormalizable (except for the U(1) model), although I think that people suspected they were. The differences between the ideas in the papers are very minor, and are not very notable.Likebox (talk) 18:43, 19 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I stand corrected. I am sure that you are right when you say below that some sort of phi-4 symmetry breaking model was shown to be renormalizable in the sixties. What I meant to say is that gauge theories with symmetry breaking (or without) were not known to be renormalizable, and that mass terms for spin 1 were thought to make no difference for renormalizability, just like mass terms for spin 0, because this is true in QED. This was consensus until 1971 or so.Likebox (talk) 20:27, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Initial Response
Read the three PRL papers. Read the references and external readings from the Wiki pages. There is little stated on this Wiki page that is not referenced or baselined in a highly regarded, refereed paper or journal. Historical perspectives are provided from all teams. The submission has also been reviewed by physics Profs who were at the involved schools in 1964. In 1964, it should also be noted, evading the Goldstone theorem was thought to be very difficult and stumped many famous theorists such as Salam, Weinberg, Goldstone, and others. Additionally, several papers in 1964 proved a large range of symmetry breaking theories are renormalizable and the results were published in various journal articles. What is clear is the passage of time, and the acceptance of these broken symmetry approaches, makes many things seem easy in theoretical physics. Thank you for reading the entry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs) 20:52, 19 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I did read them (a while ago). What I am saying is not that GHK were unimportant--- their contribution was very important. It's just that a very similar contribution was also made by Brout/Englert/Higgs, and its not worthwhile comparing the papers to say "this group was better".


 * In my mind, credit for showing that you could evage Goldstone's theorem is due to Anderson, Schwinger, and Stueckelberg. Stueckelberg's version of the Higgs mechanism does it more or less explicitly. This article is uncharitable at best, and might be a personally motivated attempt to push one group up at the expense of another.Likebox (talk) 20:12, 20 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks again for the read and notes. I have no ties to this but have noticed some odd things since researching this topic over the past couple years.  The intent of this article was to highlight the similarity, merits, and differences of all three of papers.  This has been lost over time and you will rarely see this type of evaluation.  You bring up the notion that this article is pushing one team – this is not the intent.  The one thing I have noticed from my research on this topic is that GHK seems to be the most charitable on their credit to the other teams.  H and BE (in particular) seem to want to exclude GHK. BE’s historical survey referenced in the article is one of many samples of this.  Similarly, this approach seems to be buttressed by t'Hooft who referenced GHK in his Nobel winning paper (http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/phys/2005-0622-155148/13877.pdf) but left them out of the Nobel speech in Stockholm and subsequent papers (see t'Hooft's article on Scholarpedia for example (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Gauge_theories).  One can only conclude that is to make their Nobel math work (3).  As I said, this is odd.  I will look to improve this article while keeping it based in the facts and my research. Mary_at_CERN 21:16, 20 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Also, it is, in my mind, not a good idea to make the opinions of those who lived through the time a definitive source, because they could not see the big picture. Better to read the literature, and give chronological credit based on who proposed what idea when. The physicists who lived through the sixties are pretty incompetent at summarizing their own history.Likebox (talk) 20:15, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Emphasis on radiation gauge is no good
There is no reason that you can't see that Goldstone's theorem is evaded in any gauge. The symmetry direction is pure gauge, so the operator that does a symmetry transformation does not change a physical state. Any physicist familiar with the path-integral or other equivalent Lagrangian formulation can immediately see that. The problem is that in 1964, the majority of physicists were stupid and incometent in this regard, and ignored the path integral.Likebox (talk) 20:22, 20 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Ok, I should retract this because it assumes path integrals for gauge theory which came in 1967: the radiation gauge is probably the only general tool available in 1964. But the observation that plasmons have a nonzero frequency, and that this violates Goldstone, was made by Anderson.Likebox (talk) 20:37, 20 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I think I get the point now. There were three papers in 1964, the first, BE, claimed you get massive vectors using physical arguments that were hard for HEP people to understand. Higgs gave an essentially classical field redefinition argument in "unitarity" gauge, which was easy but difficult to state in diagrams, so suspicious in those days before classical arguments could be trusted within path integrals. So a lot of people said "What about Goldstone's theorem? What's up with that?" and then you could point to GHK, who did it explicitly by diagrams in radiation gauge. Is this a fair take? If so, the article can say it more tersely, and also it would be nice to actually summarize the detailed arguments in each of the papers in modernized language so that a young person would be able to read it.Likebox (talk) 13:38, 25 August 2009 (UTC)


 * GHK did not use graphs - technically graphs do not work because this is not a perturbative solution. However, because they form a complicated sort of complete set of functions you can represent any relativistic theory by them summed in certain appropriate ways. What those appropriate ways are is defined by the overall structure of the theory and again is not trivial. The paper that recently came out (http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.3466), and sourced in this Wiki article, from GG addresses much of this in modern language. Few people actually understand the path integral for broken symmetry problems. (they think they do until they are shown contradictions which come from the way everyone does these things).Mary_at_CERN 23:11, 25 August 2009 (UTC)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs)


 * I don't think you are right that the path integral it still confusing. I can't imagine what contradictions could possibly come up. When you say "nonperturbative" in this case, I think you just mean that you shifted the fields. That's not really nonperturbative, because it's something you can do with diagrams in the effective action. You're not looking at monopoles or theta angles.Likebox (talk) 03:28, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Why "Higgs field" (or "... boson", etc.)?
Hi, I came to this page to understand why the field/boson/whatever are generally named after Higgs only. Maybe he was the first? It doesn't seem so. I then expected to see that his contribution was somewhat more advanced with respect to the others, but it does not seem to be like this as well.

Maybe this page on the comparison could include a few explicit words about this.

213.203.132.119 (talk) 08:59, 20 January 2010 (UTC)


 * It's a firmly established historical accident: 'tHooft who popularized this, read Higgs.Likebox (talk) 13:18, 20 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Ben Lee was the physicist who first started to call this the Higgs or a prticle with "Higgs-like" properties. It could have been named after any or all six.  I believe Ben did this in Berekely, CA at a Rochester Conference in the early 1970's.  Here is one article on the naming (http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000087) and one on the 2010 Sakurai Prize (http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/10/05/not-the-nobel-but-higgs-shares-major-theoretical-physics-prize/#more-5226).Mary_at_CERN 21:15, 29 January 2010 (UTC)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs)

Does it really makes sense to use Guralnik's assessment
From the article
 * However, a case can be made that, while first to publish by a couple months, Higgs, Brout and Englert solved half of the problem – massifying the gauge particle. Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble, while published a couple months later, had a more complete solution – massifying the gauge particle and also showing how the numbing influence from Goldstone's theorem is avoided.

The citation is to a paper by Guralnik himself. While he may well be correct, I worry that relying on Guralnik's opinion alone creates the appearance of bias. -- Tim314 (talk) 20:56, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Agreed, the article does sound rather biased to me. Ptrslv72 (talk) 18:00, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

I added a POV tag hoping to attract attention on the article. The issue of who exactly was the first in elucidating this or that aspect of the problem 47 years ago sounds quite arcane now, and I for one don't have a definite position on it. However, I fully agree with the statement of the editor above: relying on Guralnik's own assessment (not just in the closing sentence, but seemingly in the whole article) does create the appearance of bias. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 13:11, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Let me quote a few examples of subjective judgements that are presented in the article as facts (all the italics are mine):

- However, Higgs failed to provide any detail and his contribution in that paper was not as strong as it might have been otherwise.

- Because they did not demonstrate an understanding of the importance of keeping track of degrees of freedom, Brout and Englert failed to mention (or correctly comment on) the needed entire mass spectrum of their models

- So Higgs should have either showed that, in a Lorentz gauge, the unwanted Goldstone boson is harmless, or carry out a radiation gauge analysis to show that Goldstone's theorem actually failed. His earlier Physics Letters paper merely pointed out that Goldstone's theorem could fail in the radiation gauge, not that it necessarily did.

- Thus Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble achieved the goal of lending mass to the vector particle, and their paper was also not plagued by the encumbrance of Goldstone's theorem.

- Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble, while published a couple months later, had a more complete solution.

Regardless of the merits of the case, this is clearly not an impartial encyclopaedic article. It sounds more like self-promotion from GHK. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 13:22, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

BTW, the topic is becoming hot again: see this link and have a look at this talk. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 13:49, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

In case there are still any doubts left, I will list a few similarities between the language of the article and the language of section 8 of Guralnik's review paper:


 * (Wiki article): Because they did not demonstrate an understanding of the importance of keeping track of degrees of freedom, Brout and Englert failed to mention (or correctly comment on) the needed entire mass spectrum of their models.
 * (Guralnik): This paper (...) did not appear to fully recognize how very important it is to keep track of degrees of freedom. As a result, these authors did not provide, nor correctly comment on, the entire mass spectrum of their models.


 * (Wiki article): Higgs attempted to fill in this gap in the subsequent PRL paper but did not revisit the radiation gauge or avoidance mechanism suggested in his earlier paper.
 * (Guralnik): Higgs attempts to fill in this deficiency in his PRL paper [7], but does not revisit the radiation gauge and does not completely calculate the spectrum in this paper as discussed in more detail below.


 * (Wiki article): However, a case can be made that, while first to publish by a couple months, Higgs, Brout and Englert solved half of the problem – massifying the gauge particle. Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble, while published a couple months later, had a more complete solution – massifying the gauge particle and also showing how the numbing influence from Goldstone's theorem is avoided. (NOTE: here the article does indeed quote Guralnik's paper)
 * (Guralnik): I quote my collaborator C.R. Hagen, “In a sense EB and H solved half of the problem — namely massifying the gauge particle. GHK solved an entire problem — massifying and also showing how the deadening hand of the Goldstone theorem is avoided.”


 * (Wiki article): Over the years, the differences between these papers are no longer widely understood, due to the passage of time and acceptance of end-results by the particle physics community.
 * (Guralnik): Over the decades, the awareness of the need to address what in 1964 were many worrisome points has vanished because of the acceptance of the end results and the general increase in our theoretical understanding.

In summary, it seems clear to me that this article, on a subject in which Guralnik & co-authors have an obvious interest at stake, is totally relying on Guralnik's own point of view. The fact that the article was initiated and largely maintained by a single-purpose editor is also not reassuring. I tend to agree with editor "Likebox" above that the article should be considered for deletion. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 15:04, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Whew, glad people are reading this wiki finally. Next thing you know people will actually read the three papers from 1964.  For record, I have no tie to any of these six physicists.  Indeed when this page was created a few years back it leaned on Guralnik's recently released paper.  You point this out well...the page is also sourced very well and genrally follows common views in physics (see Ian Sample's Massive for example).  In reading this again, I agree with you that the language could be more diplomatic when discussing the merits of the papers.  I will look to do this.  If you could read each of the 1964 papers that would be good also to understand the differences physics and approaches.  The 1964 papers are here (http://prl.aps.org/50years/milestones#1964).  I will circle back with some mods in the days ahead.  Lot's of "Higgs" news this past week as these are exciting times.  Thanks again for reading. Mary_at_CERN 00:28, 25 August 2011 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs)


 * Hi Mary, thanks for your kind reply. As I tried to argue in another editor's talk page, I think that the problem with this article goes a bit beyond the language. As is clear e.g. from this article in naturenews, the topic is fraught with politics: not more than three people can share a Nobel prize if the Higgs boson is discovered, and GHK are likely to be left out because their paper 1) appeared a few months after the other two papers, and 2) cites them, showing that GHK were aware of their existence. Have a look at the quotes from John Ellis in the Nature article cited above, as well as his recent talk at the 2011 Higgs Hunting Workshop. If you are still at CERN, you might even pass by his office and ask for his take on the issue.
 * Now, Guralnik's interest in promoting the idea that his paper was "more compete" than the others is natural and understandable. However, basing the Wikipedia article entirely on his arguments amounts to taking one side in the ongoing debate on who (apart from Higgs himself) should take credit for the prediction of the Higgs boson. I don't think that Wikipedia should become a tool GHK's (or anybody else's) Nobel campaign, but it's not obvious to me how the bias can be removed from the article without rewriting it entirely. And even if we do rewrite it, which sources should we use to document the different points of view? Remember that a Wikipedia article must not rely on original research, nor should it draw directly from primary sources (check the links if you are not familiar with these policies). Indeed, it seems to me that, in its present form, the article is clearly violating the Wikipedia policy on primary sources. Anyway, I'll keep an eye on your modifications and see if I can contribute anything useful. Hopefully other knowledgeable editors (e.g. Headbomb) will get involved too. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 09:40, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks again. Ellis is more extreme than my original version - so that should be tempered also.  As such, he should read beyond the referneces and "Higgs sentance about the boson" which he has promotoed in other papers.  Thanks for documents.  Pages 5-7 seem a bit unprofessional so we should strive to have a version here that does not parrallel that presentation. Thanks.  Mary_at_CERN 10:47, 25 August 2011 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs)


 * If the Higgs boson is discovered, the debate on who should get the prize will gather steam and this article will risk becoming part of the battleground. The only way to avoid it is to stick carefully to the  agreed policies on what should and should not be used as a source for a Wikipedia article. We cannot just read the three PRL articles and summarize what we (Mary and Ptrslv72) think their differences and relative merits are, because that would amount to editors interpreting primary sources. We cannot rely entirely on Guralnik's review either, because it's inevitably biased by a conflict of interests. What we need are reliable secondary sources, i.e. third-party accounts of the topic, published in reputable journals. You are free to consider the opinion of John Ellis "extreme", but he is undoubtedly an authority on the issue, and his statements are reported in a Nature news article, which is a perfectly legitimate source for WIkipedia. Note BTW that the proper way to report on it would be "John Ellis says that (...)". We should not present this or that opinion as a fact: even your version of the article would have looked a lot less biased if you had made it clearer in the text that you were summarizing Guralnik's side of the argument.  So, if you think that Ellis' opinion does not provide a full picture of the issue, all you have to do is gather other documented opinions by third-party experts,  then quote all of them to give the reader an idea of the different positions in the debate. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 13:01, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * All valid points, you are correct - particularly on how to position facts. Ellis can be considered an authority on the topic.  My final point on Ellis is this 1) he has explicitly positioned himself in the middle of the "politics" you mention and supports the point made in Guralnick's paper around folks in Europe trying to "write-out GHK" or make this a very European Nobel and 2) some feel he does not completely "get it" or want to get the physics of this. He is right that BE did not have boson (I cannot find it) and clearly Higgs did have a sentance on this.  However, GHK has equation and paramters for the particle or boson on p 586 which is mid-represented in his presentation from July 2011 - I have asked better physicists than me to confirm this (and received confirmation). Guralnick's point of view should be positioned as his thoughts just as Englert's view that the boson was "obvious" and did not need to be included in the paper.  I am glad people are reading this Wiki.  Hopefully folks will read the 1964 papers also.  I again agree with the balance you mention and will clean this up shortly.  Overall, given the news out of LHC this week this feels a bit like "mowing the lawn while the house is on fire" as the search for the boson took a seemingly major hit.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs) 14:45, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Once again, it's not for us (Wikipedia editors) to decide who's right or wrong in this debate, we can only report on it using reliable sources. But it sounds like we agree on that now. BTW, you should close your posts on the talk page with four consecutive tildas (~), so the system will automatically add your signature and a timestamp. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 15:39, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes. Somehow I struggle with the (~) signing :)  Mary_at_CERN 16:05, 25 August 2011 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs)
 * Incidentally, you write: "However, GHK has equation and paramters for the particle or boson on p 586 which is mid-represented in his presentation from July 2011". As is explained in section 7 of Guralnik's review, it is the field phi_2 in the second equation at the bottom of page 586 that should in fact play the role of the Higgs boson. However, all GHK's paper says about it is (italics are mine):


 * "While one sees by inspection that there is a massless particle in the theory, it is easily seen that it is completely decoupled from the other (massive) excitations, and has nothing to do with the Goldstone theorem."


 * Guralnik explains in his 2009 review that the apparent masslessness of their phi_2 was "an artifact of the lowest order approximation for the action". However, the fact remains that Higgs' paper clearly pointed out the existence of a massive boson and stated that it is "an essential feature" of theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking, while in GHK's paper the additional boson was considered massless, and appears to be somehow swept under the carpet as a nuisance. While I cannot judge whether the description of the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking is indeed more complete in GHK's paper than in the other two, it seems to me hard to deny that only Higgs' paper mentioned explicitly that the mechanism predicts the existence of a massive scalar. I suppose that this is what Ellis is referring to in his slide 8, and it does not seem to me that he misrepresented the situation. However, let me stress again that my (or your) personal opinion on this matter should not be a source for the Wikipedia article. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 18:43, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * It is a matter of emphasis - clearly GHK did not explicitly discuss the boson and the emphasis of that paper was the requirement of zero mass required by the Goldstone theorem. But the boson was clearly in the analysis and equations on p. 586. Guralnick further discuss the boson in 1965 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4592) Agree on the stance of neutrality.  Mary_at_CERN 19:17, 25 August 2011 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs)

Removal of POV tag, proposed deletion
I see that the editor "Mary at CERN" has cut the sections about the "relative contributions", as well as the last contentious sentence of combined contributions, in an effort to make the article more neutral. I definitely approve the intent, and I agree that the article is now more neutral (although, as was stated in the banner, the POV tag should not have been removed until the issue was considered resolved in the talk page). However, it seems to me that in its present form the article is not particularly useful. The lead is more or less OK, but it could be easily incorporated in the main article on the Higgs boson. The two sections Introduction and Manifest Covariance Overview are somehow hanging there, and their relation to the three PRL articles (somewhat fuzzy already in the earlier version) is completely obscure now. Finally, what is left of the subsection combined contributions are two unsourced and generic sentences (probably by Guralnik) on the passage of time and on the citation count of the three papers. I therefore reiterate my suggestion that the article be deleted, and it would be great if other editors (apart from myself and "Mary") could provide their opinion. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 17:01, 14 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I have this page as well as most other CERN related pages on my watch list, and I see this discussion beginning to spill over into other articles. I have just a couple of points to make looking through this talk page, it seems the page was being used to promote Guralnik et alii position originally, whether that's because as Ellis states that there's a Nobel prize at stake or not I don't know and Wikipedia should mirror Ellis's neutral stance on the subject.


 * Wikipedia can only show that which can be reliably sourced and unfortunately once one gets past the lede there is only one reference in the remaining 3/4 of the article, and looking through this article I fail to see the relevance of 3/4 of this article to it's title. The Introduction section should be an introduction about the release of the papers or studies that allowed the three groups to reach their positions, the background per se. However it is an educational paragraph to explain the reader about gauge theory and Goldstone's Theorem, this is already better covered in those articles. Manifest covariance overview section again is another educational paragraph already discussed in other articles with no reference to the title, the third paragraph is the only one relating to the title and could be added to the lede. So where does that leave the article, my opinion is that the majority of this material is covered in the Higgs Boson article in the Origins of the theory section and any salient features here that aren't there can be quickly added.


 * My suggestion would be take it to AFD for which my response would be a merge of the relevant information in the Higgs article and delete the article.
 * Note I am aware of the similar POV preeminence discussions on the higgs talk page as well related to this subject, and would suggest that editors forget they are extremely knowledgeable about the subject and find more sources to advance their positions.
 * If I can be of any assistance please don't hesitate to ask.
 * Kind regards. Khu  kri  07:02, 15 September 2011 (UTC)


 * As there has been no response to my points above, and this discussion has now been taken back to the Higgs boson article, I will take this article to WP:AFD as a WP:CONTENTFORK of the higgs article. Regards Khu  kri  13:52, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I support the AfD move, for the reasons that I have already stated in my post at the top of this thread. Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 12:50, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
 * This page should stay and contain more of the detials around the original papers - much of the detail is too much for the Higgs Boson page.  Thanks  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary at CERN (talk • contribs) 15:26, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

External links modified
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Proposed changes to external links section
I recently removed some external links from the article (diff). That edit was reverted, and while I agree that I was wrong about some of the links there are still a couple which I think should be changed/removed, which is why I'm making this post. The changes I propose are:

Thanks, HoneycrispApples (talk) 23:27, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
 * 1) Massive by Ian Sample - Propose replacing with an ISBN link: A link to an e-commerce site seems prohibited by the first point of WP:ELPOINTS, and it can come off as advertising. An ISBN gives people more choice in where they want to find the book, and avoids the appearance of advertising. The link could probably be moved to the further reading section, since it wouldn't be an external link anymore.
 * 2) Blog Not Even Wrong, Review of Massive by Ian Sample - Propose removing: Indirectly related to article. The way I see it, here's how it's related: 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers -> Higgs boson -> Massive by Ian Sample -> Review of Massive by Ian Sample. The article isn't about Massive, it's about the 1964 papers, so I don't see much reason for why a review of that book should be included. Also see point 13 of WP:ELNO.
 * 3) Remove external links maintenance template - I think that can be removed if there's agreement that the links in the article are within policy and can stay.