Comment by fermisea
3 days ago
It's nonsense. The fact that the particle is massive is a direct cause of the fact that the interactions are short ranged.
The nuance is this: Naturally, in a field theory the word "particle" is ill-defined, thus the only true statement one can make is that: the propagator/green function of the field contains poles at +-m, which sort of hints at what he means by stiffness.
As a result of this pole, any perturbations of the field have an exponential decaying effect. But the pole is the mass, by definition.
The real interesting question is why Z and W bosons are massive, which have to do with the higgs mechanism. I.e., prior to symmetry breaking the fields are massless, but by interacting with the Higgs, the vacuum expectation value of the two point function of the field changes, thus granting it a mass.
In sum, whoever wrote this is a bit confused and just doesn't have a lot of exposure to QFT
> whoever wrote this ... just doesn't have a lot of exposure to QFT
Incredible.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=19WGkFsAAAAJ&hl=en
be sure to check past the first 20 papers or so, like, oh, say his 1990 paper with Michael Peskin (438 citations), a copy of which can be found at <https://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/5250/slac-pub-53...>.
Actually upon further reading I realize that the author actually goes deeper into what I thought, so it's not nonsense, it's actually a simplified version of what I tried to write.
But I don't particularly like the whole "mass vs not mass" discussion as it's pointless
Well, the author did superbly better job of explaining anything to people that haven't graduated quantum mechanics than you did. That's something.
Recognizing correct analogies is not easy and it's insanely powerful educational tool.
that & pointless is an amazing pun intentional or otherwise; well-done, just absolutely