Comment by nimish
15 days ago
This is a lot of words to say that the field oscillations (i.e., particles) require very high energy. This shows up as the mass-(energy) of the particle, or stiffness of the field; take your pick.
Whether you call that stiffness or mass is a little beside the point IMO -- it shows up in the Yukawa force as an exponential dependence on that parameter which means the force quickly decays to zero unless the parameter is 0.
All of the explanations like the one you provided sounds like code comments in the style:
What he wrote is the first attempt I've seen of making actually informative comment about the purpose and intent instead of just regurgitating math verbatim but with words instead.
> regurgitating math verbatim but with words instead
Where in my comment is there any math? It's all physical concepts. No mathematics at all. Because the purpose and intent of my post was to point out that the role mass plays is identical to that of stiffness in other contexts. That's it, and he takes a very circuitous route to pointing that out.
It's like the opposite of what you described. If you don't know what "mass" and "stiffness" are you should probably understand those before attempting to understand quantum field theory. It's not condescension. The analogy holds only if you really understand both concepts.
The algebra is beside the point.
Here's math, just read out loud:
"it shows up in the Yukawa force as an exponential dependence on that parameter which means the force quickly decays to zero unless the parameter is 0"
It tells nothing to people who don't know the equation you are talking about and tells nothing new to people who know it.