I give a response to Adrian Wüthrich’s critical review of my analysis of the Higgs mechanism, in which I try to clarify some possible misunderstandings. I concede that, as Wüthrich points out, many physicists see the Higgs mechanism as the roll-over from a symmetrical potential in the initial Lagrangian to a symmetry-breaking potential, while my former analysis had basically focused on the gauge-invariant transformation of the initial Lagrangian into the intended form. My main contention, however, still is that neither Higgs story has (as yet) much explanatory power.
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I stick with the notation of my 2008 paper but skip over an unnecessary intermediate step in which \({\cal L}'\) was transformed into a mathematically equivalent Lagrangian \({\cal L}''\) and which more explicitly shows how the unphysical Goldstone boson ϑ becomes absorbed into A μ due to the above gauge.
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Lyre, H. The Just-So Higgs Story: A Response to Adrian Wüthrich. J Gen Philos Sci 43, 289–294 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-012-9200-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-012-9200-6