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Magnetic fields are created when an electric current flows: the greater the current, the stronger the magnetic field.

What influences could affect the Higgs Field?
If the Higgs field grew in strength, how might this effect the mass of a particle or particles?

The big question I'm asking, is the universe really expanding? Could the observed redshift from distant galaxies be something, far less complicated?

Spacepuzzle
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  • If the Hydrogen Proton and Electron had less mass in the past would this not cause the light to red shift? – Spacepuzzle Jun 01 '16 at 17:51
  • If you change the masses of things, then gravity would also change, i.e. you would have much tighter planetary orbits, much smaller galaxies, etc.. None of that has been observed. Stellar evolution is particularly sensitive to mass, so now you have to rewrite the entire post big-bang cosmology and show that for some reason it stays the same. – CuriousOne Jun 01 '16 at 19:14
  • Again surely this is all relative. The gravity of a system like a galaxy would still have stars, but with less mass. The number of stars and the size of the galaxy could be quite large. – Spacepuzzle Jun 01 '16 at 19:34
  • How does the number of stars change? I think you need to work on that some more. – CuriousOne Jun 01 '16 at 19:42
  • I think you have misunderstood. You said galaxies would be smaller. Do you mean in overall mass or the density; number of stars? – Spacepuzzle Jun 01 '16 at 19:50
  • I said that if the mass increases, galaxies and planetary orbits have to shrink in size. The luminosity of stars have to increase greatly. I am not aware that this has been observed. – CuriousOne Jun 01 '16 at 19:59
  • What if the mass was less not more? – Spacepuzzle Jun 01 '16 at 20:05
  • What if stars have less mass in the past? – Spacepuzzle Jun 01 '16 at 20:06
  • Then it all gets bigger and most stars won't even form. – CuriousOne Jun 01 '16 at 20:06
  • Related http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/21721/2451 and links therein. – Qmechanic Jun 02 '16 at 18:14
  • This is relevant http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75296/baryon-masses-in-wetterichs-new-cosmology – Mitchell Porter Jun 10 '16 at 06:38

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No. To make a long story short, if the Higgs field changed its coupling to particles with time then particles in the distant past would have different masses. This would mean atomic spectra of distant galaxies would has differences from spectra now here on Earth. No such change is observed.

Lawrence B. Crowell
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  • Are you referring to the spectra lines of hydrogen? – Spacepuzzle Jun 01 '16 at 18:16
  • Spectra lines of anything, generally up to and including iron for emission spectra. As with, for example, an historically variable speed of light, any change is limited to our experimental uncertainty, which is pretty good. Fundamental constants may change over time, but evidence suggests it's a tiny, tiny change over 13.8Bn years, or quite probably zero. – The Geoff Jun 01 '16 at 18:33
  • Surely its all relative? If the Higgs field were to change the mass of a particle, then all particles would be effected. – Spacepuzzle Jun 01 '16 at 18:49
  • Wouldn't the spectra lines of all the elements shift as the mass of the Proton and Electron changed? – Spacepuzzle Jun 01 '16 at 19:16
  • The spectra of stars or distant galaxies is of course the spectra of atoms there. If the Higgs field changed in some ways, in particular with Yukawa coupling it might lead to a different universe. The variability of the Higgs field in this way might make sense in a multiverse context; it is different in different cosmologies. – Lawrence B. Crowell Jun 02 '16 at 19:56
  • The variability of the speed of light or the Planck constant $\hbar$ is I think impossible to measure. Everything from the Planck units of length, mass etc would scale proportionately as would things like the Bohr radius of the atom. As I can see to talk about the variability of these is a sort of nonsense, as these seem to be involved with projective geometry. The light cone is after all the projective Lorentz group. – Lawrence B. Crowell Jun 02 '16 at 19:59
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A time dependent coupling would mean that this coupling is in fact a field in its own right. This field would correspond to some new particle that would need to be very heavy, otherwise it would have been detected in experiments directly or indirectly by modifying the way the known standard model particles interact with each other . But if the particle associated with this field is very heavy, then the coupling would be frozen to some fixed value.

Count Iblis
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