Mass Explained By Someone who knows about Science

[lpetrich]

Read what I told you to read. Guiduce says the Higgs sector is arbitrary. Basically he's saying it's the weakest part of the standard model. There's plenty of bona-fide physicists who aren't happy with it, who feel it diminishes the standard model, and feel uncomfortable with the overhyped Higgs boson "mystery of mass" moonshine because

the Higgs mechanism accounts for 1 per cent of the mass of ordinary matter.

I'm familiar with some of the physics involved, and here's the story.

The "MIT bag model" treats a nucleon as three non-interacting valence quarks and a sea-quark/gluon sea with constant density, all in a sphere. Here's what one gets, in terms of radius R:

M = c0/R + c1*mq + B*R3

where c0 and c1 can be calculated from the bag model, and are roughly on order 1. mq is the sum of the valence quarks' rest masses, measured at energy scales of the quarks' kinetic energy. Electromagnetic contributions are approximately (alpha)/R, and on the order of the quarks' masses, a few MeV. This is much less than the quarks' kinetic energies, meaning that the quarks can be treated as well in the relativistic range of kinetic energies.

It's rather easy to show that the mass splits up (3/4) valence quarks and (1/4) gluons and sea quarks. Simplify the expression:

M = c/R + B*R3

Find the radius that minimizes the mass by finding when dM/dR = 0:

dM/dR = - c/R2 + 3*B*R2

This yields B*R4 = c/3

or M = c/R + (1/3)*(c/R) = (4/3)*(c/R)

There are some complications, like the fact that the delta baryons are also composed of up and down quarks, but with spin 3/2 and mass around 1232 MeV. Compared to the nucleons' average mass of about 937 MeV, this gives a hefty hyperfine splitting of 300 MeV. Doing quantum-mechanical spin arithmetic yields a before-hyperfine mass of about 1084 MeV. So the nucleon mass splits up as:

Valence-quark kinetic energy: 813 MeV
Sea quarks / gluon sea: 271 MeV
Quark-quark hyperfine: -148 MeV

Thus, nearly all our mass, and of baryonic matter in general, is due to valence-quark kinetic energy. These quarks get their energy from confinement -- they cannot get much more than 10-15 m without the QCD force between them getting very strong.

[Farsight]

My understanding of the subject has been verified with an honours degree in physics from the Victoria University of Manchester where I graduated in the early 1990s, specialising in particle physics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, lasers physics, advanced computers, hardware & software as my third year options. Easily enough validated by anyone else attending the same university at the same time. I can say which lecturers taught which courses and in what lecture theatres. Information certainly not available on the web for the period I attended.

You think you understand it, but you're treating your textbook like a bible. You've been taught physics and you're parroting what you've been taught and you're refusing to go further, because you've been taught what to think not how to think. For example you challenged me to explain pair production, and I said you have to understand electromagnetism first, so I started a thread, and what happens? You don't even read it. You dismiss is, and later you witter on about "the shape of a magnetic field". You don't understand the first thing about electromagnetism, and you're so convinced of your superior knowledge you won't even read the original Maxwell. You don't even know that "Maxwell's Equations" were reformulated by Heaviside.

You might be aware of the department farsight. Rutherford, Moseley, Blackett, Bragg, JJ Thompson and Neils Bohr, who first formulated quantum theory taught there. The physics department has had 10 Nobel Laureautes. And you studied where?

Yes I'm aware of it. I studied at Manchester University too. I got my Computer Science honours degree there in 1977. "My" building is now named in honour of Tom Kilburn, and is the low red brick rectangle north of the maths tower. We had classes in electronics etc there, covering the associated mathematics of things like induction and impedance. This is a picture of it from Nick Higham's photo gallery. See http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~higham/index.php.


http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~high ... 50_std.jpg

Special relativity was taught as a first year course, 20 lectures in total. I got over 80% in that exam, I forget the exact figure, it was almost 20 years ago now... anyway, special relativity is one of the first undergraduate courses to be taught because the maths is so simple, and because the course sits in isolation to pretty much everything else.

And yet you don't understand why special relativity holds in a gravity-free situation.

Who has formally validated your understanding of any of this farsight?

You'll see. But what does that have to do with it? What counts is the scientific evidence and the references and the logic, not my credentials.

All I see is a word salad of wiki quotes coupled with a gleeful need to repeat every known flaw in scientific theory and fill the gaps with unsubstantiated untestable BS. In this and other threads, I have been explaining existing theory, not pushing my own. And exposing the glaring holes and inconsistencies in your ...ideas... about the most polite term I can find for them. They don't predict anything, lack internal consistency, have no formulation. Just and appeal to time being a property of space.

Garbage. They do predict things, they are totally consistent, and they're backed up by scientific evidence. All you've done is throw abuse because you can't counter that evidence, or the Einstein and Maxwell references, or the rock-solid logic. And it was all in response to your challenges. I rise to those challenges, then you run away and catcall like some stupid kid. I even do your silly little maths tests, and when I get them right, you duck and dive and say I don't understand it or I've plugged in some numbers. And all the while, you don't know even the first thing about mass. If you did you'd have referred to DOES THE INERTIA OF A BODY DEPEND UPON ITS ENERGY-CONTENT? instead of the Higgs mechanism that accounts for 1% of mass.

[Farsight]

The more strongly the field (called the Higgs field) interacts with a particle, the heavier it is.

Isn't that a bit like saying : ''the heavier it is, the heavier it is''? Presumably m is still proportional to e, so the more energy a particle has up it's sleeve, the more massive it is. Isn't it the other way round then, that the more massive a particle is, the more strongly the higgs field interacts with it?

It's a myth, mistermack. Mass is a measure of a system's energy content. Einstein solved "the mystery of mass" in 1905. See his paper. A body emitting photons loses mass. In electron-positron annihilation two bodies each emit a 511keV photon and lose all their mass because they aren't there any more. And note that the photon is a boson. The Higgs mechanism accounts for 1% of proton mass, and since low-energy proton-antiproton yields neutral pions that decay to gamma photons, we don't need the Higgs boson to solve "the mystery of mass". The photon is boson enough.

[ChildInAZoo]

What counts is the scientific evidence and the references and the logic, not my credentials.

Indeed. This is why my first question to you was about one of your references. This is also the first question that you refused to answer. You either don't understand your references or you know that they don't say what you want.

[Farsight]

I'm familiar with some of the physics involved, and here's the story... thus, nearly all our mass, and of baryonic matter in general, is due to valence-quark kinetic energy. These quarks get their energy from confinement...

Thank you lpetrich.

I'd be grateful if you could make it clear that the Higgs mechanism does not explain mass, that the opening post is incorrect, and that the article it refers to is inaccurate, amounting to little more than media "puff" rather than accurate science.

[newolder]

Sorry guys, but you're wrong. I recommend you buy a book called A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC by Gian Francesco Giudice. The guy is at CERN and he knows what he's talking about. You don't have to buy the book, you can "search inside" on "Higgs sector" and read pages 174 and 175. It tells you the Higgs mechanism accounts for 1 per cent of the mass of ordinary matter. Newolder, I've already told you this in this post. Note the quote: "It is sometimes said that the discovery of the Higgs boson will explain the mystery of the origin of mass. This statement requires a good deal of qualification".

Twiglet, you don't know much about science at all.

Peter Higgs is wrong, where? Where is your evidence that Higgs bosons are excluded from discovery at lhc energies?

Twiglet is capable to express ideas through a common dialect of mathematics and probably knows more about science than a typical, >3-sigma from the norm.

When will you cease this inane 'telling me' shit when you could simply publish its recipe through a refereed journal instead?

[lpetrich]

To Twiglet:

You don't understand the first thing about electromagnetism, and you're so convinced of your superior knowledge you won't even read the original Maxwell. You don't even know that "Maxwell's Equations" were reformulated by Heaviside.

Farsight, that's nothing but Maxwell-thumping. So what if what we call Maxwell's equations might better be called the Maxwell-Heaviside equations? Does that somehow invalidate them?

(energy == photons snipped...)

I'm familiar with some of the physics involved, and here's the story... thus, nearly all our mass, and of baryonic matter in general, is due to valence-quark kinetic energy. These quarks get their energy from confinement...

Thank you lpetrich.

But one gets these results using a theory that you disdain, Farsight. The theory that quarks are much like electrons, following the Dirac equation.

Turning to quark confinement, it is responsible for all three nucleon-mass effects: valence quarks being relativistic, a significant quantity of sea quarks and gluons, also relativistic, and a large hyperfine splitting. Quark confinement is caused by the QCD coupling constant increasing with distance due to gluon-gluon interactions, and getting around 1 around nucleon energies. It isn't caused by protons having trefoil shapes.

At much higher energies, quarks and gluons act much like free particles. The QCD equivalent of the Fine Structure Constant, alpha-s, is around 0.12 at interaction momenta of around the Z particle's mass, 91 GeV, which corresponds to a distance of about 2*10-18 m. One can do perturbation expansions for very high-energy collisions, expanding in powers of alpha-s, because such expansions will have tolerable accuracy with only a few terms.

However, for nucleons and pions and the like, such expansions will not converge, and one needs to do something more drastic: lattice QCD. It divides space-time into a 4D grid and calculates various quantities at each of the points. One has to do Monte-Carlo (random-number) integration, because the problem is otherwise intractable. Even worse, sea quarks are much more difficult to handle than gluons, which means that many calculations have been done with the gluons-only "quenched" approximation, with no sea quarks. One gets hadrons by creating its valence quarks in the grid and then removing them elsewhere. One then finds the strength of this effect and how it declines with lattice distance; that's how one can calculate hadron masses and interaction constants. Needless to say, lattice QCD requires a LOT of number crunching, and it's only in the last decade that it's been possible to get nucleon masses to a few percent.

The last I saw, lattice QCD does not feature trefoil-shaped protons. Instead, it features quarks as separate particles that follow the Dirac equation.

[colubridae]

You don't understand the first thing about electromagnetism, and you're so convinced of your superior knowledge you won't even read the original Maxwell. You don't even know that "Maxwell's Equations" were reformulated by Heaviside.

You don't need to know the original maxwell.

Newton's principia was written in latin. Unless you can read latin, then your accusation is a crock of shit.
Even if you can read latin you are implying that anyone who can't read latin cannot understand Newton. What fucking nonsense.

Principia is supported by evidence or not. and the answer is definitley not.

You don't need to know that maxwell's equations were reformulated by heaviside or santa claus or the science fairy.

They are supported by evidence or not.
And the answer is yes.

You invoke the principles of science when it suits you, and claim they are fake when it doesn't.

[lpetrich]

Now to the Higgs mechanism. I will try to explain it in non-mathematical terms. The Higgs field is an elementary spin-0 field, unlike every other known one (spins 1/2, 1, and 2). This means that its only dependence on space-time is position dependence; unlike the others, it has no more space-time structure like that. The photon / electromagnetic field, for instance, has a 4-vector structure, which makes it spin 1.

The Higgs field has a potential energy that looks like a bowl with a hump in the middle; that hump makes the field have a nonzero value. Mathematically,
V = (V2/2) F2 + (V4/4) F4

for field F. Finding its minimum, we take dV/dF = 0, resulting in
V2 + V4 F2 = 0

To get a stable solution, V4 > 0, meaning that V2 < 0. Thus, the hump in the middle. The potential's value at that point is
V = - (V2)2/(4*V4)


Now for how the Higgs particle produces mass. It interacts with other particles in a way somewhat analogous to electromagnetic and other gauge interactions:

(particle current - vector) . (gauge potential)
(particle current - scalar) . (Higgs field)

All multiplied by appropriate coupling constants. If the Higgs field has a constant nonzero value everywhere, then it acts like a mass term:

Mass = (coupling constant) * (Higgs-field value)

The Higgs particle is responsible for the masses of the W, the Z, the quarks and the leptons. For the latter sorts of particles, the coupling constants are actually matrices indexed by generation:
yij Pi* Pj F = mij Pi* Pj

for elementary-fermion fields P, coupling-constant matrix y, and mass matrix m. Combined with the Higgs-field value, they make "mass matrices", which must be diagonalized to get the mass values. However, these matrices are not exactly aligned, in a matter of speaking, thus producing cross-generation quark decay and neutrino oscillations.

Even though Higgs-generated masses are only 1% of the mass of baryonic matter, Higgs-generated masses produce these effects:

• W mass -- controls weak-decay rate
• Up and down quark masses -- make the neutron a little bit more massive than the proton, controls range of their interactions
• Electron mass -- controls macroscopic energy scales and size scales

[Twiglet]

My understanding of the subject has been verified with an honours degree in physics from the Victoria University of Manchester where I graduated in the early 1990s, specialising in particle physics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, lasers physics, advanced computers, hardware & software as my third year options. Easily enough validated by anyone else attending the same university at the same time. I can say which lecturers taught which courses and in what lecture theatres. Information certainly not available on the web for the period I attended.

You think you understand it, but you're treating your textbook like a bible. You've been taught physics and you're parroting what you've been taught and you're refusing to go further, because you've been taught what to think not how to think. For example you challenged me to explain pair production, and I said you have to understand electromagnetism first, so I started a thread, and what happens? You don't even read it. You dismiss is, and later you witter on about "the shape of a magnetic field". You don't understand the first thing about electromagnetism, and you're so convinced of your superior knowledge you won't even read the original Maxwell. You don't even know that "Maxwell's Equations" were reformulated by Heaviside.

I have always been very clear, farsight, that all I have done on these threads is to represent textbook physics. That stuff that gets taught in universities and applied in labs and product development the world over. Your appeals to "read the original Maxwell" are pathetic. I learned how to formulate and solve Maxwells equations and understand them in a real context, and passed exams to prove that I can do this.

You want me to go back to the musings of Aristotle and Maxwell in the 19th century? Perhaps I should advocate you do the same with computer science. They barely had handheld calculators in 1977, are you sure they had a dedicated degree in computer science at Manchester by then too? An interesting piece of research if anyone wants to see if farsight has just caught himself in a lie there... he may not have.

Never mind doing textbook physics farsight, you haven't yet demonstrated an ability to do schoolboy physics.

Proclaiming time is a function of space is all you've done.
You posit no predictions.
You are unable to formulate your ideas.

Your theories are as scientific as my pillock particles and drongo fields.

You might be aware of the department farsight. Rutherford, Moseley, Blackett, Bragg, JJ Thompson and Neils Bohr, who first formulated quantum theory taught there. The physics department has had 10 Nobel Laureautes. And you studied where?

Yes I'm aware of it. I studied at Manchester University too. I got my Computer Science honours degree there in 1977. "My" building is now named in honour of Tom Kilburn, and is the low red brick rectangle north of the maths tower. We had classes in electronics etc there, covering the associated mathematics of things like induction and impedance. This is a picture of it from Nick Higham's photo gallery. See http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~higham/index.php.

Impedance and induction... goodness farsight, you are so ahead of my bellcurve.....

Special relativity was taught as a first year course, 20 lectures in total. I got over 80% in that exam, I forget the exact figure, it was almost 20 years ago now... anyway, special relativity is one of the first undergraduate courses to be taught because the maths is so simple, and because the course sits in isolation to pretty much everything else.

And yet you don't understand why special relativity holds in a gravity-free situation.

GR was a different course.

All I see is a word salad of wiki quotes coupled with a gleeful need to repeat every known flaw in scientific theory and fill the gaps with unsubstantiated untestable BS. In this and other threads, I have been explaining existing theory, not pushing my own. And exposing the glaring holes and inconsistencies in your ...ideas... about the most polite term I can find for them. They don't predict anything, lack internal consistency, have no formulation. Just and appeal to time being a property of space.

Garbage. They do predict things, they are totally consistent, and they're backed up by scientific evidence. All you've done is throw abuse because you can't counter that evidence, or the Einstein and Maxwell references, or the rock-solid logic. And it was all in response to your challenges. I rise to those challenges, then you run away and catcall like some stupid kid. I even do your silly little maths tests, and when I get them right, you duck and dive and say I don't understand it or I've plugged in some numbers. And all the while, you don't know even the first thing about mass. If you did you'd have referred to DOES THE INERTIA OF A BODY DEPEND UPON ITS ENERGY-CONTENT? instead of the Higgs mechanism that accounts for 1% of mass.

If you bothered to read the OP, you would see I was quoting a science article for laypeople. Which explains why you didn't seem to understand it. To all intents and purposes you know *less* than a layperson, because you insist on seeing everything through the lens of your "idea", of which a core but unstated tenet seems to be that all mainstream science is flawed.

Oddly, this is exactly the same criticism you lay at my door for doing textbook physics, but where does that shoe fit best?

[Brain Man]

LOL, caught out bang to rights and Twiglet's only response is an attempt at comic relief. What a turkey.

Well, what's the point in arguing with you farsight? You quote things without understanding their meaning, dismiss articles out of hand by people in the field, can't answer A level standard problems, demonstrably don't understand relativity or quantum physics.

What's the point when I understand their meaning and you don't? And you can't be arsed to check it out because you're filled to the gills with intellectual arrogance, only your head is full of intellectual vacuum. You haven't even got the sense to read the Zeptospace Odyssey pages I referred to, where Gian Francesco Guiduce, CERN physicist says:

The Higgs substance provides for less than a kilogram of our body mass

Did you get that? Less than a kilogram. Now go and square that with your opening post:

Gained a few kilos?

You numpty. You don't know what you're talking about. Your knowledge of physics is scant, and you pretend to be an expert. Pah.

My understanding of the subject has been verified with an honours degree in physics from the Victoria University of Manchester where I graduated in the early 1990s, specialising in particle physics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, lasers physics, advanced computers, hardware & software as my third year options. Easily enough validated by anyone else attending the same university at the same time. I can say which lecturers taught which courses and in what lecture theatres. Information certainly not available on the web for the period I attended.

You might be aware of the department farsight. Rutherford, Moseley, Blackett, Bragg, JJ Thompson and Neils Bohr, who first formulated quantum theory taught there. The physics department has had 10 Nobel Laureautes. And you studied where?

Special relativity was taught as a first year course, 20 lectures in total. I got over 80% in that exam, I forget the exact figure, it was almost 20 years ago now... anyway, special relativity is one of the first undergraduate courses to be taught because the maths is so simple, and because the course sits in isolation to pretty much everything else.

Who has formally validated your understanding of any of this farsight?

All I see is a word salad of wiki quotes coupled with a gleeful need to repeat every known flaw in scientific theory and fill the gaps with unsubstantiated untestable BS.

In this and other threads, I have been explaining existing theory, not pushing my own. And exposing the glaring holes and inconsistencies in your ...ideas... about the most polite term I can find for them. They don't predict anything, lack internal consistency, have no formulation. Just and appeal to time being a property of space.

u replied to farsights call, by appealing to authority basically.

And what is wrong with wiki kids ? Some of these boys can leave me for
standing in subjects i excelled at in university and college.

We should be happy that information has become so democratized, you dont need 20 grand of loans to be able to understand anything these days.

[Twiglet]

It's not a pure appeal to authority in context of other stuff I've written Brainman... it would only be so if I had said "trust me I'm a scientist" and not backed up my ideas. I am actually "appealling" to the belief that textbook physics accurately represents scientific understanding, and that scientific understanding is consistent with experimental results.

Quoting wiki without understanding it is no more meaningful than telling you I've read a textbook, or in your field, quoting a thousand lines of code. It's not an illustration of how smart you are, or whether you understand what the code does.

Anyway, I'd rather appeal to authority when I actually have it, than appeal to ignorance and fantasy when I don't.

*Edit* I just want to add Brainman, how ridiculous I find the whole dismissal of "appeal to authority" to be anyway. If you're ill, you go to a doctor. If you want to build a bridge, you go to a mechanical engineer. If you want to understand relativity or quantum theory, you go to a physicist. Of course you bloody do. Because people who specialise and pass degrees have a proven level of competence.

If you're sick, you might well look up your symptoms on wiki, but you would likely still go to a doctor if you're worried, because their 7-8 years of training gives them a much better overall picture of what's likely to be wrong with you, how to test it and how serious it is. Plus you likely wouldn't understand half the jargon on wiki or be able to objectively judge whether it was written by a crank.

This came up with you before Brainman, ignorance and lack of qualification in relevant subjects is not a sign of sincerity or competence. If you think it is, I suggest you go and randomly employ people off the street to write code for you.

Pfft.

**additional edit**

A final point, Brainman. I made a note of my qualification IN RESPONSE to this:

You numpty. You don't know what you're talking about. Your knowledge of physics is scant, and you pretend to be an expert. Pah.

So in fact, it was a DIRECT reply to farsights assertion that I have a scant knowledge of physics and am pretending to be an expert.

So all in all.....

[Brain Man]

It's not a pure appeal to authority in context of other stuff I've written Brainman... it would only be so if I had said "trust me I'm a scientist" and not backed up my ideas. I am actually "appealling" to the belief that textbook physics accurately represents scientific understanding, and that scientific understanding is consistent with experimental results.

Quoting wiki without understanding it is no more meaningful than telling you I've read a textbook, or in your field, quoting a thousand lines of code. It's not an illustration of how smart you are, or whether you understand what the code does.

Anyway, I'd rather appeal to authority when I actually have it, than appeal to ignorance and fantasy when I don't.

*Edit* I just want to add Brainman, how ridiculous I find the whole dismissal of "appeal to authority" to be anyway. If you're ill, you go to a doctor. If you want to build a bridge, you go to a mechanical engineer. If you want to understand relativity or quantum theory, you go to a physicist. Of course you bloody do. Because people who specialise and pass degrees have a proven level of competence.

If you're sick, you might well look up your symptoms on wiki, but you would likely still go to a doctor if you're worried, because their 7-8 years of training gives them a much better overall picture of what's likely to be wrong with you, how to test it and how serious it is. Plus you likely wouldn't understand half the jargon on wiki or be able to objectively judge whether it was written by a crank.

This came up with you before Brainman, ignorance and lack of qualification in relevant subjects is not a sign of sincerity or competence. If you think it is, I suggest you go and randomly employ people off the street to write code for you.

Pfft.

**additional edit**

A final point, Brainman. I made a note of my qualification IN RESPONSE to this:

You numpty. You don't know what you're talking about. Your knowledge of physics is scant, and you pretend to be an expert. Pah.

So in fact, it was a DIRECT reply to farsights assertion that I have a scant knowledge of physics and am pretending to be an expert.

So all in all.....

Im stil not sure i agree with you on all this. OK i admit that if i want a really specialised job done, i consult a specialist. There have also been plenty of times where there are grey areas.

A. I found internet information on medical conditions far better than my local consultants knowledge, and might have been dead had i not looked into it.
B. I was so motivated i gained college level mastery of subjects on my own at least four times.
C. Once in my life I was so motivated i gained near to PHD level mastery of a subject on my own. It did take 7 years part time, and i required periods of academic supervsion...however i still saved myself about 40 grand..and showed me what individual will to master can achieve on its own. I have to admit though it was a rare conflucence of events and drive that led to that.

lets face it what are we doing when we do degrees, PHD etc ?

we are handing over money to a training system which can facilitate knowledge to be written into us, best as the state of knowledge is at that time. In fields like engineering its more solid, and i would rather have an engineered car than a kit car.

In fields like physics we still dont know half of whats going on, so its fair game, open season and all that.

Dont you like the feeling that if you choose to you can rage to master any subject ? Often for professional uses, that means being educated by a body you can pay for results.often it does not. i.e. You ask yourself the question, how important is it for me to recieve social approval of my ability, and do i want to be completely supervised and fork out 20-40,000 quid for the privelage of that.

[newolder]

i would rather have an engineered car mountainbike than a kit myth car mountainbike.

Fixed.

In fields like physics we still dont know half of whats going on, so its fair game, open season and all that.

If Farsight is the best shot against th'establishment then th'establishment will have eggs for breakfast.

Dont you like the feeling that if you choose to you can rage to master any subject ? Often for professional uses, that means being educated by a body you can pay for results.often it does not. i.e. You ask yourself the question, how important is it for me to recieve social approval of my ability, and do i want to be completely supervised and fork out 20-40,000 quid for the privelage of that.

[Twiglet]

I think Brainman that self study is excellent for learning, but if you self-study in a vacuum, you risk confirming your misunderstandings to yourself.

What a degree gives - is independent verification of competence and a structure for learning. You can get to the same point without going through the education system. Either way, you still have to do the work.

If you have self studied and numerous people are telling you that your conceptual understanding of an existing theory is messed up, you should certainly pay attention. In computing you are quite lucky in that you can't fake code.

You can have poor code and good code, but you wouldn't pay much attention to someone who persisted in saying "the assembler language is inconsistent with my formulation of C, we must switch to OO programming to avoid the inherent conflicts of the chip architecture" - every time you asked them to explain why a different piece of code they produced failed. Would you?

In science, you need to formulate ideas in a way which lends itself to validation, and at the very least - is consistent with observed reality. That's not a test of whether someone has a degree.

Anyway, tbh, explaining science has limited mileage when all someone seems to want to do is contradict explanations given by people who have gone through the process of learning it... it devalues the whole exercise, and nobody comes out of it looking smarter or wiser. If you have a genuine interest in a subject and want to distinguish which is the better argument, you need to pull yourself up to the point you can understand the argument, instead of cheerleading (not saying you are)

If you don't do that, you are left evaluating between sales pitches, and on the whole scientists aren't good salespeople. They are too concerned with trying to put their language truthfully and explain, rather than compete with fundamentally clueless people with an agenda. See the climate science debate and historically, the flat earth debate - for details.

When I'm naive about something, I tend to look for answers from reputable sources. I put my trust in mechanical engineers everytime I cross a bridge. I don't even think about it much.