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Once upon a time, physics was simple and beautiful. Everything we knew about the universe could be derived from a small set of brief, elegant expressions called "Lagrangians." If you wanted to predict how a particle would behave in an electric or magnetic field, for example, you would start with this Lagrangian (from classical electrodynamics):[math]\epsilon_0 \cdot \frac{||\mathbf{E}||^2 - c^2||\mathbf{B}||^2}{2} - \rho \phi + \mathbf{j} \cdot \mathbf{A}[/math]where [math]\mathbf{E}[/math] is the electric field, [math]\mathbf{B}[/math] is the magnetic field, [math]\rho[/math] is the charge density, and [math]\mathbf{j}[/math] is the current density vector. You would plug this expression into the Euler-Lagrange equation, which minimizes the integral of the Lagrangian (also called the "action"). And just a few mathematical steps later, voilà! You had a complete description of the particle's motion.If you wanted to know how a particle would behave in a gravitational field, well, then, you used this Lagrangian (from general relativity):[math]\frac{1}{16\pi}(R-2\Lambda) \sqrt{-g}[/math]Solving the resulting equation was fairly complicated, but at least the Lagrangian itself was simple and easy to understand. And to make things even easier, you had the perfectly respectable option of ignoring the [math]\Lambda[/math]. Everyone knew that the cosmological constant was just a blunder.Then came the Standard Model. Its Lagrangian looks like this:[math]-\frac{1}{2}\partial_{\nu}g^{a}_{\mu}\partial_{\nu}g^{a}_{\mu} -g_{s}f^{abc}\partial_{\mu}g^{a}_{\nu}g^{b}_{\mu}g^{c}_{\nu} -\frac{1}{4}g^{2}_{s}f^{abc}f^{ade}g^{b}_{\mu}g^{c}_{\nu}g^{d}_{\mu}g^{e}_{\nu}[/math][math]+\frac{1}{2}ig^{2}_{s}(\bar{q}^{\sigma}_{i}\gamma^{\mu}q^{\sigma}_{j})g^{a}_{\mu} +\bar{G}^{a}\partial^{2}G^{a}+g_{s}f^{abc}\partial_{\mu}\bar{G}^{a}G^{b}g^{c}_{\mu} -\partial_{\nu}W^{+}_{\mu}\partial_{\nu}W^{-}_{\mu}-M^{2}W^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\mu}[/math][math]-\frac{1}{2}\partial_{\nu}Z^{0}_{\mu}\partial_{\nu}Z^{0}_{\mu}-\frac{1}{2c^{2}_{w}} M^{2}Z^{0}_{\mu}Z^{0}_{\mu} -\frac{1}{2}\partial_{\mu}A_{\nu}\partial_{\mu}A_{\nu}[/math][math]-\frac{1}{2}\partial_{\mu}H\partial_{\mu}H-\frac{1}{2}m^{2}_{h}H^{2} -\partial_{\mu}\phi^{+}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{-}-M^{2}\phi^{+}\phi^{-} -\frac{1}{2}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{0}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{0}-\frac{1}{2c^{2}_{w}}M\phi^{0}\phi^{0}[/math][math]-\beta_{h}[\frac{2M^{2}}{g^{2}}+\frac{2M}{g}H+\frac{1}{2}(H^{2}+\phi^{0}\phi^{0}+2\phi^{+}\phi^{-})] +\frac{2M^{4}}{g^{2}}\alpha_{h}[/math][math]-igc_{w}[\partial_{\nu}Z^{0}_{\mu}(W^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\nu}-W^{+}_{\nu}W^{-}_{\mu}) -Z^{0}_{\nu}(W^{+}_{\mu}\partial_{\nu}W^{-}_{\mu}-W^{-}_{\mu}\partial_{\nu}W^{+}_{\mu}) +Z^{0}_{\mu}(W^{+}_{\nu}\partial_{\nu}W^{-}_{\mu}-W^{-}_{\nu}\partial_{\nu}W^{+}_{\mu})][/math][math]-igs_{w}[\partial_{\nu}A_{\mu}(W^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\nu}-W^{+}_{\nu}W^{-}_{\mu}) -A_{\nu}(W^{+}_{\mu}\partial_{\nu}W^{-}_{\mu}-W^{-}_{\mu}\partial_{\nu}W^{+}_{\mu}) +A_{\mu}(W^{+}_{\nu}\partial_{\nu}W^{-}_{\mu}-W^{-}_{\nu}\partial_{\nu}W^{+}_{\mu})][/math][math]-\frac{1}{2}g^{2}W^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\mu}W^{+}_{\nu}W^{-}_{\nu}+\frac{1}{2}g^{2}W^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\nu}W^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\nu}[/math][math]+g^2c^{2}_{w}(Z^{0}_{\mu}W^{+}_{\mu}Z^{0}_{\nu}W^{-}_{\nu}-Z^{0}_{\mu}Z^{0}_{\mu}W^{+}_{\nu} W^{-}_{\nu})[/math][math]+g^2s^{2}_{w}(A_{\mu}W^{+}_{\mu}A_{\nu}W^{-}_{\nu}-A_{\mu}A_{\mu}W^{+}_{\nu} W^{-}_{\nu})[/math][math]+g^{2}s_{w}c_{w}[A_{\mu}Z^{0}_{\nu}(W^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\nu}-W^{+}_{\nu}W^{-}_{\mu}) -2A_{\mu}Z^{0}_{\mu}W^{+}_{\nu}W^{-}_{\nu}][/math][math]-g\alpha[H^3+H\phi^{0}\phi^{0}+2H\phi^{+}\phi^{-}][/math][math]-\frac{1}{8}g^{2}\alpha_{h}[H^4+(\phi^{0})^{4}+4(\phi^{+}\phi^{-})^{2}+4(\phi^{0})^{2}\phi^{+}\phi^{-}+4H^{2}\phi^{+}\phi^{-}+2(\phi^{0})^{2}H^{2}][/math][math]-gMW^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\mu}H-\frac{1}{2}g\frac{M}{c^{2}_{w}}Z^{0}_{\mu}Z^{0}_{\mu}H[/math][math]-\frac{1}{2}ig[W^{+}_{\mu}(\phi^{0}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{-}-\phi^{-}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{0}) -W^{-}_{\mu}(\phi^{0}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{+}-\phi^{+}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{0})][/math][math]+\frac{1}{2}g[W^{+}_{\mu}(H\partial_{\mu}\phi^{-}-\phi^{-}\partial_{\mu}H) -W^{-}_{\mu}(H\partial_{\mu}\phi^{+}-\phi^{+}\partial_{\mu}H)][/math][math]+\frac{1}{2}g\frac{1}{c_{w}}(Z^{0}_{\mu}(H\partial_{\mu}\phi^{0}-\phi^{0}\partial_{\mu}H) -ig\frac{s^{2}_{w}}{c_{w}}MZ^{0}_{\mu}(W^{+}_{\mu}\phi^{-}-W^{-}_{\mu}\phi^{+})[/math][math]+igs_{w}MA_{\mu}(W^{+}_{\mu}\phi^{-}-W^{-}_{\mu}\phi^{+})[/math][math]-ig\frac{1-2c^{2}_{w}}{2c_{w}}Z^{0}_{\mu}(\phi^{+}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{-}-\phi^{- }\partial_{\mu}\phi^{+}) +igs_{w}A_{\mu}(\phi^{+}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{-}-\phi^{-}\partial_{\mu}\phi^{+})[/math][math]-\frac{1}{4}g^{2}W^{+}_{\mu}W^{-}_{\mu}[H^{2}+(\phi^{0})^{2}+2\phi^{+}\phi^{-}][/math][math]-\frac{1}{4}g^{2}\frac{1}{c^{2}_{w}}Z^{0}_{\mu}Z^{0}_{\mu}[H^{2}+(\phi^{0})^{2}+2(2s^{2}_{w}- 1)^{2}\phi^{+}\phi^{-}][/math][math]-\frac{1}{2}g^{2}\frac{s^{2}_{w}}{c_{w}}Z^{0}_{\mu}\phi^{0}(W^{+}_{\mu}\phi^{-}+W^{-}_{\mu}\phi^{+}) -\frac{1}{2}ig^{2}\frac{s^{2}_{w}}{c_{w}}Z^{0}_{\mu}H(W^{+}_{\mu}\phi^{-}-W^{-}_{\mu}\phi^{+})[/math][math]+\frac{1}{2}g^{2}s_{w}A_{\mu}\phi^{0}(W^{+}_{\mu}\phi^{-}+W^{-}_{\mu}\phi^{+}) +\frac{1}{2}ig^{2}s_{w}A_{\mu}H(W^{+}_{\mu}\phi^{-}-W^{-}_{\mu}\phi^{+})[/math][math]-g^{2}\frac{s_{w}}{c_{w}}(2c^{2}_{w}-1)Z^{0}_{\mu}A_{\mu}\phi^{+}\phi^{-}[/math][math]-g^{1}s^{2}_{w}A_{\mu}A_{\mu}\phi^{+}\phi^{-} -\bar{e}^{\lambda}(\gamma\partial+m^{\lambda}_{e})e^{\lambda} -\bar{\nu}^{\lambda}\gamma\partial\nu^{\lambda}[/math][math]-\bar{u}^{\lambda}_{j}(\gamma\partial+m^{\lambda}_{u})u^{\lambda}_{j} -\bar{d}^{\lambda}_{j}(\gamma\partial+m^{\lambda}_{d})d^{\lambda}_{j}[/math][math]+igs_{w}A_{\mu}[-(\bar{e}^{\lambda}\gamma^{\mu} e^{\lambda})+\frac{2}{3}(\bar{u}^{\lambda}_{j}\gamma^{\mu} u^{\lambda}_{j})-\frac{1}{3}(\bar{d}^{\lambda}_{j}\gamma^{\mu} d^{\lambda}_{j})][/math][math]+\frac{ig}{4c_{w}}Z^{0}_{\mu}[(\bar{\nu}^{\lambda}\gamma^{\mu}(1+\gamma^{5})\nu^{\lambda})+(\bar{e}^{\lambda}\gamma^{\mu}(4s^{2}_{w}-1-\gamma^{5})e^{\lambda})+ (\bar{u}^{\lambda}_{j}\gamma^{\mu}(\frac{4}{3}s^{2}_{w}-1-\gamma^{5})u^{\lambda}_{j})+ (\bar{d}^{\lambda}_{j}\gamma^{\mu}(1-\frac{8}{3}s^{2}_{w}-\gamma^{5})d^{\lambda}_{j})][/math][math]+\frac{ig}{2\sqrt{2}}W^{+}_{\mu}[(\bar{\nu}^{\lambda}\gamma^{\mu}(1+\gamma^{5})e^{\lambda}) +(\bar{u}^{\lambda}_{j}\gamma^{\mu}(1+\gamma^{5})C_{\lambda\kappa}d^{\kappa}_{j})][/math][math]+\frac{ig}{2\sqrt{2}}W^{-}_{\mu}[(\bar{e}^{\lambda}\gamma^{\mu}(1+\gamma^{5})\nu^{\lambda}) +(\bar{d}^{\kappa}_{j}C^{\dagger}_{\lambda\kappa}\gamma^{\mu}(1+\gamma^{5})u^{\lambda}_{j})][/math][math]+\frac{ig}{2\sqrt{2}}\frac{m^{\lambda}_{e}}{M} [-\phi^{+}(\bar{\nu}^{\lambda}(1-\gamma^{5})e^{\lambda}) +\phi^{-}(\bar{e}^{\lambda}(1+\gamma^{5})\nu^{\lambda})][/math][math]-\frac{g}{2}\frac{m^{\lambda}_{e}}{M}[H(\bar{e}^{\lambda}e^{\lambda}) +i\phi^{0}(\bar{e}^{\lambda}\gamma^{5}e^{\lambda})][/math][math]+\frac{ig}{2M\sqrt{2}}\phi^{+} [-m^{\kappa}_{d}(\bar{u}^{\lambda}_{j}C_{\lambda\kappa}(1-\gamma^{5})d^{\kappa}_{j}) +m^{\lambda}_{u}(\bar{u}^{\lambda}_{j}C_{\lambda\kappa}(1+\gamma^{5})d^{\kappa}_{j}][/math][math]+\frac{ig}{2M\sqrt{2}}\phi^{-} [m^{\lambda}_{d}(\bar{d}^{\lambda}_{j}C^{\dagger}_{\lambda\kappa}(1+\gamma^{5})u^{\kappa}_{j}) -m^{\kappa}_{u}(\bar{d}^{\lambda}_{j}C^{\dagger}_{\lambda\kappa}(1-\gamma^{5})u^{\kappa}_{j}][/math][math]-\frac{g}{2}\frac{m^{\lambda}_{u}}{M}H(\bar{u}^{\lambda}_{j}u^{\lambda}_{j}) -\frac{g}{2}\frac{m^{\lambda}_{d}}{M}H(\bar{d}^{\lambda}_{j}d^{\lambda}_{j}) +\frac{ig}{2}\frac{m^{\lambda}_{u}}{M}\phi^{0}(\bar{u}^{\lambda}_{j}\gamma^{5}u^{\lambda}_{j})[/math][math]-\frac{ig}{2}\frac{m^{\lambda}_{d}}{M}\phi^{0}(\bar{d}^{\lambda}_{j}\gamma^{5}d^{\lambda}_{j})[/math][math]+\bar{X}^{+}(\partial^{2}-M^{2})X^{+}+\bar{X}^{-}(\partial^{2}-M^{2})X^{-} +\bar{X}^{0}(\partial^{2}-\frac{M^{2}}{c^{2}_{w}})X^{0}+\bar{Y}\partial^{2}Y[/math][math]+igc_{w}W^{+}_{\mu}(\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{0}X^{-}-\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{+}X^{0}) +igs_{w}W^{+}_{\mu}(\partial_{\mu}\bar{Y}X^{-}-\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{+}Y)[/math][math]+igc_{w}W^{-}_{\mu}(\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{-}X^{0}-\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{0}X^{+}) +igs_{w}W^{-}_{\mu}(\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{-}Y-\partial_{\mu}\bar{Y}X^{+})[/math][math]+igc_{w}Z^{0}_{\mu}(\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{+}X^{+}-\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{-}X^{-}) +igs_{w}A_{\mu}(\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{+}X^{+}-\partial_{\mu}\bar{X}^{-}X^{-})[/math][math]-\frac{1}{2}gM[\bar{X}^{+}X^{+}H+\bar{X}^{-}X^{-}H+\frac{1}{c^{2}_{w}}\bar{X}^{0}X^{0}H][/math][math]+\frac{1-2c^{2}_{w}}{2c_{w}}igM[\bar{X}^{+}X^{0}\phi^{+}-\bar{X}^{-}X^{0}\phi^{-}] +\frac{1}{2c_{w}}igM[\bar{X}^{0}X^{-}\phi^{+}-\bar{X}^{0}X^{+}\phi^{-}][/math][math]+igMs_{w}[\bar{X}^{0}X^{-}\phi^{+}-\bar{X}^{0}X^{+}\phi^{-}] +\frac{1}{2}igM[\bar{X}^{+}X^{+}\phi^{0}-\bar{X}^{-}X^{-}\phi^{0}][/math]But that's not even the worst part! Trying to get a prediction out of this untidy jumble of Greek letters yields infinity in pretty much any nontrivial situation. So physicists had to introduce a trick called "renormalization" to remove the infinities. Renormalization doesn't have any particularly strong mathematical justification, but it gives the right results, so we kept using it.Then another problem came up: no one could explain why particles had mass. This was a… massive… problem. (Sorry.) In the 1960's, some clever physicists came up with a kludge called the Higgs mechanism that mostly filled the gap, but the ad hoc introduction of a new scalar field wasn't exactly satisfying. (All the same, I’ve included the Higgs mechanism in the Lagrangian above — it’s now an important, experimentally validated piece of the Standard Model.)In the end, we have the Standard Model: a patchwork quilt of quick fixes and unsightly workarounds that barely fits together. There are 17 fundamental particles (no one knows why) and somewhere around 18 arbitrarily adjustable parameters. Yet somehow this convoluted mishmash is the most accurate scientific theory of all time.For physicists, that’s a deeply unsettling state of affairs. We want to believe the universe isn’t really this ugly. We want a better theory to exist, a more beautiful theory that will unify quantum mechanics and general relativity in one simple and lovely set of equations. But so far, we haven’t been able to find anything convincing. A Nobel Prize awaits the first person who does.

This took me a fair bit of googling, but I do think I’ve got it.First off, thank you, everyone, for saying why the word’s spelling has a “w” in it - it used to be pronounced, then got dropped, et cetera. That’s only half the answer, though: there’s also the question of why the letter is silent.Sound changes in English can always be attributed to rules in sound change. There are some fuzzy bits where sounds are added or shifted because speakers think it makes more sense that way, but 98% of the time a silent letter can be explained via regular sound change rules.For example, every “g” and “k” before an “n” at the start of a word was lost in most varieties of English. This is why we have “gnome” and “know” and “gnash” and “knife”: the initial consonants really did use to be pronounced, but were lost due to this regular sound change, though they hung around in the word’s spelling.So you’d expect there to be a regular sound change deleting the “w” in “answer”. This would be completely different from the change that deleted the “w” before an “r” in words like “wry” or “wrong”, since the “w” in “answer” is separated from the “r” by the “e”.There are two other deleted-“w”-after-an-“s”-words I can immediately think of: “sword” and “sister” (sweoster in Old English). Would such a sound change rule explain these as well?This took me a terribly long time to find - oh, the things one does for strangers on the internet - but Google Books coughed up an excerpt from The Inside Story on English Spelling by Paquita Boston, which says that this is a case of consonant cluster simplification. In less technical terms, this means that a group of sounds didn’t like being together and so some of them either merged with their neighbours or left entirely.Quotation from here.This change took awhile to catch on, however - especially in America. According to H. L. Mencken’s The American Language,…the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the Restoration. Franklin, in 1768, still retained the sound of l in such words as would and should, a usage not met with in England after the year 1700. In the same way, according to Menner, the w in sword was sounded in America “for some time after Englishmen had abandoned it”.[1]As for “sister”? This confused me at first, but it appears that it was influenced by or even merged with Old Norse syster, which knocked the “w” out independently of sound changes.So to answer your question, the “w” was dropped because it was awkward to say and dropping it made pronunciation easier. The sound change involved was simply simplifying a consonant cluster.Thanks for asking!Footnotes[1] The American Language

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