Of Particular Significance

Category: Higgs

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POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON March 5, 2024

A lot is happening on this end. 

Carroll is a professor of theoretical physics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, while Whiteson is a professor of experimental particle physics — a member of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider — at the University of California, Irvine. Both are well-known authors and great communicators; check them out!

Stay tuned for far more book-related material; there will be a whole wing of this website devoted to answering readers’ questions and providing additional information for those who want to know more!

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON March 5, 2024

How confident can we be that light’s speed across the universe is really constant, as I assumed in a recent post? Well, aspects of that idea can be verified experimentally. For instance, the hypothesis that light at all frequencies travels at the same speed can be checked. Today I’ll show you one way that it’s done; it’s particularly straightforward and easy to interpret.

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POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON February 27, 2024

Quick note today: I’m pleased and honored to share with you that the world-renowned journal Science has published a review of my upcoming book!

The book, Waves in an Impossible Sea, appears in stores in just 10 days (and can be pre-ordered now.) It’s a non-technical account of how Einstein’s relativity and quantum physics come together to make the world of daily experience — and how the Higgs field makes it all possible.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON February 23, 2024

Nothing goes faster than the speed of light in empty space, also known as the cosmic speed limit c. Right? Well, umm… the devil is in the details.

Here are some of those details:

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POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON February 20, 2024

I have posted my fourth article discussing zero-point energy. (Here are the firstthe second, and the third, which covered respectively the zero-point energy of a ball on a spring, a guitar string, and a bosonic field whose particles have zero mass, such as the electromagnetic field.) Today’s article looks at fields whose particles have non-zero mass, such as the Higgs field, and fermionic fields, such as the electron field and quark fields. It presents some simple formulas, and in its final section, shows how one can obtain them using math.

Along the way we’ll encounter the idea of “supersymmetry” and its failed role in the cosmological constant problem. This is a word which (for some good historical reasons) generates a lot of heat. But stay calm; I’m neither promoting it nor bashing it. Supersymmetry is an idea which proves useful as a conceptual tool, whether it is true in nature or not.

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POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON February 19, 2024

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A decay of a Higgs boson, as reconstructed by the CMS experiment at the LHC