Well, gosh… what nice news as 2024 comes to a close… My book has received a ringing endorsement from Ethan Siegel, the science writer and Ph.D. astrophysicist who hosts the well-known, award-winning blog “Starts with a Bang“. Siegel’s one of the most reliable and prolific science writers around — he writes for BigThink and has published in Forbes, among others — and it’s a real honor to read what he’s written about Waves in an Impossible Sea.
His brief review serves as an introduction to an interview that he conducted with me recently, which I think many of you will enjoy. We discussed science — the nature of particles/wavicles, the Higgs force, the fabric (if there is one) of the universe, and the staying power of the idea of supersymmetry among many theoretical physicists — and science writing, including novel approaches to science communication that I used in the book.
If you’re a fan of this blog or of the book, please consider sharing his review on social media (as well as the Wall Street Journal’s opinion.) The book has sold well this year, but I am hoping that in 2025 it will reach an even broader range of people who seek a better understanding of the cosmos, both in the large and in the small.
18 Responses
Hi Matt Strassler,
Such an interesting book! I like that you at least contemplate that space doesn’t exist.
As I mentioned over in Medium.com, you have a lovely opportunity to promote the Eddington-Wilczek version of your wavicles as the primary force in creating stars from cosmic dust clouds. The missing piece — I don’t think it’s in your book, but please correct me if I’m wrong — is that wavicles deposit necessarily deposit momentum when they reflects specularly. Under such non-absorption circumstances they follow Maxwell’s classical light-pressure theory beautifully, skipping over the quantization issue entirely.
Well… almost entirely. A NASA light sail that reflects light back towards earth has, in some very real sense, “captured” those photons by attaching the origins of their future paths to the sails. This nicely proves the reality of your wavicles since it shows they can follow paths that are neither purely particle paths nor the all-of-space paths before they struck the light sails.
In any case, I find it visually delightful that without your wavicles, the Pillars of Creation could not exist, since without specular reflection of wavicles from cosmic dust particles, all you get is nearly directionless particle heating. Without wavicles, our sun — and us with it — could not exist. Wow!
Cheers,
Terry
P.S. – Tyson, Tyson… oh yes! Bit someone’s ear off once, yes? Of course I remember him! 🙂
Congrats on the great reviews! You deserve them.
The book was excellent. Blew my mind every few pages. I now check your blog daily for more.
Thanks! Sorry I’m not able to produce too many blog posts right now, due to other responsibilities, but I hope you are also checking out all the articles under https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/ . There are several hundred there, most of them still in good condition (although a few have suffered from glitches, and others are hard to read on a phone because they are from a decade back.)
Yes a great book. A reward for your years of dedications to explain physics without compromising it. Congratulations
Energy + Supersymmetry + Angular Momentum = Quantum Gravity
Stay tuned …
Congratulations is not an impossible order to set out to sea, so thanks for all the hard work and well deserved praise!
Reading the interview was rewarding, but of course also question raising. I think I finally understand what you mean by “turning the Higgs field on” which I somehow missed a definition of, helped by Siegel’s illustrations. It is perhaps presupposing the Higgs field Lagrangian symmetries being in place but having the field state starting at the phi = 0 Hill top (“field off”) to roll down (“field on”)!? If it is the field state that can have on/off values it would perhaps be clearer to say so than that the field is somehow on/off (which suggested existence/non-existence to me).
If the fields are so statical, the field dynamics that (say) Ed Copeland describes in his videos of decaying fields are either my misunderstanding (of a phib perhaps) or speculative physics. If inflation is a scalar field it may not have decayed but its initial state has and the field is “turned off”.
But then it makes it hard to grok why “neither [light nor gravity] has a medium” implies that “space isn’t a fundamental phenomenon”. Space is at the very least the relativistic environment the relativistic quantum field can live in. And if it isn’t, why would a less constrained dynamic of fields be more “fundamental” and less “emergent”?
Thanks!
Your questions touch on an issue which all science communicators struggle with: how to be clear about the difference between (1) the existence vs non-existence of a field, and (2) a field that exists having a zero value or a non-zero value [more precisely, a “vacuum expectation value”]. The problem is that most people don’t know what fields are or what field values are; it’s all too abstract. Field “states” are even more abstract. Adding to the problem is that although we all have experience of certain fields — air pressure, for instance — some of those fields can’t have a zero value — for instance, air pressure is never zero if air is present in the first place. This is part of why I used “wind” as field in my book, because wind can have a zero or non-zero value (can be switched off or switched on), but [importantly!] the wind field is present even on a calm day, when there is no wind.
I chose to use “switched on/off” with regard to the Higgs field (and similar fields) because I thought it would bring to mind, in many readers, the idea of a light bulb or electrical circuit, which still exists even when it is switched off. It seems not to have done so in your case, unfortunately.
The language of “decaying fields” is also ambiguous. It’s imprecise to speak of a field decaying, when what’s actually decaying away is its value. The inflaton field does not decay; its value decays (in some models of inflation, that is.) In the simplest, standard models of inflation, the inflaton field still exists today, though its expectation value is far different from what it was in the early universe, and it could someday be studied in experiments.
So you see, the problem here is linguistic. If I could say: there exists a field F(x,y,z), and that field has an expectation value F(x,y,z) = F_0, and the question is whether F_0 = 0 or F_0 > 0, then it would all be trivially clear. Math is much more precise than language, which is why professionals always use it.
As for your last paragraph: exactly! The question is: how could gravity not have a medium if gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of space? The very statement that “gravity is a manifestation of curved space” is equivalent to the statement that “the gravitational field is a property of space”, as air pressure is a property of air, which means that “space is the medium for the gravitational field” — by definition. And therefore the only way that gravity could fail to have a medium is if space itself is an illusion, which would indeed mean that the gravitational field is, itself, an illusion. (How could you have a real property of an illusory thing?)
This is *exactly* what happens in the so-called gauge/gravity[string] correspondence, AdS/CFT. You start with a field theory that has no gravity; you rewrite it in new mathematics that has both gravity (strings too) and more dimensions of space than you started with. From the point of view that you started with, the gravity and the extra dimensions of space are illusions… emergent … useful fictions.
No, this is not easy to understand. It was only figured out in 1997 — about 25 years after string theory was first seriously proposed as a theory of quantum gravity. The math behind it is still incompletely understood, and the conceptual lessons are still being heavily debated.
Professor Strassler, your wavelet concept is inconsistent with all experimentally known quantum behavior. Congratulations on your accolades, but have you shown mathematically how to keep your wavelets from exploding instantly, or have you mapped it mathematically into QED?
Terry, it’s “wavicle”, not “wavelet”; “wavelets” are something completely different, look them up.
As for your complaints — the word “wavicle” is used by Frank Wilczek (Nobel Prize, 2004) and Neil deGrasse Tyson (you may have heard of him.) And my book was read by and endorsed by Nima Arkani-Hamed (professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Breakthrough Prize winner), Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal, UK), Sean Carroll (high-profile theorist and science communicator.) You can read what they said about the book at the bottom of this webpage: https://profmattstrassler.com/waves-in-an-impossible-sea/
So maybe — just maybe — you have something to learn from the experts, rather than the other way around.
Ethan’s review is incorrectly linked to think.com rather than bigthink.com. The link should be corrected to: https:/bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/waves-in-an-impossible-sea-science-book-year/
Thanks — fixed
Well deserved! I thoroughly enjoyed your book and am awaiting your next. Well done! bc
Thank you!
Dear Matt,
Ethan Siegel’s review and praise of your book are well deserved. I am recommending the book around my friends and family as one of the best I have read this year.
Have a wonderful holiday season.
Henrik
Thank you, Henrik!
I’ve got it on Kindle. Are there any plans for an audio version?
Great! There is an audiobook (though I am not the reader.) For instance, https://www.audible.com/pd/Waves-in-an-Impossible-Sea-Audiobook/B0DGW4BBH3 , also available on Amazon and other sources. Note also that there is a lot of supporting material on this website, https://profmattstrassler.com/waves-in-an-impossible-sea/audiobook-for-waves-in-an-impossible-sea/ .