A pause from my quantum series to announce a new interview on YouTube, this one on the Blackbird Physics channel, hosted by UMichigan graduate student and experimental particle physicist Ibrahim Chahrour. Unlike my recent interview with Alan Alda, which is for a general audience, this one is geared toward physics undergraduate students and graduate students. A lot of the topics are related to my book, but at a somewhat more advanced level. If you’ve had a first-year university physics class, or have done a lot of reading about the subject, give it a shot! Ibrahim asked great questions, and you may find many of the answers intriguing.
Here’s the list of the topics we covered, with timestamps.
- 00:00 Intro
- 00:40 Why did you write “Waves in an Impossible Sea”?
- 03:50 What is mass?
- 09:03 What is Relativistic Mass? Is it a useful concept?
- 17:50 Why Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is necessary
- 23:50 Electromagnetic Field, Photons, and Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)
- 36:17 Particles are ripples in their Fields
- 38:47 Fields with zero-mass particles vs. ones whose particles have mass?
- 46:49 The Standard Model of Particle Physics
- 52:08 What was the motivation/history behind the Higgs field?
- 1:02:05 How the Higgs field works
- 1:05:33 The Higgs field’s “Vacuum Expectation Value”
- 1:12:02 The hierarchy problem
- 1:24:18 The current goals of the Large Hadron Collider
One Response
Enjoyed watching the video especially the section around self organized criticality.
And it’s yet another great youtube channel to subscribe to.