The Higgs Field Meets Quirks & Quarks (and Other Conversations)

For forty years, the Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC) has had a famous science radio show called “Quirks and Quarks“; it is currently hosted by science journalist Bob McDonald. I’m pleased to tell you that I was invited onto that show this past week. In my conversation with McDonald, I explained how the Higgs field actually works, avoiding the “molasses”/”snow”/”crowd” analogies that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

(This all happened while I was spending a few days in Ontario. I was meeting all sorts of wonderful people at the Perimeter Institute’s 2024 science communicators conference SciComm Collider 2, organized by Katie Mack. More on that at a later time.)

If you’d like to hear the Quirks and Quarks conversation, or one of the other detailed podcast conversations I’ve had about my book, you can find them here:

• The “Quirks and Quarks” show:
  • Episode title: “Why an essential subatomic particle plays the field”
    • 15 minutes, on how the Higgs field gives mass to particles
• Sean Carroll’s podcast “Mindscape”
  • Episode title: “Matt Strassler on Relativity, Fields, and the Language of Reality”
    • 90 minutes, all about the book
• Daniel Whiteson’s podcast “Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe”,
  • Episode title: “Is the Universe Made From Waves?”
    • Part 1 , 43 minutes
    • Part 2 , 53 minutes