Of Particular Significance

A New Interview

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON 03/17/2025

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

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2 Responses

  1. hi Matt, a big thanks for what feels like ‘private tutoring’.
    It ties in nicely with the book and the blog. You allow me to catch up to stuff I was never taught.

    As usual, a (silly) question :
    when you describe the massless fields, you point out that they suffer no restoring effect, no preferred field value. That goes with the notion that only differences in field values have observable effects. (If my entire house were at 10 kVolt above neutral, I wouldn’t notice any effect inside). But then, you introduce the VEV of the Higgs field. And without even blinking, that field DOES have an absolute reference value. It has a zero reference value (that other fields lack) and prefers to sit at a value above zero. Where did I miss the point here? Can we assign an energy ‘label’ to other fields (electromagnetic- or electron-) dependent on its value, and if so, measured from what reference? I’m, again, confused.

  2. Enjoyed watching the video especially the section around self organized criticality.
    And it’s yet another great youtube channel to subscribe to.

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