Of Particular Significance

Author: Matt Strassler

As promised, the audiobook for Waves in an Impossible Sea, read by Christopher Grove, has finally come available. You can find it on Audible and on many other platforms. (Click here to order the audibook, hardback, or e-book.)

To help make the text easier to follow, I’ve put the 50+ figures, the 6 tables, and the glossary on-line. You might, for instance, choose to have them open on your phone for easy reference while you’re listening. (The endnotes are also there too, although my understanding is that Mr. Grove won’t be mentioning them as he reads, so you may need the text to make them useful.)

There are additional resources for readers already up on this website, supplementing the book, and more are coming soon, so please make use of them. Also feel free to ask me questions if you find yourself confused — and please don’t be embarrassed to do so, because the universe is confusing… even to physicists. No question is too simple; in fact, the simple ones (what is empty space? what’s a particle? why don’t we feel the Earth’s motion?) are often the hardest to answer.

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 24, 2024

Things have been extremely busy! I have

If any of these might interest you, here are the details!

(more…)
Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 20, 2024

Back in April 2022, the CDF experiment, which operated at the long-ago-closed Tevatron particle collider. presented the world’s most precise measurement of the mass of the particle known as the “W boson“. Their result generated some excited commentary, because it disagreed by 0.1% with the prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics. Even though the mismatch was tiny, it was significant, because the CDF measurement was so exceptionally precise. Any disagreement of such high significance would imply that something has to give: either the Standard Model is missing something, or the CDF measurement is incorrect.

(more…)
Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 19, 2024

———-

Still waiting for a possible outbreak of auroras (northern/southern lights) tonight; a tremendous blast from the Sun, launched from a sunspot two days ago, is believed likely to make a glancing impact on the Earth, and to do so within the next 12 hours or so. That means a possibility of bright northern lights tonight if you’re north of, say, New York City’s latitude.

BUT always keep in mind that forecasting auroras is part science, part art, part luck. Our chances are decent, but the forecast can always be wrong.

As far as timing, the best way to monitor what’s going on, I’ve found, is to use https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/ace-real-time-solar-wind and look for sudden activity in multiple data channels. If that happens, then the ACE satellite (about a million miles away) has detected a sudden change in the solar wind, and a geomagnetic storm is likely to start at Earth within an hour or so.

Whether you will see auroras or not during the storm depends on how powerful it is, which determines how far from the poles the auroras will reach and how bright they will be. While the forecast is for a strong storm, we’ll just have to see…


At 2300 UTC (about one hour before this posting) you can see jumps occurred in many channels below. That means that the solar storm may begin right around now (0000 UTC, 8 pm New York Time)

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 16, 2024

I’m delighted to tell you that Quanta Magazine has published an essay I have written on the *real* story of how the Higgs field gives mass to particles — avoiding those famous false analogies. There’s a musical connection, too. I hope you enjoy it! https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-higgs-field-actually-gives-mass-to-elementary-particles-20240903/

If you are curious to learn more about the main points of the essay, feel free to ask me questions about it in the comments below or at Quanta Magazine. (I also go into more detail about these subjects in my book.)

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 3, 2024

Though I’ve been busy with a number of physics and writing tasks, I’ve been beefing up the “Reader Resources” section of this website, devoted to extending the experience of readers of my book. [BTW, the audiobook is due out at the end of September.]

The book has many endnotes (available separately here, in case [like me] you hate paging back and forth between the text and the endnotes, and would like to have the endnotes more easily available on a separate screen.) A number of these endnotes have asterisks, and for those endnotes I promised to provide more information here on this website. Well, that information is going up, step by step.

For example:

(more…)
Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON August 20, 2024

Search

Buy The Book

Reading My Book?

Got a question? Ask it here.

Media Inquiries

For media inquiries, click here.