Of Particular Significance

Author: Matt Strassler

The Impossible Cover

Waves in an Impossible Sea, on the intersection of modern physics with human existence and daily life, is essentially done and edited now — not perfect, of course, but as good as I have had time to make it. Now I await the proofs.

The book is supposed to appear in early March. Here’s the cover art, created by an artist at the publisher, Basic Books. I hope it makes you curious about what might lie inside!

***A Harvard physicist takes us on an awe-inspiring journey from relativity to the Higgs field, showing how the universe creates everything from what seems like nothing at all***

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 14, 2023

New Scientist Covers the Standard Model and Beyond

For those of you who subscribe to New Scientist, their magazine’s cover story this week is a feature entitled “THE AMAZING THEORY OF (ALMOST) EVERYTHING”. In the feature is an overview of the Standard Model (which describes all known fields and particles, excepting gravity, with amazing accuracy, but leaves a plethora of puzzles unaddressed) and includes a final section (edited by Abby Beall) with short articles by six scientists about their current views regarding the Standard Model, among them myself. [This website’s introductory article on the Standard Model is here; see also here.] . . .

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 11, 2023

Dismantling Common Sense, Twice

In my last post I raised a question about the pros and cons of common sense. I left it as a wide-open question, as I was curious to see how readers would react.

Many aspects of common sense affect how we relate to other people, and it’s clear they have considerable value. But the intuitions we have for nature, though sometimes useful, are mostly wrong. These conceptual errors pose obstacles for students who are learning science for the first time.

It’s also interesting that once these students learn first chemistry and then Newtonian-era physics, they gain new intuitions for the natural world, a sort of classical-physics common sense. Much of this newfound common sense also turns out to be wrong: it badly misrepresents how the cosmos really works. This is a difficulty not only for students but also for many adults. If you’ve read about or even taken a class in basic astronomy or physics, it can then be challenging to make sense of twentieth-century physics, where Newtonian intuition can fail badly.

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 20, 2023

The Topic(s) of the Upcoming Book

Every book on science focuses attention on a little sliver of a vast, complex universe. In Waves in an Impossible Sea, I had intended to write mainly about the Higgs field, and the associated Higgs particle that was discovered in 2012 to great fanfare. I was planning to explain how the Higgs field does its job in the universe, and why it’s so important for the existence of life.

However, this plan had a problem. The Higgs field would be irrelevant were it not for quantum physics on the one hand and Einstein’s relativity on the other, and to comprehend the latter requires some understanding of Galileo’s earlier concept of relativity. To show why the Higgs field can give mass (more precisely, rest mass) to certain types of particles requires combining all of these notions together. Each of these topics is daunting, worthy of multiple books, and I knew I couldn’t hope to cover them all in 100,000 words!

To my surprise, resolving this problem wasn’t as difficult as I expected, once I picked out a few crucial elements about each of these subjects that I felt everyone ought to know. Lining up those conceptual points carefully, I found I could give a non-technical yet accurate explanation of how elementary particles can get mass from a Higgs field. (A more mathematical explanation has been given previously on this website, in two series of articles here and here.)

Yet what surprised me even more was that the book’s main subject slowly changed as I wrote it. It became focused on the question of how ordinary life emerges from an extraordinary cosmos. Though a substantial section of the book is devoted to the Higgs field, it is situated in a much wider context than I originally imagined.

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 16, 2023

Emerging From the Writing Cave

I have just submitted a book, entitled Waves in an Impossible Sea, to my publisher, Basic Books (a trade press well known for Gödel, Escher, Bach, as well as numerous other science and math titles.) If all goes smoothly, it will go on sale in March 2024 or thereabouts. Now that it is mostly done, I will have some more time for writing of other sorts, including posts on this blog.

In the book, I’ve tried to explain how modern physics intersects with human existence and experience. I hope it will bring a physicist’s perspective on the cosmos, and on humans’ place within it, to a wider range of people. Along the way, it explains clearly and correctly what the Higgs field’s role in nature is, and how it plays that role, to the extent we understand it.

The book is non-technical yet sophisticated; though a layperson with no science background can read it, it’s not a lightweight read. I’ve made the universe as comprehensible as I know how, but I haven’t oversimplified it. Of course I had to leave a lot out; otherwise the book would have been 3500 pages instead of 350. But whatever is covered in the book is covered as carefully as space allows.

Precisely because I’ve had to leave out so many interesting side-topics and technical details, I’ll be providing lots of supplementary material on this website. Some of it will be brief surveys of topics that couldn’t fit in the book; some of it will allow me to discuss subtle points that would have distracted from the flow of the book; and some of it will present some of the underlying math that didn’t belong in a non-technical book, but which I know will interest certain readers of this website. I’ll be writing much of that material in coming months, and as I finish parts of it, I’ll be posting them here. Your comments will be both welcome and essential in making sure that it is comprehensible and comprehensive.

There’s much more to come, so stay tuned.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 14, 2023

Busy Writing a Book

Happy 2023 everyone! You’ve noticed, no doubt, that the blog has been quiet recently. That’s because I’ve got a book contract, with a deadline of March 31, 2023. [The book itself won’t be published til spring 2024.] I’ll tell you more about this in future posts. But over the next couple of months I’ll be a bit slow to answer questions and even slower to write content. Fortunately, much of the content on this website is still current — the universe seems to be much the same in 2023 as it was in 2011 when the site was born. So poke around; I’m sure you’ll find something that interests you!

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON January 11, 2023

Buy The Book

Reading My Book?

Got a question? Ask it here.

Media Inquiries

For media inquiries, click here.

Author: Matt Strassler

The Impossible Cover

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

New Scientist Covers the Standard Model and Beyond

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

Dismantling Common Sense, Twice

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

The Topic(s) of the Upcoming Book

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

Emerging From the Writing Cave

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

Busy Writing a Book

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

Recent Posts

Buy The Book

Reading My Book?

Media Inquiries

Order Waves In An Impossible Sea