This week I’m in California, at a conference celebrating two famous professors, from whom I learned an enormous amount when I was a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher. More on this later in the week.
Today, I just want to let you know I have completed the core of my naturalness article, which I began writing a couple of weeks ago. (more…)
ON September 9, 2013
Done: All three parts of my lecture for a general audience on String Theory are up now…
Beyond the Hype: The Weird World of String Theory (Science on Tap, Seattle, WA, September 25, 2006). Though a few years old, this talk is still very topical; it covers the history, development, context and impact of string theory from its earliest beginnings to the (then) present.
Be forewarned: although the audio is pretty good, this was an amateur video taken by one of the organizers of the talk, and because the place was small and totally packed with people, it’s not great quality… but good enough to follow, I think, so I’ve posted it.
By the way, if you’re interested in other talks I’ve given for a general audience, you can check out my video clips, which include a recent hour-long talk on the Quest for the Higgs Boson.
ON September 6, 2013
For today’s post, I’ve added a bit more information to the article that I’m gradually writing on “naturalness”. So far, in that article and an accompanying one, I have
And now the next installment of the article on Naturalness and the Standard Model provides additional knowledge that you’ll need, if you want to understand the argument that suggests the Standard Model (the highly successful equations used to predict the behavior of the known particles and forces) is an apparently unnatural (i.e., highly atypical) theory.
Specifically, the new section of the article explains how the Higgs field’s average value, and the Higgs particle’s mass, are determined (as for any similar field) by how the energy of empty space — to which the above-mentioned quantum fluctuations are a crucial contributor — depends on the Higgs field itself.
Yes, this is a long story — but so central to current “conventional wisdom” about the universe that we’d better go through it carefully. By the next installment, we should be getting to the heart of the matter.
ON September 4, 2013
Welcome September! I’m going to be quite busy for a bit, partly because I have two big science projects that need to get finished, partly because I’m settling in at my new location this week — which always takes longer than one hopes and expects. But I’ve got a few things in the pipeline for the blog, so there will be posts to follow soon.
If you were away last week, you missed the first two sections of a collection of articles that I’m writing on “naturalness”, a concept that’s central to the lines of reasoning often taken by particle physicists and their colleagues, both nowadays and over the past few decades. These articles came out last week, one on Tuesday (explaining what “natural” means in this context, and giving a first glimpse into what particle physicists mean by saying the Standard Model is “unnatural”) and one on Friday of last week, where I explained something about the quantum fluctuations of the fields of nature and how they can have lots of energy — energy which,
I said something (not very much, really) about the first problem on Friday, and it’s not my main focus right now. My plan this week is to start explaining the details of the second problem.
So stay tuned…
ON September 3, 2013
I’m still early on in my attempts to explain the “naturalness problem of the Standard Model” and its implications. A couple of days ago I explained what particle physicists mean by the term “natural” — it means “typical” or “generic”. And I described how, at least from one naive point of view, the Standard Model (the equations we use to describe the known elementary particles and forces) is unnatural. Indeed any theory is unnatural that has a
But I didn’t actually explain any of this yet; I just described it.
Specifically, I didn’t start yet to explain what causes the Standard Model to be unnatural. This is important to do, because, as many attentive readers naturally complained, my statements about the unnatural aspect of the Standard Model was based on a rather arbitrary-sounding statistical argument, and story-telling, which is hardly enough for scientific discussion. Patience; I’ll get there, not today but probably the next installment after today’s.
To see why the argument I gave is actually legitimate (which doesn’t mean it is right, but if it’s wrong it’s not for a simple reason you’ll think of in five minutes), it is necessary to look in a little bit more detail at one of the most fundamental aspects of quantum field theory: quantum fluctuations, and the energy they carry. So for today I have written an article about this, reasonably complete.
Be prepared — the article runs headlong into the only naturalness problem in particle physics that is worse than the naturalness problem of the Standard Model (the one I wrote about on Tuesday)! I am referring to the “cosmological constant problem”. In a nutshell:
After you’ve read about quantum fluctuations and the cosmological constant problem, and have a bit of a sense as to why it is so hard to make it go away, we can go back to the Standard Model, and try to understand the naturalness problem that is associated with the Higgs particle and field. It all has to do with another aspect of quantum fluctuations — the fact that their energy depends on, and therefore helps determine, the average value of the Higgs field.
ON August 30, 2013
So I got the following questions from a high school English teacher this morning, and I thought, for fun, I’d put the answers here for you to enjoy. Here (slightly abridged) is what the teacher wrote, and my answers:
I’ve turned my classroom into a video game to increase student engagement. In my gamified classroom, the villain is experimenting with/on the Higgs field. Your article on what would happen if the Higgs field was turned off answered a lot of my questions, but … I was hoping you could answer a couple of questions for me. I am sure these questions probably don’t have “real” answers, and are completely ridiculous, but I’d love to hear from you. (more…)
ON August 29, 2013
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