As many of you have already read on the BBC or on the physics blogs, such as Resonaances, Quantum Diaries and Cosmic Variance, a new discrepancy — this one quite substantial, and appearing in a measurement that is harder to question than some others we’ve seen this year — has appeared at a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment, LHCb. (more…)
Blog – Of Particular Significance
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON November 16, 2011
Couple of new articles up: we had Worlds of 1 Dimension last week, and now the article on Worlds of 2 Dimensions is ready. Along the way I’ve addressed a natural and very common confusion about shapes and spaces that arises in the context of the Big Bang and the expanding universe (mistaking the properties of a shape with the properties of a particular way of drawing or picturing the shape.) Coming soon (though not this week I suspect): how, if you’re a particle physicist, you can figure out that a space that appears one-dimensional is really two-dimensional… a story which will be our window into how to understand extra dimensions more generally.
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON November 14, 2011
Matt Strassler 11/11/11
Today is a special day — at least if you are fond of the numeral 1, or the number 11, and especially so if you’re willing to buy in to one of the oldest human pseudo-scientific pursuits: numerology. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love numbers and I always have. When I was five years old I was mesmerized when my parents’ car reached 99,999.9 miles, and I think 12:34:56 on 7/8/90 is just a cool a time as anybody else does. But I do this with a sense of humor.
Unfortunately it happens that a few influential people attempt serious and consequential numerology involving the calendar — predicting disaster and convincing people to sell their homes and give away their belongings. Now that makes me mad. Outraged, in fact — because it’s often obvious from the way these predictions are generated that those who made them don’t understand much about the calendar, about time, about history and about astronomy or physics… and yet they speak with authority, an authority they haven’t earned and don’t deserve.
Of course the movies play this up too, making money off of people’s fear: we have an 11/11/11 horror film in store. The prophet intones: “On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month…” Well. By the end of this article I hope you’ll wonder what he’s even talking about. [Note added: I should have emphasized, for non-European readers, that the phrase “on the eleventh hour…” refers to the moment that it was decided, arbitrarily, that the Armistice ending the First World War should be signed. Is it not ironic that this tragically modern war was concluded at a time chosen by an ancient form of calendar numerology? Perhaps more enlightened leadership could have avoided future disasters.]
Meanwhile, we should most certainly drink to this one-one-of-a-kind moment, and as we do, let’s also remember, and enjoy, just how absurd it really is. Let us even count the ways. (more…)
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON November 11, 2011
In my recent Worlds of 1 Spatial Dimension article, I wrote about various one-dimensional worlds (the Income Line, the Rainbow Line, and the Aeolian Line) — all of them involving dimensions which are not themselves physical dimensions of space. What is the distinction between a general dimension and an honest-to-goodness spatial dimension? In short, what do we mean by saying that a dimension has something to do with physical space? Click here to learn more.
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON November 10, 2011
Yesterday I spent the day at Stony Brook, one of the branches of the State University of New York (SUNY), which has a long and distinguished history, and a bright future, in high-energy physics and related fields. It is the home of the C.N.Yang Institute and the Simons Center. My main task was to deliver a colloquium on the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] (roughly the same talk I gave at Harvard recently) but the real pleasure of the visit (at least for me) was catching up with what some of my colleagues who work there, or who were themselves visiting there, have been doing recently.
One thing I’ve not talked about yet on this website — mainly because it is more technical than LHC physics — is that a lot of progress is being made right now understanding the fundamentals of my entire research area. I refer here to what is known as “quantum field theory” [QFT for short]. It’s not a “theory” in the colloquial sense of “hunch” or “conjecture”, where you imagine someone saying “my theory is that it was the butler’s fault”. This is a second meaning, very common in science, of the word “theory”: a mathematical framework for scientific calculations, and a conceptual framework that goes along with it. (more…)
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON November 9, 2011
I’ve done some work today on writing the first parts of a section on Extra Dimensions of Space, a very important but very large topic. It will probably be months before the whole thing is fleshed out, but some of you may be curious to read along as it takes shape. In particular, you can’t understand extra dimensions of space if you don’t understand dimensions properly, so I’m starting from the point of view that I need to explain how I and many other physicists think about dimensions in general, and spatial dimensions in particular. Right now, of several planned sub-articles, only one (on one-dimensional worlds) exists so far, but even that article is pretty thick with material, and perhaps interesting for many readers.
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON November 7, 2011
Buy The Book
Reading My Book?
Got a question? Ask it here.
Media Inquiries
For media inquiries, click here.
