Today a reader asked me “Out of the quantum fields which have mass, do any of them also have weight?” I thought other readers would be interested in my answer, so I’m putting it here. (Some of what is discussed below is covered in greater detail in my upcoming book.)
Before we start, we need to rephrase the question, because fields do not have mass.
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ON September 23, 2023
Continuing with the supplementary material for the book, from its Chapter 2. This is in reference to Galileo’s principle of relativity, a central pillar of modern science. This principle states that perfectly steady motion in a straight line is indistinguishable from no motion at all, and thus cannot be felt. This is why we don’t feel our rapid motion around the Earth and Sun; over minutes, that motion is almost steady and straight. I wrote
To this I added a brief endnote, since the spin of the Earth can be detected, with some difficulty.
But for those who would want to know more, here’s some information about how to measure the Earth’s spin.
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ON September 21, 2023
Since the upcoming book is basically done, it’s time for me to launch the next phase of the project — the supplementary material, which will be placed here, on this website.
Any science book has to leave out many details of the subjects it covers, and omit many important topics. While my book has endnotes that help flesh out the main text, I know that some readers will want even more information. That’s what I’ll be building here over the coming months. I’ll continue to develop this material even after the book is published, as additional readers explore it. For a time, then, this will be a living, growing extension to the written text.
As I create this supplementary material, I’ll first post it on this blog, looking for your feedback in terms of its clarity and accuracy, and hoping to get a sense from you as to whether there are other questions that I ought to address. Let’s try this out today with a first example; I look forward to your comments.
In Chapter 2 of the book, I have written
This sentence then refers to an endnote, in which I state
Obviously this is very terse, and I’m sure some readers will want an explanation of the endnote. Here’s the explanation that I’ll post on this website:
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ON September 19, 2023
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!
ON September 14, 2023
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.] . . .
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ON September 11, 2023
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.
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ON June 20, 2023
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