Of Particular Significance

Category: Public Outreach

Speaking in Nashville, Cambridge and the West Coast

I’m beginning a period of travel and public speaking, so new posts may be a bit limited for a time. (Meanwhile, explore this site’s other offerings!) Tomorrow, Thursday March 28th, I’ll be in Nashville, at Vanderbilt University’s department of physics and astronomy, giving a talk (at 4 pm) about the subjects covered in my recent book. Next, on Wednesday April 3rd (6 pm) I’ll be in Cambridge, Massachusetts, giving a public talk about the book at the Harvard Science Center, as organized by the Harvard Bookstore (the wonderful independent book store located right in Harvard Square.) [Free, but RSVP.]

Then I’ll be on the west coast for a couple of weeks; if you live out there, check out this site’s upcoming-events page. And if you can’t attend any of these events, you can always listen to the recent podcasts that I’ve been on, with Sean Carroll (here) and with Daniel Whiteson (part 1 and part 2.)

More physics coming soon!

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON March 27, 2024

Why a Partial Solar Eclipse is Totally Awesome!

On April 8th, 2024, a small strip of North America will witness a total solar eclipse. Total solar eclipses are amazing, life-changing experiences; I hope you have a chance to experience one, as I did.

Everyone else from Central America to northern Canada will see a partial solar eclipse. What good is a partial solar eclipse?

Astonishingly, the best thing about a partial solar eclipse seems to have essentially disappeared from public knowledge. We’ve got three weeks to change that, and I hope you’ll help me — especially the science journalists and science teachers among you.

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POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON March 14, 2024

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

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.

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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.

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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

Giving two free lectures 6/20,27 about gravitational waves

For those of you who live in or around Berkshire County, Massachusetts, or know people who do…

Starting next week I’ll be giving two free lectures about the LIGO experiment’s discovery of gravitational waves. The lectures will be at 1:30 pm on Mondays June 20 and 27, at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, MA. The first lecture will focus on why gravitational waves were expected by scientists, and the second will be on how gravitational waves were discovered, indirectly and then directly. No math or science background will be assumed. (These lectures will be similar in style to the ones I gave a couple of years ago concerning the Higgs boson discovery.)

Here’s a flyer with the details: http://berkshireolli.org/ProfessorMattStrasslerOLLILecturesFlyer.pdf

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 14, 2016

LHC Starts Collisions; and a Radio Interview Tonight

In the long and careful process of restarting the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] after its two-year nap for upgrades and repairs, another milestone has been reached: protons have once again collided inside the LHC’s experimental detectors (named ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE). This is good news, but don’t get excited yet. It’s just one small step. These are collisions at the lowest energy at which the LHC operates (450 GeV per proton, to be compared with the 4000 GeV per proton in 2012 and the 6500 GeV per proton they’ve already achieved in the last month, though in non-colliding beams.) Also the number of protons in the beams, and the number of collisions per second, is still very, very small compared to what will be needed. So discoveries are not imminent! Yesterday’s milestone was just one of the many little tests that are made to assure that the LHC is properly set up and ready for the first full-energy collisions, which should start in about a month.

But since full-energy collisions are on the horizon, why not listen to a radio show about what the LHC will be doing after its restart is complete? Today (Wednesday May 6th), Virtually Speaking Science, on which I have appeared a couple of times before, will run a program at 5 pm Pacific time (8 pm Eastern). Science writer Alan Boyle will be interviewing me about the LHC’s plans for the next few months and the coming years. You can listen live, or listen later once they post it. Here’s the link for the program.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON May 6, 2015

Science Festival About to Start in Cambridge, MA

It’s a busy time here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the US’s oldest urban Science Festival opens tomorrow for its 2015 edition. It has been 100 years since Einstein wrote his equations for gravity, known as his Theory of General Relativity, and so this year a significant part of the festival involves Celebrating Einstein. The festival kicks off tomorrow with a panel discussion of Einstein and his legacy near Harvard University — and I hope some of you can go! Here are more details:

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First Parish in Cambridge, 1446 Massachusetts Avenue, Harvard Square, Cambridge
Friday, April 17; 7:30pm-9:30pm

Officially kicking off the Cambridge Science Festival, four influential physicists will sit down to discuss how Einstein’s work shaped the world we live in today and where his influence will continue to push the frontiers of science in the future!

Our esteemed panelists include:
Lisa Randall | Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Priyamvada Natarajan | Professor of Astronomy & Physics, Yale University
Clifford Will | Professor of Physics, University of Florida
Peter Galison | Professor of History of Science, Harvard University
David Kaiser | Professor of the History of Science, MIT

Cost: $10 per person, $5 per student, Tickets available now at https://speakingofeinstein.eventbrite.com

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON April 16, 2015

Giving Public Talk Jan. 20th in Cambridge, MA

Hope all of you had a good holiday and a good start to the New Year!

I myself continue to be extraordinarily busy as we move into 2015, but I am glad to say that some of that activity involves communicating science to the public. In fact, a week from today I will be giving a public talk — really a short talk and a longer question/answer period — in Cambridge, just outside of Boston and not far from MIT. This event is a part of the monthly “CafeSci” series, which is affiliated with the famous NOVA science television programs produced for decades by public TV/Radio station WGBH in Boston.

Note for those of you have gone before to CafeSci events: it will be in a new venue, not far from Kendall Square. Here’s the announcement:

Tuesday, January 20th at 7pm (about 1 hour long)
Le Laboratoire Cambridge (NEW LOCATION)
http://www.lelaboratoirecambridge.com/
650 East Kendall St, Cambridge, MA

“The Large Hadron Collider Restarts Soon! What Lies Ahead?”

Speaker: Matthew Strassler

“After a long nap, the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], where the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012, will begin operating again in 2015, with more powerful collisions than before. Now that we know Higgs particles exist, what do we want to know about them? What methods can we use to answer our questions? And what is the most important puzzle that we are hoping the LHC will help us solve?”

Public Transit: Red line to Kendall Square, walk straight down 3rd Street, turn right onto Athenaeum Street, and left onto East Kendall

Parking: There is a parking deck – the 650 East Kendall Street Garage – accessible by Linskey Way.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON January 13, 2015

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