Of Particular Significance

Category: Uncategorized

Quick note: two powerful solar flares occurred in the last 72 hours, creating high spikes in the rate of X-rays from the Sun.

Each flare created a coronal mass ejection that could arrive in a couple of days at Earth, potentially creating a geomagnetic storm. Consequently there’s a good probability this weekend, especially Saturday night into Sunday morning (in Europe and the US), of seeing northern and southern lights (auroras). [See this post for some advice as to how to infer whether the storms have started and/or are ongoing.]

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 4, 2024

This is my second post on the subject of why “the speed of light (in empty space)”, more accurately referred to as “the cosmic speed limit”, is so fast. This speed, denoted c, is about 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second, which does indeed seem quick.

But as I pointed out in my first post on this subject, this isn’t really the right question, because it implicitly views humans as centrally important and asks why the cosmos as strange. That’s backward. We should instead ask why we ourselves are so slow. Not only does this honor the cosmos properly, making it clear that it is humans that are the oddballs here, this way of asking the question leads us to the answer.

And the answer is this: ordinary atomic material, from which we are made, is fragile. If a living creature were to move (relative to the objects around it) at speeds anywhere close to c, it couldn’t possibly survive its first slip and fall, or its first absent-minded collision with a door frame.

Today I’ll use a principled argument, founded on basic particle physics and its implications for atomic physics, to show that any living creature made from atoms will inevitably view the cosmic speed limit as extremely fast compared to the speeds that it ordinarily experiences.

(more…)
Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 3, 2024

I’m often asked two very natural and related questions.

  1. Why is the speed of light, usually denoted c, so astonishingly fast?
  2. Why, in Einstein’s famous equation relating energy and mass — E=mc2 — does c2, a gargantuan number, appear?

It’s true that the speed of light does seem fast — light can travel from your cell phone to your eyes in a billionth of a second, and in a full second and a half it can travel from the Earth to the Moon.

And indeed the energy stored in your body is comparable to the Earth’s most explosive volcanic eruptions and to the most violent nuclear bombs ever tested — enormously greater than the energy you use to walk across the room or even to lift a heavy suitcase.

What in the name of physics — and chemistry and biology — is responsible for these bewildering features of reality? The answer is fascinating, and originates in particle physics and the resulting structure of matter. It is surprisingly intricate, though, so I’m going to approach this step-by-step over three blog posts. Here’s the first.

(more…)
Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 1, 2024

My hour-long conversation with UCSD Professor Brian Keating, on his Into the Impossible podcast, has just come out on YouTube; click here to listen.

We covered several topics from my book, including what particles really are and how the Higgs field gives them mass, along with others ranging from renormalization to the nature of the book’s cover.

(more…)
Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 30, 2024

I’m very pleased to report that “Waves in an Impossible Sea“, my book about the universe and its secret role in every aspect of daily life, has been selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of “10 Books to Read Now: Science and Technology”.

The full list and the reviews are behind a paywall, but you can see the titles of the books even before the paywall. The other nine are:

  • Supremacy, by Parmy Olson
  • Escape from Shadow Physics, by Adam Forrest Kay
  • Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, by George Musser
  • Count Down, by Sarah Scoles
  • Magic Pill, by Johann Hari
  • Superconvergence, by Jamie Metzl
  • The Afterlife of Data, by Carl Öhman
  • Read Dead’s History, by Tore C. Olsson
  • Who Wrote This, by Naomi S. Baron

Ten books to keep our minds active and up-to-date! We all have some reading to do…

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 27, 2024

What? There’s a comet coming?

In fact, it’s already here. Oh yes, it seems that 2024 may not just be the year of a terrific solar eclipse and spectacular outbursts of northern lights (and maybe, just maybe, a nova.) In morning twilight, if you live in the right latitudes, an ever-brightening comet can apparently be spotted right now. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m hoping to get a chance.

Nothing in cometary life is guaranteed; comets can fall apart unexpectedly, or fail to brighten as expected. So far, though, Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is looking promising; its tail may soon be longer than its name.

(more…)
Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 26, 2024

Search

Buy The Book

Reading My Book?

Got a question? Ask it here.

Media Inquiries

For media inquiries, click here.