Of Particular Significance

Category: Waves In An Impossible Sea

A New Interview

A pause from my quantum series to announce a new interview on YouTube, this one on the Blackbird Physics channel, hosted by UMichigan graduate student and experimental particle physicist Ibrahim Chahrour. Unlike my recent interview with Alan Alda, which is for a general audience, this one is geared toward physics undergraduate students and graduate students. A lot of the topics are related to my book, but at a somewhat more advanced level. If you’ve had a first-year university physics class, or have done a lot of reading about the subject, give it a shot! Ibrahim asked great questions, and you may find many of the answers intriguing.

Here’s the list of the topics we covered, with timestamps.

00:00 Intro
00:40 Why did you write “Waves in an Impossible Sea”?
03:50 What is mass?
09:03 What is Relativistic Mass? Is it a useful concept?
17:50 Why Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is necessary
23:50 Electromagnetic Field, Photons, and Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)
36:17 Particles are ripples in their Fields
38:47 Fields with zero-mass particles vs. ones whose particles have mass?
46:49 The Standard Model of Particle Physics
52:08 What was the motivation/history behind the Higgs field?
1:02:05 How the Higgs field works
1:05:33 The Higgs field’s “Vacuum Expectation Value”
1:12:02 The hierarchy problem
1:24:18 The current goals of the Large Hadron Collider

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON March 17, 2025

A Conversation on Alan Alda’s Podcast

If you’re of a certain age, you know Alan Alda from his wonderful acting in television shows and in movies. But you may not know of his long-standing interest in science communication and his podcast Clear and Vivid (named for the characteristics that he feels all communication should have.)

Alda and I had a great conversation about the idea that we are made of waves, and what it means for our relationship to the universe. A slimmed-down version of that discussion is now available on his podcast. I hope you enjoy it!

Separately, as promised: to my last post, which covered various ways of depicting and interpreting wave functions, I’ve added explanations of the two quantum wave functions that I placed at the end. Tomorrow I’ll take a step back and consider wave functions from a larger point of view, taking a brief look at what they are (and aren’t), what’s “wavy” (and not) about them, and at their roles in contexts ranging from pre-quantum physics of the 19th century to quantum field theory of the 21st.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON February 18, 2025

Science Book of The Year (!?!)

Well, gosh… what nice news as 2024 comes to a close… My book has received a ringing endorsement from Ethan Siegel, the science writer and Ph.D. astrophysicist who hosts the well-known, award-winning blog “Starts with a Bang“. Siegel’s one of the most reliable and prolific science writers around — he writes for BigThink and has published in Forbes, among others — and it’s a real honor to read what he’s written about Waves in an Impossible Sea.

His brief review serves as an introduction to an interview that he conducted with me recently, which I think many of you will enjoy. We discussed science — the nature of particles/wavicles, the Higgs force, the fabric (if there is one) of the universe, and the staying power of the idea of supersymmetry among many theoretical physicists — and science writing, including novel approaches to science communication that I used in the book.

If you’re a fan of this blog or of the book, please consider sharing his review on social media (as well as the Wall Street Journal’s opinion.) The book has sold well this year, but I am hoping that in 2025 it will reach an even broader range of people who seek a better understanding of the cosmos, both in the large and in the small.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON December 17, 2024

Public Talk at the University of Michigan Dec 5th

This week I’ll be at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and I’ll be giving a public talk for a general audience at 4 pm on Thursday, December 5th. If you are in the area, please attend! And if you know someone at the University of Michigan or in the Ann Arbor area who might be interested, please let them know. (For physicists: I’ll also be giving an expert-level seminar at the Physics Department the following day.)

Here are the logistical details:

The Quantum Cosmos and Our Place Within It

Thursday, December 5, 2024, 4:00-5:00 PM ; Rackham Graduate School , 4th Floor Amphitheatre

When we step outside to contemplate the night sky, we often imagine ourselves isolated and adrift in a vast cavern of empty space—but is it so? Modern physics views the universe as more full than empty. Over the past century, this unfamiliar idea has emerged from a surprising partnership of exotic concepts: quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity. In this talk I’ll illustrate how this partnership provides the foundation for every aspect of human experience, including the existence of subatomic particles (and the effect of the so-called “Higgs field”), the peaceful nature of our journey through the cosmos, and the solidity of the ground beneath our feet.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON December 2, 2024

Speaking at Brown University Nov 18th

Just a brief note, in a very busy period, to alert those in the Providence, RI area that I’ll be giving a colloquium talk at the Brown University Physics Department on Monday November 18th at 4pm. Such talks are open to the public, but are geared toward people who’ve had at least one full year of physics somewhere in their education. The title is “Exploring The Foundations of our Quantum Cosmos”. Here’s a summary of what I intend to talk about:

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 marked a major milestone in our understanding of the universe, and a watershed for particle physics as a discipline. What’s known about particles and fields now forms a nearly complete short story, an astonishing, counterintuitive tale of relativity and quantum physics. But it sits within a larger narrative that is riddled with unanswered questions, suggesting numerous avenues of future research into the nature of spacetime and its many fields. I’ll discuss both the science and the challenges of accurately conveying its lessons to other scientists, to students, and to the wider public.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON November 15, 2024

Video: A Public Lecture About “Waves in an Impossible Sea”

If you’re curious to know what my book is about and why it’s called “Waves in an Impossible Sea”, then watching this video is currently the quickest and most direct way to find out from me personally. It’s a public talk that I gave to a general audience at Harvard, part of the Harvard Bookstore science book series.

My intent in writing the book was to illuminate central aspects of the cosmos — and of how we humans fit into it — that are often glossed over by scientists and science writers, at least in the books and videos I’ve come across. So if you watch the lecture, I think there’s a good chance that you’ll learn something about the world that you didn’t know, perhaps about the empty space that forms the fabric of the universe, or perhaps about what “quantum” in “quantum physics” really means and why it matters so much to you and me.

The video contains 35 minutes of me presenting, plus some Q&A at the end. Feel free to ask questions of your own in the comments below, or on my book-questions page; I’ll do my best to answer them.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON November 4, 2024

The Impossible Sea Sweeps Into the Impossible Podcast

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…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 30, 2024

“Waves in an Impossible Sea” Appears on a Wall Street Journal List of “10 Books To Read Now”

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…

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 27, 2024

Audiobook Appears Today (Tuesday Sept 24th)

As promised, the audiobook for Waves in an Impossible Sea, read by Christopher Grove, has finally come available. You can find it on Audible and on many other platforms. (Click here to order the audibook, hardback, or e-book.)

To help make the text easier to follow, I’ve put the 50+ figures, the 6 tables, and the glossary on-line. You might, for instance, choose to have them open on your phone for easy reference while you’re listening. (The endnotes are also there too, although my understanding is that Mr. Grove won’t be mentioning them as he reads, so you may need the text to make them useful.)

There are additional resources for readers already up on this website, supplementing the book, and more are coming soon, so please make use of them. Also feel free to ask me questions if you find yourself confused — and please don’t be embarrassed to do so, because the universe is confusing… even to physicists. No question is too simple; in fact, the simple ones (what is empty space? what’s a particle? why don’t we feel the Earth’s motion?) are often the hardest to answer.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 24, 2024

An Article, A Podcast, and An Audiobook

Things have been extremely busy! I have

written a new article for New Scientist about the familiar-sounding words that we use in physics (such as “particle”) and how they can easily mislead the unwary;
appeared in an extended Know Time podcast, hosted by a non-scientist, in which we discuss fields, particles and the Higgs boson — core material of my book Waves in an Impossible Sea; and
learned that the audiobook version of the book is now available for pre-order; it comes out September 24^th.

If any of these might interest you, here are the details!

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 20, 2024

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Category: Waves In An Impossible Sea

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

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The Quantum Cosmos and Our Place Within It

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

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