Of Particular Significance

Tag: Book

After a tiring spring that followed the publication of the book, I’ve taken a little break. But starting tomorrow, I’ll be posting on the blog again, focusing again on the important differences between the conventional notion of “particle” and the concept of “wavicle”. I prefer the latter to the former when referring to electrons, quarks and other elementary objects.

Today, though, some book-related news.

First, a book review of sorts — or at least, a brief but strong informal endorsement — appeared in the New York Times, courtesy of the linguist, author and columnist John McWhorter. Since McWhorter is not a scientist himself, I’m especially delighted that he liked the book and found it largely comprehensible! The review was in a paragraph-long addendum to a longer column about language; here’s an excerpt:

Another positive review recently appeared in Nautilus magazine, written by Ash Jogalekar, a scientist himself — but a chemist rather than a physicist. The full review is available here.

Lastly, the audiobook is in preparation, though I still don’t know the time frame yet.

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON July 8, 2024

Three events coming up!

Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 15th, in the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, I’ll be speaking about my book — specifically, about why and how the relationship between ourselves and the universe is not what it seems. The event will be held at the Broadside Bookshop at 7pm. If you’re in the Pioneer Valley, please come by! And let your friends in the area know, too.

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Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON May 14, 2024

A quick reminder, to those in the northwest’s big cities, that I will be giving two talks about my book in the next 48 hours:

Hope to see some of you there! (You can keep track of my speaking events at my events page.)

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON April 17, 2024

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Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON April 1, 2024

I’m aiming to get the blog back to science as soon as possible, but I need to answer some questions that I’ve been receiving about the book and website.

  • Yes, there will be an audiobook. It’s coming. A few weeks. I’ll let you know.
  • Yes, there will be a page on this website where book-readers can ask questions about the subjects covered in the book. No later than next week. I doubt I’ll be able to answer all questions individually, but I’ll be collecting them and answering the most common… see below.

In fact, there will soon be a whole wing of this website devoted to the book, which will have

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Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON March 7, 2024

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 

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON September 14, 2023

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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Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 16, 2023

Happy 2023 everyone!  You’ve noticed, no doubt, that the blog has been quiet recently.  That’s because I’ve got a book contract, with a deadline of March 31, 2023.  [The book itself won’t be published til spring 2024.]  I’ll tell you more about this in future posts. But over the next couple of months I’ll be a bit slow to answer questions and even slower to write content.  Fortunately, much of the content on this website is still current — the universe seems to be much the same in 2023 as it was in 2011 when the site was born. So poke around; I’m sure you’ll find something that interests you!

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON January 11, 2023

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