Of Particular Significance

Tag: Higgs

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

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

Update to the Higgs FAQ

Although I’ve been slowly revising the Higgs FAQ 2.0, this seemed an appropriate time to bring the Higgs FAQ on this website fully into the 2020’s. You will find the Higgs FAQ 3.0 here; it explains the basics of the Higgs boson and Higgs field, along with some of the wider context.

For deeper explanations of the Higgs field:

if you are comfortable with math, you can find this series of pages useful (but you will probably to read this series first.)
if you would prefer to avoid the math, a full and accurate conceptual explanation of the Higgs field is given in my book.

Events: this week I am speaking Tuesday in Berkeley, CA; Wednesday in Seattle, WA (at Town Hall); and Thursday outside of Portland, OR (at the Powell’s bookstore in Cedar Hills). Click here for more details.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON April 15, 2024

Peter Higgs versus the “God Particle”

The particle physics community is mourning the passing of Peter Higgs, the influential theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel Prize laureate. Higgs actually wrote very few papers in his career, but he made them count.

It’s widely known that Higgs deeply disapproved of the term “God Particle”. That’s the nickname that has been given to the type of particle (the “Higgs boson”) whose existence he proposed. But what’s not as widely appreciated is why he disliked it, as do most other scientists I know.

It’s true that Higgs himself was an atheist. Still, no matter what your views on such subjects, it might bother you that the notion of a “God Particle” emerged neither from science nor from religion, and could easily be viewed as disrespectful to both of them. Instead, it arose out of marketing and advertising in the publishing industry, and it survives due to another industry: the news media.

But there’s something else more profound — something quite sad, really. The nickname puts the emphasis entirely in the wrong place. It largely obscures what Higgs (and his colleagues/competitors) actually accomplished, and why they are famous among scientists.

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON April 12, 2024

How To Make A Standing Wave Without Edges

I recently pointed out that there are unfamiliar types of standing waves that violate the rules of the standing waves that we most often encounter in life (typically through musical instruments, or when playing with ropes and Slinkys) and in school (typically in a first-year physics class.) I’ve given you some animations here and here, along with some verbal explanation, that show how the two types of standing waves behave.

Today I’ll show you what lies “under the hood” — and how you yourself could make these unfamiliar standing waves with a perfectly ordinary physical system. (Another example, along with the relevance of this whole subject to the Higgs field, is discussed in chapter 20 of the book.)

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON March 25, 2024

CERN’s Giant New Particle Accelerator: Is It Worth It?

About a month ago, there was a lot of noise, discussion and controversy concerning CERN‘s proposal to build a giant new tunnel and put powerful new particle accelerators in it. This proposal is collectively called the Future Circular Collider (“FCC”). (The BBC reported on it here.)

Some scientists made arguments that FCC is a great idea, based on reasoning that I somewhat disagree with. Others said it would be a waste of money, based on reasoning that I again disagree with. But any decision on whether to actually fund the building of the FCC’s tunnel is still some years off, so I was reluctant to get involved in the debate, especially since my nuanced opinion seemed likely to be drowned out amid the polemics.

But I did eventually write something in response to a reporter’s questions, and looking back on it, I think it may be of interest to some readers. So here it is.

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON March 8, 2024

Article 4 on Zero-Point Energy: Mass, Fermions, and a Good Wrong Idea

I have posted my fourth article discussing zero-point energy. (Here are the first, the second, and the third, which covered respectively the zero-point energy of a ball on a spring, a guitar string, and a bosonic field whose particles have zero mass, such as the electromagnetic field.) Today’s article looks at fields whose particles have non-zero mass, such as the Higgs field, and fermionic fields, such as the electron field and quark fields. It presents some simple formulas, and in its final section, shows how one can obtain them using math.

Along the way we’ll encounter the idea of “supersymmetry” and its failed role in the cosmological constant problem. This is a word which (for some good historical reasons) generates a lot of heat. But stay calm; I’m neither promoting it nor bashing it. Supersymmetry is an idea which proves useful as a conceptual tool, whether it is true in nature or not.

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON February 19, 2024

About the Future Circular Collider (FCC)

A number of people have asked me my opinion concerning CERN‘s proposal for a new, larger and more powerful particle physics collider… or rather, two completely different colliders that would operate in the same tunnel:

Phase 1 (two to three decades from now): an electron-positron collider targeted at the detailed physics of Higgs bosons, Z bosons, W bosons and top quarks, using them to search for subtle high-energy phenomena and for rare but dramatic low-energy phenomena;
Phase 2: (five to six decades from now) an exploratory proton-proton collider, like the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] but with a higher collision energy, and therefore capable of making discoveries of particles that either have higher mass or a lower production rate than what LHC can handle.

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON February 6, 2024

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.

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 16, 2023

The Standard Model More Deeply: The Nature of Neutrinos

Earlier this week I explained how neutrinos can get their mass within the Standard Model of particle physics, either by engaging with the Higgs field once, the way the other particles do, or by engaging with it twice. In the first case, the neutrinos would be “Dirac fermions”, just like electrons and quarks. In the second, they’d be “Majorana fermions”. Decades ago, in the original Standard Model, neutrinos were thought not to have any mass at all, and were “Weyl fermions.” Although I explained in my last post what these three types of fermions are, today I want go a little deeper, and provide you with a diagrammatic way of understanding the differences among them, as well as a more complete view of the workings of the “see-saw mechanism”, which may well be the cause of the neutrinos’ exceptionally small masses.

[N.B. On this website, mass means “rest mass” except when otherwise indicated.]

The Three Types of Fermions

What’s a fermion? All particles in our world are either fermions or bosons. Bosons are highly social and are happy to all do the same thing, as when huge numbers of photons are all locked in synch to make a laser. Fermions are loners; they refuse to do the same thing, and the “Pauli exclusion principle” that plays a huge role in atomic physics, creating the famous shell structure of atoms, arises from the fact that electrons are fermions. The Standard Model fermions and their masses are shown below.

(more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON July 22, 2022

Buy The Book

Reading My Book?

Got a question? Ask it here.

Media Inquiries

For media inquiries, click here.

Tag: Higgs

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

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

The Three Types of Fermions

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

Recent Posts

Buy The Book

Reading My Book?

Media Inquiries

Order Waves In An Impossible Sea