Conversations About Science with Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler
Today a reader asked me “Out of the quantum fields which have mass, do any of them also have weight?” I thought other readers would be interested in my answer, so I’m putting it here. (Some of what is discussed below is covered in greater detail in my upcoming book.)
Before we start, we need to rephrase the question, because fields do not have mass.
Today’s post is for readers with a little science/math background:
Last week, I explained, without technicalities, how the various elementary forces of nature can be inferred from the pattern of lifetimes of the known particles. I did this using an image, repeated below, that organized the particles by their masses and lifetimes. I’ll add more non-technical posts on the Standard Model in the coming days. But today’s post is a tad more technical, using dimensional analysis (a physicist’s secret weapon) (which I demonstrated here, here and here) to explain key features of the image: the red line, the blue line, and the particles at the upper left, as well as why there is a high-energy and a low-energy version of the weak nuclear force.
In my last post I introduced you to dimensional analysis, an essential trick for theoretical physicists, and showed you how you could address and sometimes solve interesting and important problems with it while hardly doing any work. Today we’ll look at it differently, to see its historical role in Einstein’s relativity.
Appropriate for General Readership [Apologies: due to a computer glitch, the figure in the original version of this post was not the most up-to-date, and had typos, now fixed.] On Tuesday, the New York Times Editorial page ran an Op-Ed about dark matter… and although it could have been worse, it could certainly have been … Read more
Personal and professional activities require me to take a short break from posting. But I hope, whether you’re a novice with no knowledge of physics, or you’re a current, former, or soon-to-be scientist or engineer, or you’re somewhere between, that you can find plenty of articles of interest to you on this site. A couple … Read more
One of the challenges for a person trying to explain physics to the non-expert — and for non-experts themselves — is that scientific language and concepts are often frustratingly confusing. Often two words are used for the same thing, sometimes words are used that are fundamentally misleading, and often a single word is used for two very different but related concepts. You’d think we’d clear this stuff up, but no one has organized a committee dedicated to streamlining and refining our terminology.
A deeply unfortunate case, the subject of today’s post, is the word “mass”. Mass was confusing before Einstein, and then Einstein came along and (accidentally) left the word mass with two different definitions… both of which you’ll see in first-year university textbooks. (Indeed, this confusion even extended to physicists more broadly, causing the famous particle physicist Lev Okun to make this issue into a cause celebre…) And it all has to do with how you interpret E = mc² — the only equation everybody knows — which relates the energy stored in an object to the mass of the object times the square of the universal speed limit c, also known as “the speed of light”.
Here are the two possible interpretations of this equation. Modern particle physicists (including me) only use the first interpretation. The purpose of this post is to alert you to this fact, and to point you to an article where I explain more carefully why we do it this way.
Posts have been notably absent, due mainly to travel with very limited internet; apologies for the related lack of replies to comments, which I hope to correct later this week. Meanwhile I’ve been working on a couple of articles related to the nuclei of atoms, part of my Structure of Matter series, which serves to … Read more
My rather hasty, breathless and inconsistent summaries (#1, #2 and #3) of last week’s talks at the excellent Higgs Symposium (held at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the new Higgs Center for Theoretical Physics) clearly had their limitations. So I thought it might be useful to give a more organized overview, with more … Read more