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.
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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:
Ten books to keep our minds active and up-to-date! We all have some reading to do…
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.
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ON September 26, 2024
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.
ON September 24, 2024
Things have been extremely busy! I have
If any of these might interest you, here are the details!
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ON September 20, 2024
Back in April 2022, the CDF experiment, which operated at the long-ago-closed Tevatron particle collider. presented the world’s most precise measurement of the mass of the particle known as the “W boson“. Their result generated some excited commentary, because it disagreed by 0.1% with the prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics. Even though the mismatch was tiny, it was significant, because the CDF measurement was so exceptionally precise. Any disagreement of such high significance would imply that something has to give: either the Standard Model is missing something, or the CDF measurement is incorrect.
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ON September 19, 2024
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