In recent talks at physics departments about my book, I have emphasized that the elementary “particles” of nature — electrons, photons, quarks and so on — are really little waves (or, to borrow a term that was suggested by Sir Arthur Eddington in the 1920s, “wavicles”.) But this … | Continue reading
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.) | Continue reading
The idea that a field could be responsible for the masses of particles (specifically the masses of photon-like [“spin-one”] particles) was proposed in several papers in 1964. They included one by Peter Higgs, one by Robert Brout and Francois Englert, and one, slightly later but i … | Continue reading
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 contex … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
A quick note today, as I am flying to Los Angeles in preparation for and other events next week. I hope many of you were able, as I was, to witness the total solar eclipse yesterday. This was the third I’ve seen, and each one is different; the corona, prominences, stars, planets, … | Continue reading
It’s always fun and interesting when a measurement of an important quantity shows a hint of something unexpected. If yesterday’s results from DESI (the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) were to hold up to scrutiny, it would be very big news. We may well find out within a year … | Continue reading
A reminder: tonight (April 3) at 6pm I’ll be giving a public lecture about my book, along with a Q&A in conversation with Greg Kestin, at Harvard University’s Science Center. It’s free, though they request an RSVP. More details are here. Please spread the word! (Next event in Pas … | Continue reading
I hope that a number of you will be able to see the total solar eclipse next Monday, April 8th. I have written about my adventures taking in a similar eclipse in 1999, an event which had a profound impact on me. Perhaps my experience might give you some things to think about that … | Continue reading
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I’m beginning a period of travel and public speaking, so new posts may be a bit limited for a time. (Meanwhile, explore this site’s other offerings!) Tomorrow, Thursday March 28th, I’ll be in Nashville, at Vanderbilt University’s department of physics and astronomy, giving a talk … | Continue reading
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 phys … | Continue reading
Quick note: a powerful double solar flare from two groups of sunspots occurred on Friday. This in turn produced a significant blast of subatomic particles and magnetic field, called a Coronal Mass Ejection [CME], which headed in the direction of Earth. This CME arrived at Earth e … | Continue reading
One of the most challenging aspects of writing a book or blog about the universe (as physicists currently understand it) is that both writer and reader must confront the concept of fields. The problem isn’t that fields are intrinsically that complicated. It’s that they are an unf … | Continue reading
After my post last week about familiar and unfamiliar standing waves — the former famous from musical instruments, the latter almost unknown except to physicists (see Chapter 17 of the book) — I got a number of questions. Quite a few took the form, “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Stra … | Continue reading
A quick note today about developments here at the website. The Reader Resources section of the site is slowly coming into being. These resources will supplement the book Waves in an Impossible Sea, providing answers to questions, opportunities to explore topics more deeply, acces … | Continue reading
Recently, the first completed search for what is nowadays known as SUEP — a Soft-Unclustered-Energy Pattern, in which large numbers of low-energy particles explode outward from one of the proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] — was made public by physicists … | Continue reading
On April 8th, 2024, a small strip of North America will witness a total solar eclipse. Total solar eclipses are amazing, life-changing experiences; I hope you have a chance to experience one, as I did. Everyone else from Central America to northern Canada will see a partial solar … | Continue reading
Already I’ve had a few people ask me for clarification of a key point in the book, having to do with a certain type of unusual “standing wave.” It’s so central to the story that I’ve decided to address it right away. The point that there are two quite different types of standing … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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. In fact, there will soon be a whole wing of this website devoted to the book, which will have And more! [Some parts of this are … | Continue reading
Recently, a reader raised a couple of central questions about speed and relativity. Since the answers are crucial to an understanding of Einstein’s relativity in particular and of the cosmos in general, I thought I’d bring them to your attention, in case you’ve had similar questi … | Continue reading
A lot is happening on this end. Carroll is a professor of theoretical physics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, while Whiteson is a professor of experimental particle physics — a member of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider — at the University of Califor … | Continue reading
How confident can we be that light’s speed across the universe is really constant, as I assumed in a recent post? Well, aspects of that idea can be verified experimentally. For instance, the hypothesis that light at all frequencies travels at the same speed can be checked. Today … | Continue reading
Quick note today: I’m pleased and honored to share with you that the world-renowned journal Science has published a review of my upcoming book! The book, Waves in an Impossible Sea, appears in stores in just 10 days (and can be pre-ordered now.) It’s a non-technical account of ho … | Continue reading
Nothing goes faster than the speed of light, also known as the cosmic speed limit c. Right? Well, umm… the devil is in the details. Here are some of those details: I addressed issue #1 in a blog post last year. Today I’ve just put up an article on issue #2. (This is a part ... Re … | Continue reading
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 f … | Continue reading
My two new webpages from earlier this week addressed the zero-point energy for the simple case of a ball on a spring and for the much richer case of a guitar string; the latter served as a warmup to today’s webpage, the third in this series, which explains the zero-point energy o … | Continue reading
In my last post, I introduced a new webpage concerning “zero-point energy”, the core concept that lies at the heart of the hierarchy puzzle. I have now posted the next webpage in the series, which extends the notion of zero-point energy to a slightly more complex system, an ordin … | Continue reading
A central issue in discussions of particle physics’ present and future is known as the hierarchy puzzle. Although I discuss the hierarchy — its confusing nature and the debates that it generates — in my upcoming book, I do so rather briefly, and so, I’ll be putting up some new pa … | Continue reading
Last night, using the methods I described as part of my check-it-yourself astronomy series, I estimated the distance to the planet Jupiter using nothing more than my eyes, a protractor, and a simple calculator. It took about 30 seconds of measuring something before and after suns … | Continue reading
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: Importantly, any decision to fund this machine lies several y … | Continue reading
For many years, I thought that measuring the distance to the Sun was quite difficult for a non-astronomer. I had the impression that it requires precision measurements, often involving telescopes or information from satellites, and that it was only easy to obtain a minimum distan … | Continue reading
(This is the third post in a series, though it can be read independently; here are post #1 and post #2.) Measuring the distance to the Sun is challenging, for reasons explained in my last post. Long ago, the Greek thinker Aristarchus proposed a geometric method, which involves es … | Continue reading
(This is the second post in a series; here’s post #1.) It’s not too hard to measure the distance to the Moon; the Greeks did it over two thousand years ago. First you measure the size of the Moon, which can be done in various ways; for instance, you can use the occultation (i.e. … | Continue reading
A couple of years ago I wrote a series of posts (see below) showing how anyone, with a little work, can verify the main facts about the Earth, Moon, Sun and planets. This kind of “Check-It-Yourself” astronomy isn’t necessary, of course, if you trust the scientists who write scien … | Continue reading
The Moon has a four-week cycle; it is full every four weeks (actually every 29.5 days). But ocean tides exhibit a two-week cycle; they are large one week and then smaller the next. Specifically, as in Fig. 1 below, ocean tides are stronger (“spring tides”) around New Moon and Ful … | Continue reading
If you live in Canada, Europe or the northern half of the US, keep an eye to the north late tonight and possibly tomorrow night. A series of solar flares occurred on the Sun in the last couple of days, and when their repercussions reach Earth, they may cause quite a storm in the … | Continue reading
I’ll expound below upon the second bullet point, hoping to draw attention to general questions concerning aesthetics in theoretical physics. The Beauty of General Relativity General Relativity, Einstein’s masterpiece, revolutionized human understanding of gravity. It’s widely see … | Continue reading
This year marks a half-century since the discovery that a quantum field theory, now known as QCD (quantum chromodynamics), could be the underlying explanation for the strong nuclear force. That’s the force that holds quarks and gluons inside of protons and neutrons, and keeps pro … | Continue reading
More about tidal forces today (see also yesterday’s post) and the conceptual point underlying Earth’s ocean tides. Here I’ll explain this last observation more carefully. Mere Gravity Isn’t Enough Tides are subtle, and not all explanations found in textbooks and websites are corr … | Continue reading
[This is a tricky one… it’s easy to make confusing statements about Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity), and so I am especially hopeful of getting readers’ feedback on this subtle issue, to make sure what follows is 100% clear and correctly stated.] Astronauts in a … | Continue reading
Additional supplementary material for the upcoming book; your comments/corrections are welcome. This entry has to do with how Newton realized that weight and mass aren’t the same thing — that the pull of Earth’s gravity depends on how far you are from the Earth’s center. Here I’l … | Continue reading
The press is full of excitement today at the news that anti-matter — hydrogen anti-atoms, specifically, made from positrons and anti-protons instead of electrons and protons — falls down rather than rising up. This has been shown in the ALPHA experiment at CERN. But no theoretica … | Continue reading
Personally, I think that popular science books ought to devote more pages to the issue of how language is used in science. The words scientists choose are central to communication and miscommunication both among researchers and between scientists and non-scientists. The problem i … | Continue reading
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 st … | Continue reading
Continuing with the supplementary material for the book, from its Chapter 2. This is in reference to Galileo’s principle of relativity, a central pillar of modern science. This principle states that perfectly steady motion in a straight line is indistinguishable from no motion at … | Continue reading
Since the upcoming book is basically done, it’s time for me to launch the next phase of the project — the supplementary material, which will be placed here, on this website. Any science book has to leave out many details of the subjects it covers, and omit many important topics. … | Continue reading