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
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. He … | Continue reading
For those of you who subscribe to New Scientist, their magazine's cover story this week is a feature entitled "THE AMAZING THEORY OF (ALMOST) EVERYTHING". In the feature is an overview of the Standard Model (which describes all known fields and particles, excepting gravity, with … | Continue reading
[A post for all readers.] NASA describes the space-based Webb telescope, the next step beyond the Hubble space telescope, as “a powerful time machine with infrared vision that is peering back over 13.5 billion years to see the first stars and galaxies forming out of the darkness … | Continue reading
Common sense about nature, though sometimes useful, is mostly wrong. Errors of intuition pose obstacles for students who are learning science for the first time. Worse, once these students learn first chemistry and then Newtonian-era physics, the new intuitions they gain for the … | Continue reading
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 h … | Continue reading
I have just submitted a book, entitled Waves in an Impossible Sea, to my publisher, Basic Books (a trade press well known for Gödel, Escher, Bach, as well as numerous other science and math titles.) If all goes smoothly, it will go on sale in March 2024 or thereabouts. Now that i … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Once we clear away the hype (see the previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4), and realize that no one is doing anything as potentially dangerous as making real wormholes (ones you could actually fall into) in a lab, or studying how to send dogs across the galaxy, we are left with a question. … | Continue reading
By now the word is widely out that Tuesday’s fusion announcement was less of a news flash (as I initially suggested) and more of a overheated news flicker. The politician-scientists who made the announcement that they’d put 2 Megajoules of energy into a pellet of nuclear kindling … | Continue reading
The fusing of small atomic nuclei into larger ones, with the associated release of particles carrying a lot of motion-energy, is the mechanism that powers the Sun’s furnace, and that of other stars. This was first suspected in the 1920’s, and confirmed in the 1930s. Nuclear fissi … | Continue reading
A wormhole! What an amazing concept --- a secret tunnel that connects two different regions of space! Could real ones exist? Could we --- or our dogs --- travel through them, and visit other galaxies billions of light years away, and come back to tell everyone all about it? Well … | Continue reading
A break from all these wormholes and strings; let’s take a moment to look at the sky. In the US, sadly, most of the country will be under cloud, but for those who aren’t, you have a spectacle tonight, at around 10-11pm Eastern Time in the US, roughly 5-6 am UT in Northern Europe. … | Continue reading
what are these wormholes that some claim to be trying to make or, at least, simulate? The Maldacena equivalence implies that an Einstein-Padolsky-Rosen entangled state of two quark/gluon/etc field theories without gravity, suitably chosen, is physically equivalent to an Einstein- … | Continue reading
With a headline like that, you probably think this is a parody. But in fact, I’m dead serious. Not only that, the discovery was made in the 1960s. Due to an accident of history, the physicists involved just didn’t realize it back then. That said, there are profound problems with … | Continue reading
Well, now… Don’t get me wrong. What they did is pretty cool! I’d be pretty proud of it, too, had I been involved. Congratulations to the authors of this paper; the methods and the results are novel and thought-provoking. But the hype in the press? Wildly, spectacularly overblown! … | Continue reading
Sadly, the LunaH-MAP mini-satellite (or “CubeSat”) that I wrote about a couple of days ago, describing how it would use particle physics to map out the water-ice in lunar soil, has had a serious setback and may not be able to carry out its mission. A stuck valve is the most likel … | Continue reading
A post for general readers: The recent launch of NASA’s new moon mission, Artemis 1, is mostly intended to demonstrate that NASA’s incredibly expensive new rocket system will actually work and be safe for humans to travel in. But along the way, a little science will be done. The … | Continue reading
Two of the most widely reported stories of the year in particle physics, (1) CDF experiment: the W boson mass is higher than predicted in the Standard Model, and (2) the "NNPDF collaboration": there are unexpectedly many charm quark/anti-quark pairs in the proton, both depend c … | Continue reading
This has been an exceptional few days, and I’ve had no time to breathe, much less blog. In pre-covid days, visits to the laboratories at CERN or Fermilab were always jam-packed with meetings, both planned and spontaneous, and with professional talks by experts visiting the labs. … | Continue reading
The blog’s been quiet recently, thanks to a series of unfortunate events, not the least of which were my first (known) Covid-19 infection and an ongoing struggle with a bureaucracy within the government of Massachusetts. But meanwhile there is some good news: it seems I will some … | Continue reading
There's been a lot of chatter lately about a claim that charm quarks are found in protons. The evidence is by no means entirely convincing yet, but it might be sort of true. But it sounds confusing. A charm quark has a larger mass than a proton does! Hmm. Well, here's a relate … | Continue reading
Now comes word via the Wall Street Journal that power shortages, rather than mere budget considerations, may require CERN to cut back its substantial energy usage, in order to stabilize the power grid. The LHC, which just restarted in July after a couple of years of upgrades, is … | Continue reading
Hi all, and welcome! On this site, devoted to sharing the excitement and meaning of science, you’ll find a blog (posts begin below) and reference articles (accessible from the menus above.) The site is being upgraded, so you’ll see some ongoing changes; if you notice technical pr … | Continue reading
A post for general readers: Einstein’s relativity. Everybody’s heard of it, many have read about it, a few have learned some of it. Journalists love to write about it. It’s part of our culture; it’s always in the air, and has been for over a century. Most of what’s in the air, … | Continue reading
For general readers: A week or so ago, I wrote about my skepticism concerning the claim of a “detection” of the photon ring that’s widely expected to lie hidden within the image of a black hole. A nice article in Science News appeared today outlining the current controversy, with … | Continue reading
For readers who want to go a bit deeper into details (though I suggest you read last week’s posts for general readers first [post 1, post 2]): Last week, using just addition and subtraction of fractions, we saw that the ratio of production rates R = Rate (e+ e— ⟶ quark anti-quark … | Continue reading
A post for general readers who’ve heard of quarks; if you haven’t, you might find this article useful: Yesterday I showed you that the usual argument that determines the electric charges of the various types of quarks uses circular reasoning and has a big loophole in it. (The up … | Continue reading
A post for general readers who’ve heard of quarks; if you haven’t, try reading here: The universe has six types of quarks, some of which are found in protons and neutrons, and thus throughout all ordinary material. For no good reasons, we call them up, down, strange, charm, botto … | Continue reading
Ten years ago today, the discovery of the type of particle known as the “Higgs Boson” was announced. But the particle was first produced by human beings in 1988 or 1989, as long as 34 y… | Continue reading
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… | Continue reading
Here’s a tip. If you read an argument either for or against a successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in which the words “string theory” or “string theorists̶… | Continue reading
Last time we looked at the potential for the Standard Model if it just had U(1) gauge symmetry or it just had SU(2) gauge symmetry. [A gauge symmetry is a symmetry of the equations we use, bu… | Continue reading
Back before we encountered Professor Richard Muller’s claim that “According to [Einstein’s] general theory of relativity, the Sun does orbit the Earth. And the Earth orbits the Su… | Continue reading
It’s commonly taught in school that the Earth orbits the Sun. So what? The unique strength of science is that it’s more than mere received wisdom from the past, taught to us by our elde… | Continue reading
(An advanced particle physics topic today…) There have been various intellectual wars over string theory since before I was a graduate student. (Many people in my generation got caught in the… | Continue reading
Once you’ve convinced yourself the Earth’s a spinning sphere of diameter about 8000 miles (13000 km), and you’ve estimated the Moon’s size and distance (diameter about 1/4 E… | Continue reading
Having confirmed we live on a spherical, spinning Earth whose circumference, diameter and radius are roughly 25000, 8000, and 4000 miles (40000, 13000, and 6500 km) respectively, it’s time to… | Continue reading
I’ve received various comments, in public and in private, that suggest that quite a few readers are wondering why a Ph.D. physicist with decades of experience in scientific research is spendi… | Continue reading
In my last post I gave you a way to check for yourself, using observations that are easy but were unavailable to ancient scientists, that the Earth is rotating from west to east. The clue comes fro… | Continue reading