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OF PARTICULAR SIGNIFICANCE

Conversations About Science with Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler


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WELCOME!

November 25, 2023September 5, 2022 by Matt Strassler

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.)

Keep an eye out for my new book, “Waves in an Impossible Sea,” due out in March
2024. Here’s what some of my colleagues are saying about it. You can pre-order
it at independent bookstores (such as Harvard Book Store, Powell’s, and many
others), or at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Read more

Categories Uncategorized 6 Comments


IS EINSTEIN’S THEORY OF GENERAL RELATIVITY TRULY ELEGANT?

November 6, 2023November 6, 2023 by Matt Strassler
 * Quote: . . . the Higgs field exhibits the most inelegant of the known laws
   governing fields and particles. There’s an amusing tendency for those who
   tout beauty to ignore this, as though it were an inconvenient family member,
   and to focus instead on Einstein’s elegant theory of gravity. Yet even that
   theory has its issues.
 * Endnote: Einstein’s theory of gravity is amazingly elegant as long as one
   ignores the puzzle of “dark energy,” which would have been easier to do had
   it been exactly zero, and as long as gravity is a very weak force, as its
   weakness leads to extremely simple equations. In string theory, Einstein’s
   equations become much more complex, and the elegant simplicity of the math
   shifts to the level of the strings themselves . . . perhaps.

I’ll expound below upon the second bullet point, hoping to draw attention to
general questions concerning aesthetics in theoretical physics.

Read more


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Categories Astronomy, black holes, general relativity, History of Science,
Quantum Gravity, String Theory Tags astronomy, general relativity, gravity,
string theory 37 Comments


A HALF CENTURY SINCE THE BIRTH OF QCD

November 2, 2023 by Matt Strassler

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 protons and neutrons clumped together
in atomic nuclei. This major step in theoretical physics occurred just a couple
of years after it was discovered that a similar quantum field theory for the
weak nuclear force (which includes W bosons, a Z boson and a Higgs boson) is
mathematically consistent.

With these two breakthroughs came the sudden and unexpected triumph of quantum
field theory, emerging as the basic mathematical and conceptual language for
understanding the cosmos. It came after two decades in which most experts were
convinced that quantum field theory was inconsistent, and only a stepping stone
to something deeper.

This week I am in New York City attending two attached scientific meetings, both
focused on QCD and other quantum field theories that share its key property,
known as “confinement.” One meeting is hosted by New York University, and the
other, the Annual Meeting of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD
Strings, by the Simons Foundation. Many luminaries who have spent time on this
subject are here together, ranging from David Gross, who co-invented the subject
(and was a winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize), to brilliant graduate students who
are hoping to reinvent it.

Read more


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Categories Particle Physics, Quantum Field Theory, String Theory Tags flux
tubes, gluons, particle physics, QCD, quantum field theory, quarks, strings 23
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WHAT [REALLY] CAUSES OUR TWICE-DAILY OCEAN TIDES?

October 27, 2023October 27, 2023 by Matt Strassler

More about tidal forces today (see also yesterday’s post) and the conceptual
point underlying Earth’s ocean tides.

 * (Quote) Because gravity dwindles at greater distances, the Moon’s pull is
   stronger on the near side of the Earth and weaker on the far side than it is
   on the Earth’s center. This uneven pull stretches our planet’s oceans
   slightly, resulting in a small bulge of water, not much taller than a human,
   both on the Earth’s side facing the Moon and on the opposite side, too.
 * (Endnote) To explain why gravity leads to a water bulge on both sides of the
   Earth is too complex for a footnote, and I’d rather not repeat the most
   commonly heard explanations, which are misleading. One can see a hint of the
   cause as follows: if one drops a water balloon in constant gravity, it will
   fall as a sphere, whereas if it is pulled more strongly at the bottom than at
   the top, it will stretch into an oval as it falls.

Here I’ll explain this last observation more carefully.

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Categories Astronomy, general relativity Tags astronomy, general relativity,
gravity, tides 27 Comments


THE IMPOSSIBLE COMMENTARY: IS GRAVITY A FORCE? IS IT AN ILLUSION?

October 26, 2023October 26, 2023 by Matt Strassler

[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.]

 * (Quote) On Earth’s surface, we are roughly 4,000 miles from Earth’s center.
   But if you ascended another 22,000 miles, where you’d find the GOES weather
   satellites that monitor Earth’s weather patterns, you’d find your weight (but
   not your mass!) reduced to one-fortieth of what it is on Earth… And if you
   traveled out into deep space, far from any large object, you’d weigh
   virtually nothing. Yet all the while, your body’s mass—the difficulty I would
   face if I tried to speed you up or slow you down—would never change.
 * (Endnote) Confusingly, astronauts orbiting Earth inside nearby space stations
   appear to float as though weightless. From Newton’s perspective, they are not
   truly weightless; if they were, they’d coast, leaving the Earth’s vicinity
   and moving rapidly into deep space.
   Instead, they and their spaceship are pulled by gravity into a common orbit
   around the Earth. Since they travel on the same path as their container and
   as the camera which films them, they seem and feel weightless. (This subtle
   issue is turned on its head in Einstein’s view of gravity.)

Astronauts in a space station seem to float, as though they are weightless. Are
they truly weightless? Or are they only apparently weightless?

The same issues arise for people in a freely falling elevator, accelerating
downward with ever greater speed. They will feel weightless, too. But are they?

Newton would have said they are apparently weightless, subject to gravity but
all falling together along with their vehicle. A naive (but instructive!)
reading of Einstein might lead us to say that they are truly weightless… that
the gravity that Newton claims is present is a pure illusion, a fictitious
force. But a precise Einsteinian would say they are almost but not quite
weightless — and the lack of perfect weightlessness is a clue, a smoking gun in
fact, that they are indeed subject to gravity.

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Categories Astronomy, general relativity Tags astronomy, Einstein, general
relativity, gravity, Newton 48 Comments


THE IMPOSSIBLE COMMENTARY: NEWTON, GRAVITY, AND THE SPEED OF THE MOON

October 24, 2023 by Matt Strassler

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.

 * (Quote) Newton knew right away that if the force of gravity were as powerful
   out by the Moon as it is at Earth’s surface—if the Moon accelerated toward
   the Earth at the same rate that your dropped keys do—then motion and gravity
   would be wildly out of balance [and so the Moon would have fallen and crashed
   into the Earth.]
 * (Endnote) To avoid disaster, the Moon’s orbital speed would need to be 40
   miles per second, leading it to circle Earth twice a day.

Here I’ll explain why this is true, using a little math. (If you already know
something about Kepler’s laws of planetary orbits, additional relevant
discussion can be found in this post from 2022.)

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Categories Astronomy, History of Science Tags astronomy, gravity, Newton 6
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ABOUT THE NEWS THAT ANTIMATTER DOESN’T “FALL UP”

September 27, 2023 by Matt Strassler

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 theoretical physicist is surprised. Today
I’ll explain one of many … Read more


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Categories Atomic Physics, general relativity, Quantum Field Theory Tags
antiparticles, gravity 14 Comments


BEYOND THE BOOK: THE AMBIGUITIES OF SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE

September 27, 2023 by Matt Strassler

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 is that all language is full of
misnomers and contradictory definitions, and scientific language is no
exception.

One especially problematic scientific word is “matter.” It has multiple and
partly contradictory meanings within particle physics, astronomy and cosmology.
For instance,

 * (Quote) It’s not even clear that “dark matter,” a term used widely by
   astronomers and particle physicists alike, is actually matter.
 * (Endnote) Among possible dark matter particles are axions and dark photons,
   neither of which would obviously qualify as “matter.”*

Why might one not view them as matter?

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Categories Astronomy, Dark Matter, Particle Physics Tags astronomy, cosmology,
DarkMatter, language, matter, particle physics 8 Comments


MASS, WEIGHT, AND FIELDS

September 23, 2023September 23, 2023 by 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.

Read more


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Categories general relativity, Particle Physics, Quantum Field Theory Tags
gravity, mass, QuantumFieldTheory, VacuumEnergy, weight 44 Comments
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Depiction of proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Copyright CERN.


RECENT POSTS

 * Is Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity Truly Elegant?
 * A Half Century Since the Birth of QCD
 * What [Really] Causes our Twice-Daily Ocean Tides?
 * The Impossible Commentary: Is Gravity a Force? Is it an Illusion?
 * The Impossible Commentary: Newton, Gravity, and the Speed of the Moon
 * About the News that Antimatter Doesn’t “Fall Up”
 * Beyond the Book: The Ambiguities of Scientific Language
 * Mass, Weight, and Fields


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