Matt Strassler

Professor Matt Strassler has had excellent coverage of the events at LHC, including detailed explanations. For anyone interested in reading: https://profmattstrassler.com/

… all it takes to make positrons is particle collisions at an energy greater than 1.2 MeV, something, pulsar magnetic fields can do easily. To make antiproton takes 1500 times more. There is a great hope, however, that (i) dark matter interacts with itself, (ii) concentrates in certain places (say around black holes) and (iii) dark mater annihilation makes ordinary matter particles we can see. But who knows? Maybe there is the same asymmetry between dark matter and anti-dark matter so that annihilation stoped happening after the Big Ban, but maybe some dark matter particles are their own antiparticles. See https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity-space-astr…

> The law of conservation of momentum was created before quantum mechanics was discovered. The law of conservation of momentum is a fundamental part of quantum field theory; without it, we don't have particle accelerators, nor any understanding of particle decay. I strongly suggest, well, everything on this site, but in particular, https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basi… and https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basi… . It's the best review of modern physics I've seen anywhere that is both accessible to a lay-but-interested reader, and aligns correctly with the actual math.

If you're willing to dive in a bit, Matt Strassler has a nice blog aimed at the lay reader. His mini-series on the structure of the proton is quite excellent: https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfa…

I am not a scientist, but I can't stop me thinking that an old radio engineer would think about that article: "They are sending information by modulating polarization (indeed in a weird manner), so why the fuss?" Or if you prefer, I am thinking some people are over interpreting what a "particle" means. BTW I like your comment, it reminds me the blog: https://profmattstrassler.com

If you want a good read on this topic that isn't pop-sci crap, (and also not months late) I suggest: https://profmattstrassler.com/2016/03/18/the-diphoton-excess-improves-…

Strassler has a lot of articles of this kind on his site, highly recommended. Check the articles menu on his homepage. There's a nice series on dark matter. There's also this page with various links: http://profmattstrassler.com/about/about-this-site-and-how-to-use-it/

don't ever read beyond mass media headlines for HEP; just go here instead: http://profmattstrassler.com

Useful links here: http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/11/12/first-news-from-kyoto-conferen… http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=5264 Talk is here (follow password instructions): http://kds.kek.jp/getFile.py/access?contribId=61&sessionId=25&…

CERN apparently said the following in a press release, which puts some substantial limits on what's actually going to be announced: "A seminar will be held at CERN on 13 December at which the ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs." I got that from Matt Strassler's blog entry below (which is worth reading): http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/12/07/about-those-rumors-that-the-hi…

Many tens of thousands of people have studied quantum chromodynamics (and related experimental results) enough that they understand there is a scaling problem in the proton: the more energy you use to probe a proton the more internal structure is revealed. We're orders of magnitude away from being able to probe proton structure at scales where "the problem of time" arises in any practical sense. You haven't studied QCD or much high-energy physics, but you can improve your understanding of the proton starting with this excellent recent article by Matt Strassler: https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/07/22/the-standard-model-more-deepl… > "our assumption of time: that it's a level straight stream that flows forward" That's not an assumption anyone who's studied physics would recognize, except (being generous) to the extent they read about the history of physical equations before about 1910 which were parametrized by "absolute time", and which have been superseded by relativistic equivalents. There is no single "assumption" about time; time is treated very differently in different candidates for a fundamental physical theory (and differently again in theories that aren't fundamental; non-fundamental means that although bulk behaviour might be completely and accurately described, it emerges from microscopic behaviour not dealt with in detail by the non-fundamental theory -- examples include Navier-Stokes and Bloch's…

It's very helpful to use natural units (or QCD units) when working with particle physics. Set the speed of light, the reduced Planck's constant, and Boltzmann's constant equal to 1. For QCD units also set the mass of the proton equal to 1. Then compute all the other units based on this. (There are several other systems of "natural" units also in use. All of them set the speed of light to 1, but differ in what other units are included.) A particular advantage to intuition comes with the famous e=mc^2. Since c is 1, and 1^2 is 1, e=m. Energy and mass are completely equivalent. Strong force binding energy in a proton is mass. The only bit that's not straight from binding energy is from the Higgs mechanism, which is where the mass of the electron (and the quarks themselves) comes from. Matt Strassler has an excellent explanation of that: https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basi…

As usual I think that Woit's blog post is unnecessarily polarizing. If you decide to read his post then I would recommend you also read the excellent comment by Marty Tysanner on the same page. Also, sigh. If you dig deep into the dark corners of the internets then I am sure that you can find fake anything. Focus on the beauty and the truth, people. For example: [1] LIGO continues to work beautifully, as evidenced by its second detection of gravitational waves back in June: http://news.mit.edu/2016/second-time-ligo-detects-gravitational-waves-… [2] A fun but highly speculative 'bump' in the LHC data, which will probably go away but is fun to think about: https://profmattstrassler.com/2016/10/21/hiding-from-a-nightmare/ [3] New precision results from a nice little experiment done 'on the side' at CERN: https://press.cern/press-releases/2017/01/cern-experiment-reports-sixf… [4] Or just a very accessible overview of particle physics in 2016: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/2016-year-in-particle-physics

It's a good question that I wish I could answer. For me looking into String Theory's status as scientific/not-scientific is a good way to learn that the Popperian view of falsifiable==scientific is a bit too simplistsic and that classifying things as scientific/not-scientific may not even be a productive activity. It's just not that simple. In the meantime it's generally best to listen to scientists talk about it to get a feel for its standing: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28pzc1/string_theory_what… A good quote from that thread which may answer your question: "Anyways, my point is that String Theory is not just some whacky idea "what if everything was strings" that exists in a vacuum, but is rather a very natural and conservative extension of Quantum Field Theory to a more general and less arbitrary framework." And here's a blog post (series of posts) linked from that discussion which may also help: http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/09/23/quantum-field-theory-string-th…

People keep referring to Scott Aaronson like he changed his mind, and it's pretty clear he didn't. He just didn't want to be the Chief Naysayer anymore; he has more important things to do and frankly that shouldn't be his calling card. I think the only part of "general-purpose quantum computer" D-Wave can claim is the "computer" part. They have not proven that any part of their annealing is "quantum". They have pretty epic lithography/fabrication skills, and are barreling ahead without any regard for coherence. They also have just an insane number of control lines, so there's some innovation there. But their net worth becomes negative if you count the bad press for quantum computing in having a charlatan claim they have 1024 qubits and are "500,000" times faster at solving Sudoku. Other fields are having this PR problem too, where even careful program reviews are getting brutalized by the PR news cycle (see recent dark-matter experiment: http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/04/03/ams-presents-some-first-result… -- forgive the typography)

Quantum Interference 1: A Simple Example: https://profmattstrassler.com/2025/03/18/quantum-interference-1-a-simp…

Basically it's because the relevant structures are somewhat fragile. Matt Strassler has a good post about "why does everything we care about move so slowly compared to the cosmic speed limit?" (https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/03/why-is-the-speed-of-light-so-… and the answer is, it's because we're made of atoms, atoms are held together by the electromagenetic force, and that's only so strong, if things moved way faster then collisions would tear atoms apart. But of course life is dependent not only on atoms, but also on electromagnetic bonds much weaker than the ones that hold atoms together. So this limits how hot it can get.

The book Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler goes deep into explaining precisely this. https://profmattstrassler.com/waves-in-an-impossible-sea/

It says that it's not necessary for this specific question : https://profmattstrassler.com/2025/01/10/no-the-short-range-of-the-wea… > quantum physics plays no role in why the weak nuclear force is weak and short-range. (It plays a big role in why the strong nuclear force is strong and short-range, but that’s a tale for another day.)

This particular article has a prelude on the same website https://profmattstrassler.com/2025/01/10/no-the-short-range-of-the-wea…

Fortuitously the author of the posted article also has a series on the Higgs mechanism (with the math, but still including some simplifications): https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basi…

This debate reminded me Matt Strassler's recent post that most of the data observed in the accelerators are thrown away [1]: So what’s to be done? There’s only one option: throw most of that data away in the smartest way possible, and ensure that the data retained is processed and stored efficiently. I thought that was strange. It's like there is too much data and our technology is not up to it so let's throw away everything that we cannot process. Throwing data "in the smartest way possible" did not convince me. [1] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-data-collectio…

Direct link to Part 2: https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/03/why-is-the-speed-of-light-so-…

Part 2: [1] It's kind of an anthropic principle argument.[1] If the fundamental constants had substantially different values, the resulting universe would be boring. All the mass collapsed into one black hole, or evenly distributed as fundamental particles. Or atoms don't work. Or stars don't work. This leads to the usual problems - many-worlds theory, gods, etc. Strassler hasn't gone there, but others have. [1] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/03/why-is-the-speed-of-light-so-… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

This is a very good author. "What's a Proton, Anyway?" is also both educational and entertaining [https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfa… "Ok, then, what’s a hydrogen atom? It is the simplest example of what physicists call a “bound state” — the word “state” basically just meaning a thing that hangs around for a while, and the word “bound” meaning that it has components that are bound to each other, as spouses are bound in marriage. In fact, the image of a married couple, especially one with one spouse weighing a lot more than the other, is probably the one you want."

I can also add this set of articles from Matt Strassler which explains it all with surprisingly simple math. It really is quite understandable and I wish more pop-sci discussions of the subject threw in a few equations now and then to explain such stuff. https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basi…

I'm not thinking of anything as formal as that, more in terms of trying to get a handle on the difference between the words in ordinary language. Metaphors, analogies and models often help us understand things, but they can mislead unless they are, to a reasonable degree, models of the thing we we are trying to understand. The physicist Matt Strassler calls the latter 'phibs', and has written a recently-published book motivated by one in particular, an attempt to explain the relevance of the Higgs field. https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field-is-nothin…

https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/09/09/protons-and-charm-quarks-a-le… It's explained better here. tl;dr; is that they are virtual particles and don't have the same mass as a "real" charm quark.

The big bang has two meanings in common usage. Some people think it means "the beginning of time". But it can also refer to the time immediately after inflation. [1] [1] https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity-space-astr…

Wow! What a rabbit hole finding a proton is not just 3 quarks!. Suggesting these 2 articles: 1] Experimental results of proton collision as of 2013 (3 quarks is an observation, but for low energies) : https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/81190/whats-inside-a-proto… 2] Another article from the same author (Matt Strassler). Suggesting to read his answers for the comments of: Harry Bostock, Bob Anderson, and the 2 top comments of "aa. sh." (for more history and Neutron decay) https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfa…