Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel talks to Matt Strassler about how everything is vibrating, and his new book "Waves in an Impossible Sea" (Part 2)
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Hello everyone. Quick note that this episode is part two of my conversation with theoretical physicist Matt Stressler about his book Waves in an Impossible Scene. If you haven't yet heard part one, pause this episode and go back listen to the first part. This stuff is hard enough without listening to it backwards, so do the first things first. Pause this episode and come right back. We'll wait for you. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe, in which we dig deep into the nature of space and time and particles, in which we want you to understand our new ideas about how the universe works and be bewildered with us about everything we don't understand about the universe. Today we have an unusual episode, and then it's part two. This is the second half of my conversation with Professor Matt Stressler. In the first part of the conversation, we reviewed relativity. How waves traveled through media, but light waves seem to travel through empty space. How you can measure the speed of most waves like sound, relative to their medium, but you can't measure the speed of light relative to space, only to other things in space. Matt is painting us a careful and insightful picture of how everything is made out of waves, and why that's crucial to understanding the last, the craziest, the most recent wave to be discovered, waves in the Higgs field. So here is part two of my conversation with Matt. Give us a glimpse of how your mind works, how you see the universe as being built out of waves, and why you think this is so important for understanding the Higgs field.
I'll take you through that in a few steps, but the most important to start with is we have to deal with words. And this is a theme of the book because I think it's a theme of human affairs in general, and it's certainly a theme of scientific communication.
Oh absolutely, And physics is terrible about words. I mean, we use names for things totally inappropriately. Quarks have color and flavor, Like, what are we talking about here? Why don't we just invent new words to describe new things? Right?
And we used to? I mean, you know this is in some sense of mid twentieth century development. But that said, in order to think about things ourselves, we often borrowed words from English, and particle is one of them. Wave is another force, even theory. We have lots of words that are part of physics dialect that we have taken from English. And we humans, just in ordinary language, are spectacularly good at using a single word with many definitions, right. We all know. You go to the dictionary and you look up simple words and there's twelve definitions of the same word. And yet in language we communicate with each other switching definitions all the time. We may use the same word in one sense in two different ways, and it doesn't bother us. Well, this is true of physicists as well. We have our dialect some words have multiple meanings. We switch back and forth without a problem. But of course, when you are switching dialects, when you're trying to communicate physics to a non physics speaking English speaker, just as when you try to switch from French to English and you're trying to use words that have multiple meanings without even thinking about it, you may easily confuse your listener. And we do this all the time. So there are famous phrases like an electron is part particle, part way. It's a way part of the time, and it's a particle part of the time. And aside from the fact that that could mean many different things, and over history it has meant at least two different things to classes of people. It's really problematic that the word particle has multiple meanings and the word wave has multiple meanings, and the most common meanings in English are not the ones that we are using here. So we will not get anywhere if I don't spend a minute on those definitions. So I'll start with wave. We'll talk about waves for a while, because waves are such a wonderful phenomenon. They underlie so many aspects. Obviously, I'm the sound I'm using to communicate and the radio waves that we're using to send all this information back and forth. And also they're the fundamentals in music, just surrounded by music in our modern world, in the best and we're senses and we should take a moment to think about what we mean. And one thing we do not mean is the thing that everybody means when they go to the beach. Right, you go to the beach. Oh, that is a great wave. I want to surf that one. Ooh, here comes a big wave. Okay, what do we mean? We mean, here comes a big crest in the water, a big high point in the water, and it is operated from the next high point by two low points. And we call that crest a wave. That is not what we are talking about here. We are not made from single wave crests. No. Yet. The word wave as used in science is a rich concept. There are waves of many different shapes and sizes. For example, I'm speaking now making sound waves, or if you're a recording engineer, you will say I'm making a sound wave singular, So a wave can be a very complicated shape. But to keep things focused, let's talk about the simplest waves. And the simplest waves are the ones that you make when you sing, you sing a note, or you make a pure tone on a musical instrument, and then you are making a wave which consists of a whole bunch of high points and a whole bunch of low points, a whole bunch of crests and troughs equally spaced, and it may be a long series of them.
So imagine like a sign wave extending all the way from negave infinity to positive infinity along the X axis or something.
If you like your tenth grade eleventh grade math, yes exactly, or if you don't. It's just the ripples that you would make in a pond. If you put your hand in the water and moved it up and down regularly, you would get a set of ripples that would move outward. That's a wave in science, rather than a set of waves. So it's more what a beach gore would call a wave set or a wave train. And now even that has a subtlety which I'll come back to you. But of the types of waves that we encounter, which scientists talk about. There are two types, both of which are really important and which have slightly different properties. And the first one is the one that you would talk about when you're talking about sound waves most of the time from my voice to your ears. Those are traveling waves, traveling meaning as you would guess, they're moving in a certain direction at a certain speed. And traveling waves include sound, they include ocean waves, they include the seismic waves across the earth. They include light waves which cross the universe, and they include the things we call particles and when they're moving around. And the other type of wave that we encounter is standing waves. And standing waves have crests and troughs that don't go anywhere. They just sort of vibrate in place. So a classic example would be the way in which a guitar string or a violin string vibrates. Pluck it. It goes up and down and up and down and up and down. There's a crest where it bends upward, and then a moment later it's a trough where it bends downward, and it goes up and down and up and down and up and down. Or maybe the air vibrating in an organ pipe. When you make the organ pipe sound, what you're doing is you're making the air inside ripple back and forth where it's more dense in one place and then less dense, and it goes back and forth and back and forth in a regular repeating fashion. But it's not actually moving outside the organ pipe. It's staying in the organ. So we have these two different types of waves, traveling waves which move around, standing waves which they put And in the case of traveling waves, as I described, it's not a single wave crest, it's a whole set of them. With standing waves, it can be any number of crests, including just one. So it's still not a wave at the beach because the wave of the beach is moving. But it can be as simple as a wave at the beach in the case of a guitar string, for example. So we have these distinctions, which we're going to have to keep track of for a minute, between traveling waves and standing waves. And what I want to emphasize is how important both types of waves are in music. You can't have music without both of them. And the reason is that what you do when you play the guitar or play a piano or play an organ is you're creating a standing wave somewhere on the instrument. You're making a wave in a part of the instrument that doesn't have to move anywhere. It's staying on the instrument. The instrument is not moving. There's a piece of it that's vibrating back and forth, but it's vibrating in place.
So the guitar string has a standing wave on it exactly.
But that standing wave then creates traveling waves in the air, and those sound waves then move outward away from the instrument and eventually reach the ears of listeners. So you need both of them. You need something to happen on the instrument, and then you need that whatever it is to create waves that can go somewhere and be heard. And this brings up the most important distinction between these two types of waves for the purposes of particle physics, aside from the fact that one of them goes somewhere the other doesn't, which is that traveling waves can vibrate at any frequency you like and standing waves cannot. So what do I mean by that, Well, when you pluck a guitar string, assuming you're not putting your hands on it, anywhere. Just you just take the guitar string as it is and you pluck it, or you take a violin and string and you pluck it, or you take a string on a piano and you hammer it. You will get one home and it's the same tone every time. And so a musical instrument like a piano or like a guitar piano is a better example because with guitars, we put our hands on the instrument, shortened the strings of it gets complicated. But a piano, we just hit the strings. We only get the notes we get. We can't get notes in between, because each string gives you a particular note. And so you know, there are eighty eight notes on a piano keyboard, and we have eighty eight sets of strings, one for each.
Note, and each one is a different length, etc. And that's what gives them the different.
Notes, different length and tension. But yes, each one has a particular frequency associated with it. And the reason for this is a phenomenon known as resonance. It's the same reason that when we strike a pendulum or make a pendulum swing back and forth, as in the old pendulum clocks of previous generations, they vibrate with a predictable frequency, and this predictability and this single mindedness, this resonance phenomenon, is what allows us to make musical instruments of most types, because most musical instruments, the human voice being an exception, are not designed to make all possible notes. They're designed to make some set of them. But fortunately this is not true of traveling waves, which can have any frequency. And if you think about it, that's essential in music. Suppose that air and its waves could only carry specific frequencies, well, then you'd have to match your instrument to the air, or the sound just wouldn't go anywhere whereas in fact, musical instruments of any frequency, or if you sing a note, no matter what note you see, it will always travel through the air because traveling waves are free to go, they're flexible. So that's a key distinction that standing waves have to do with resonance and traveling waves have to do with non resonant phenomena and can have any frequency they like. They said, it's key for music, but it's also key for the universe.
To us for the universe, how do this concept of standing waves and traveling waves help us understand what we're made out of and how everything works.
There's certain things about light and light waves, which are essential features of all the waves of the universe, but there's also a thing they don't have. Light waves are always traveling waves, or precisely, lightwaves in empty space are always traveling waves. You can do things in materials to make them do other things, but that's not really critical. I'm trying to focus our attention on what happens in empty space. And lightwaves can cross empty space just fine, no matter what their frequency. Radio waves, microwaves, gamma rays, X rays, and visible light. They all cross the universe at the speed of light, and they have no problem with that, and they can have any frequency you like, all the colors that we can see, and then all the other frequencies that our eyes cannot detect but our scientific instruments can. So light waves are of a certain sort, and there are a couple of other types of waves that are part of the cosmos. Gravitational waves are another example that have this property. They're only traveling lives. But the waves that we are made from that ultimately we call electrons or the quarks out of which protons and neutrons are made. These waves can both travel and stand. And that's connected with the fact that the particles that we call electrons can move and they can also stop, whereas the particles that are associated with light, which we call photons, they cannot stop in empty space. They always are traveling.
So we talk about this on the podcast sometimes and we say that particles can have energy of motion, like kinetic energy they're moving through the universe, but they can also have energy in their mass. So electron just sitting there has energy inside of it. It's equals mc squared, but that photons only have energy of motion for example.
Right now, we have to be careful about language again because the word mass is also ambiguous. We are specifically talking about what scientists referred to as rest mass, which is the mass that's intrinsic to an object. You will also hear people say that mass increases with speed. They are talking about a different type of mass.
Right, And we had a whole podcast episode about relativistic mass and why it's actually just to stand in for energy, and so people should go dig into that if they're curious. But here we're talking about mass as being the energy of an object at rest.
That's right, and so photons don't have any and effectively that's why they can never stop. But electrons and quarks and most of the different types of particles that we know about so far in the universe, most of them do indeed have the ability to be at rest, and they have a certain amount of energy even when they're at rest, and that energy, via equals mc squared, translates into what we call their mass, which is the difficulty for anyone to make them go from at rest to moving at a certain space. It's a form of stubbornness. If a rock has mass, it's the statement that you're going to have to make an effort if you want to throw it across the room.
I hear you trying to avoid using the word inertia. You're explaining all the same concepts where you're not using that word.
Why is that, well, inertia has, like most words in English, has a couple of different meanings. Right, inertia is certainly a notion of the difficulty of making something stop. In English, right, if something has inertia, you mean that I'm not going to be able to change its direction or slow it down very much. It's going to continue doing what it's doing. Via inertia. But what scientists mean by inertia is subtly different from that. It's not exactly the same. So it's another word which requires a discussion. And the unnecessary discussions are ones that I don't avoid because they're not worth having. But we only have so much time, and there's only so many pages in a book. We have to pick our battles carefully, so I decided not to pick that one.
All right. I have a bunch more questions for Matt about how the universe works and how we can really understand the Higgs field correctly. But first, let's take a quick break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price, your thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mintmobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used Mintmobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear I can recommend it to you, So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts.
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My mental impage of an electron is probably still from back in my navy days when I learned electronics. A group of small little marbles surrounded by a one or more spinning marbles in an orbit around the center, looking more like a nuclear power plant logo or something.
I see an electron as kind of like a ripple, almost like in space itself, in a certain way that you can squeeze closer together in anyone direction, so you can look at it closer and closer in anyone direction, but as you squeeze it, it gets bigger in the other directions, keeping you from like localizing it. I used to think of it as a particle, but that didn't super make sense to me because you can always localize it down smaller, so it would have no volume. So I think of it as a ripple in something, though I'm not really sure what.
Well, I don't know, like a lot fuzzy blob that's right where I see it, except it's not where I see it, because something about observing something changes it, but it's not really there anymore.
And here's what people said when I asked them what they thought about a quantum field ripple.
I would have to say, the best way to describe for me is like looking at a piece of lasagna with ripples and at lengthwise that's the only thing I can think of, like a.
Wave in a pond, but without the vertical more of a horizontal side side.
In a lot of ways, it's the same thing as a particle to me. It's really just a wave that's sort of localized in one space.
And I think about quantum fiota. I see damage of a three dimension of great space moving like a wave.
It's like the geometry of existence shifts. It doesn't look like it normally does, and you can almost see through to the other side of it.
Pretty much as you would have a ripple in a pond if you threw a stone in so concentric series of waves heading away but getting less in magnitude, but trying to imagine that is going out in three dimensions as opposed to two.
Well, actually it's a black space surrounded by a water like wave small one.
That is.
So if you imagine an infinite plane and then someone takes I don't know around, you know, lollipopper sucker, and this plane is somehow elastic, are made of rubber, and you push up on that plane, except that it only wants to deform locally. It doesn't stretch out evenly across the width of the plane. I sort of envision it as a large plane with like a sort of three D parabolic shape pushed up into it.
I guess I kind of picture a sheet that has been pulled taut and then shake it like a salt shaker.
I picture a quantum field being kind of like a transparent sphere, and then a ripple in it would be like a little light bulb or something in the middle flicking on.
So quite a variety of answers here, Matt, What do you think about these mental pictures of electrons versus quantum fields. Do any of these aligned with the way you think about it?
Well? I love this range of answers because I think it points out a range of fascinating challenges that both non scientists have and trying to understand what physicists are saying, and physicists have and journalists are trying to convey the stuff have in trying to come up with a language that is clear enough, and of course some of the things we've been talking about, the difficulty of understanding the word wave as scientists use it and don't use it is one of the difficulties because if your image of an electron is as a single crest in water, well that may or may not work very well. For example, if your image of a photon, a particle of light is as a single crest. If your mental image somehow takes a light wave that consists of many crests and it divides it into its individual crests, well then it's confusing because why would a photon if it's just a single crest have a frequency or a wavelength. Wavelength has to do with how far apart the crests are. You end up in puzzles that you can't pull yourself out of. And then we have the problem of the word particle. We haven't talked about it yet. So let's spend a moment on that. In English, we have all sorts of things that we would refer to as a particle, a dust, particle, it's a tiny little thing that it looks a little bit like a ball or something, you know, ball like but small, A particle of sand, it's a grain, it's a little thing. You could put it in your hand, it'll just sit there. And that is a concept of particle which is reinforced for those who do take physics in freshman year, that's the way it's talked about. For those who even go on to junior year quantum physics, that's still kind of the way it's talked about. Even though there's some wavelike things that come in when we talk about particle, we still sort of envision this thing with a position. And if you've read about quantum physics just as a layperson, and you read what Neils Bore, the great quantum physics pioneer, had to say about the electrons, he said, sometimes they're like particles, sometimes they're like waves. And what did he mean. He meant that it's an object with a position. But come nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, slowly but surely, the math stopped talking about electrons that way. And the weird thing is that the language of physicists took much longer to change, and even the way I was taught, because first I learned junior quantum physics, in which we think of particles as things with positions and moving around. Maybe you can't specify how they move around as well as you did, but a particle is an object with a position that moves around on some path. That is not what we mean when we talk about elementary particles, not since the nineteen fifties or so, and instead we mean something much stranger and much less familiar. And so I'll come back to that, but you need to step away from the notion of particle that's in your head, and a notion which is hard to step away from because, as a number of listeners sort of referred to, there is this cartoon of an atom, which is a part of our culture. It consists of a blob at the center made of neutrons and protons, with these electrons going around in orbits outside, and the electron is drawn as a dot, usually blue. Okay, it's not blue, but it's also not a ball or a dot. That's not the right way to think about it, and this is critically important if you want to understand why an electron has mass. Why does an electron that is at rest have any energy if it's just the dot, why would there be any in there? Where would it come from? You know, that's a fundamental puzzle. And understanding that electrons are waves in the nineteen fifties language of what is the mass of what is known as quantum field theory is where we get our modern notion of what electrons are and what their mass consists of. And in that picture, electrons are not to be thought of as dots going around on paths. Now, quantum physics of the nineteen twenties already taught us that, but even the word particle as we use it in quantum field theory should not be thought of in that way. So let's now take a step back with that rather cryptic remark and look at what the language of quantum field theory really tells us about electrons and photons, because we should kind of do them in parallel. Remembering there's this difference that electrons can be standing waves or traveling waves, but photons are easier to think about because we know something about them in life, and our eyes absorb them, let's kind of do them a little bit in parallel. So the real surprise about light is that it doesn't behave like we'd expect waves to behave. And yet another way, and one way to talk about that is to talk about sound. We have this naive notion which makes perfect sense that if you speak at a certain volume, you could speak at half that volume and then the sound would be quieter, or you could speak at half of that volume and then it be even quieter, and half of that and be even quieter, and you could keep going, you know, sort of a Zeno's paradox kind of thing. Divide in half and then divide in half. Fine, and you could just speak in a quieter and quieter voice as far down as you like. And you could have the same idea about a beam of light like a laser, like a laser pointer, that you could, you know, sort of turn it down so it's half as bright, and turn it down so it's half as bright again, and half is bright again every time, we just get a dimmer beam, and you could go down as far as you like to infinity. It's not true, and it's similar to the idea that if you were a person who'd never seen paper before, and you were given a gigantic stack of paper six feet high, you might not initially realize that, oh, this thing is actually made of a large number of sheets of paper. It's so big you don't recognize it. But of course if you took the thing apart, you would realize, oh, this stack of paper is made from a huge number of individual sheets. In a similar non obvious way, a light wave and again that's a series of crests and troughs corresponding to a laser beam, can be pulled apart into individual little miniature waves and again, wave meaning a series of crests and troughs stacked together to make something bright, but made from a huge number of things that are extremely dim. And so you can't take your bright thing and make it half as bright and half as bright and half as bright again, any more than you could take your stack of paper and divide it in half, and divide in half, and divide and half forever, you would eventually reach individual sheets and you couldn't go any further. Well, that's the way it is with laser light. It's not obvious, but you can break laser ight up in half and again and again, and you will eventually find yourself with something indivisible in individual indivisible flashes of light, which we call photons. And it was Einstein who proposed this without really fully understanding yet how it would work. But he's responsible for this idea too. So that's our first image of what photons are. But remember, particle physicists call them particles. But you see, they're not dots. They're like laser beams, only much dimmer.
Right, they're flashes. They're not dots.
They are particulate in the sense of indivisible, but they are not particle like in the sense of dust boats or sand grains. They don't have that shape. That's really critically important. And what I've just told you about photons is also true of electrons. They are not dots. They are waves of minimal height, minimal brightness. You could say, all of course, we understand the word brightness for light. The word we use is intensity. In the scientific context, we would say light has a certain intensity, and there's a minimum intensity that can have. And electrons, in a sense, are waves in something with a minimum intensity. And the question, now, though, is all right, but the light waves, they're always traveling. With electrons, they could be traveling or they could be standing what's the difference. And as you make an electron slow down, which you could do with a battery nothing special, you can ask yourself, well, how is the electron changing shape? Does it still look like a long series of crests and troughs. And the slower it is, the more it looks like just one or two crests and troughs. And by the time you slowed it down, it really does look a lot like the ripple on a guitar string, just one crest standing still. It's still vibrating, though like a guitar string, it's going up and down. In some sense, it's diving back and forth. It's doing something that's I mean, exactly how you visualize it is a bit of a matter of taste. But what's for sure is it might be standing still, but that doesn't mean it's not doing anything. It's a standing wave, it's a vibration. It's a standing wave. So standing waves don't go anywhere, but they're still doing something. And that picture, then electron, rather than being a dot, is a vibrating thing, is critical to understanding what it is and how it works. And in particular, unlike a dot, which if it's moving, would have motion energy, but if it's stopped, doesn't see dive energy at all. A vibrating thing has energy even when it's not going anywhere. Ah, that's where the E comes from. That gives us the mass the mc squared, it's the energy of the vibration, and that's generally true. That's fundamentally how particle physics works. The particles that have mass can be slowed to a stop, at which point they are standing waves. But they are not standing and doing nothing. They are standing and vibrating, and they have a certain amount of energy associated with them. So that is why the particles of nature have a variety of specific masses. They're standing waves. And remember, traveling waves kind have any energy you like, but standing waves tend to have a specific energy associated with the idea of resonance.
So electron is a little vibration of the electron field, and when it's at rest, it's vibrating at the resonant frequency of the electron field, and the muon fields has its own resonant frequency, and the quark fields have their own resonant frequency, and that's what gives all these particles different masses.
That's the bigger picture, right. So up to this point, I've really only explained that electron is a resonant, vibrating thing, but I haven't told you what it's a vibration of. And that does bring us back to the question that the very beginning when I suggested that you know, we're made of waves, but I avoided the question of what we are waves in. Yeah, and I said, well, maybe we're waves of the universe in some sense, and scientists don't know what we are waves in in some sort of deep sense, but we do know something. We understand how these waves work. And the language that we use is the language of fields, which are things that are present everywhere in the universe, the most famous being the electric field or the magnetic field, which scientists put together into the electromagnetic field that you treat them as a single unit. And waves in the electromagnetic field are what we call light. And there are again these quote particles, namely, the dimmest possible wave in the electromagnetic field is what we call a photon, a quote particle of light. So that gives us a conceptual package where Okay, there's something called the electromagnetic field. That's an aspect of the universe. We don't really understand what it is, but we understand how it works. We know that it has waves, and those waves have the dimmest possible flash associated with them, the dimmest possible wave, and those waves are what we call particles. Although, as I emphasize the book, the word particle is not a very good word, and there is another word available, which once I reach that part of the book, I only use that word afterwards, which is the word wavecle And I like it because it emphasizes this thing is really wavelike and not dust particle like. But it also brings forth the notion that it's particulate. It's somehow a bit of a wave, and yet it's sufficiently unfamiliar as a term that it carries less cultural and conceptual baggage. It leaves your brain fear to understand what it might actually be. And so this little bit of a wave is a good concept.
I think, yeah, And I'll say that reading your book it made it a at the same time easier to understand because you invented some of your own words for clarity. It also made it more of a challenge because it was sometimes harder to connect it to existing established ideas and concepts that people might have in their heads. But I think it's beautiful as a sort of like standalone structure. Like I'm going to start from nothing and build up a bunch of concrete ideas and piece them together for you. You follow along that road, it really does all come together. All right, we're gonna get even deeper into this, but first we're going to take a quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of greeky yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are US. Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times. The same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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We're back and I'm talking to Professor Matt Stressler, author of Waves and an Impossible See. So bring it together for us now, because we could talk for hours, but I want to get our listeners to a place where they can understand how this wavecle picture of the universe and wavecles as like either standing waves or traveling waves or both, helps us understand the Higgs boson, and then why this new understanding can be consistent with the principle of relativity.
Okay, so let's summarize kind of where we've got to, which is a long way. We went from electrons being these blue dots and now suddenly they are these standing vibrations. They have energy associated with their vibration, and it's really important to understand the electron is really the vibration. It's not that an electron is vibrating. The electron is the vibration.
Right.
There is this thing which is a part of the universe. We don't understand it very well. We call it the electron field. It's analogous to the electromagnetic field, whose ripples are associated with photons. There is this thing we call the electron field. We understand good math for it, we don't understand what it is, but its vibrations are what we call electrons, and those electrons have a particular frequency when they are standing. There is a resonance associated with the electron field that determines how fast a stationary electron vibrates, and that in turn determines how much energy it has and therefore determines how much mass it has. This connection between resonant frequency, energy, and mass, which comes out of Einstein's core ideas, is what gives us a link between resonance and mass. But now, what about this resonance, what is resonating? Well, again, what's resonating is the thing that's vibrating, the electron field itself. We don't understand what it is, but we understand what it's doing. It is vibrating in a resonant way, somewhat as a guitar string when plucked, will vibrate at a particular resonant frequency. So when you take a guitar or piano and you play all its notes, you get various frequencies. When you take the universe and you make it vibrate in all the ways it likes to vibrate, you get the particle masses. There's a direct link between the frequencies at which the universe likes to vibrate, and the masses of the elementary particles. And now that gives us a chance to guess what the Higgs field is actually doing. The Higgs field is changing the frequencies of the other fields. By tuning a guitar, it is able to change the electron field's resonant frequency, and therefore it can change the mass of the electron. Now a guitar player would be able to change all the frequencies independently, right if you tune anyone's string independently of all the others. The Higgs field can't do all that. It just changes the frequencies of all of the elementary particles together, starting from zero and moving them up to where they are today.
But they all get different values.
They all get different values, and the key to why they get different values is related to how strongly the Higgs field interacts with a particular field. So, for example, the electron field. The electron has a relatively small mass, and that reflects the fact that the electron field interacts relatively weakly with the Higgs field, and so when the Higgs field does its thing, it doesn't change the electrons frequency that much. But the top quark, which is the particle whose mass is largest among all the particles known so far, that is a vibration of the top quark field. We're really inventive with our names, right. Top quark is a vibration of the top quark field. The top quark field interacts very strongly with the Higgs field, and therefore the top quark field has a high resonant frequency, and therefore the top quark has a high mass.
So the Higgs is changing how all these fields vibrate, changing their resonant frequencies, which really changes the masses of what we're calling particles or wavecles. There's no molasses or snow involved at all.
That's right. In fact, if you think about it, what the Higgs field is doing is really not affecting particles directly. It affects the other fields, changes their properties, and then it's just a consequence of quantum physics that the waves in those fields come in these chunks that we call quote particles or wavehicles. And then it's a consequence of relativity that the energy of their vibration has something to do with mass equals mc squared. The direct link between the mass of the electron and the Higgs field doesn't really exist. You have to go through these other pieces, and that is why, in order to explain how the Higgs field works, I had to explain both quantum physics to some degree and relativity to some degree in the book before we could get to that. So, in a way, the book was about trying to make sure some aspects of relativity were clear, some aspects of waves were clear, some aspects of quantum physics were clear, and then bringing them all together so that we could understand what wavecles are. And at that point explaining what the Higgs field does is not so difficult. Just change the frequency of a field. Changes the frequency of a field, then it changes the way it vibrates, and that's going to change the mass of the corresponding particle. That's all. But you have to first understand that electrons aren't like thustar articles, and they don't get their mass through any mechanism that particles could possibly have. They have to be vibrating objects in order for that to make any sense.
And photons, you're saying, are just traveling waves, which means there is no standing wave for a photon photons have no resonant frequency because the Higgs doesn't interact with the electromagnetic field.
Yeah, to be more precise, the electromagnetic field has no resonant frequency, and correspondingly, it has no standing waves in empty space, and therefore photons don't have any rest mass. And yes, one reason for this, let's say, is that the Higgs field does not directly interact with the electromagnetic field. But it's important that not only the Higgs field that we know doesn't do that, but there aren't any other Higgs like fields that get in the way either. Now, why is this? Why is it that the electromagnetic field has this property whereas the electron field doesn't. Why is it that the electromagnetic field doesn't interact with the Higgs field and its particles remain massless while the electron field does. We don't know. We don't have an understanding of the pattern of which feels the Higgs field interacts with, or, more precisely, we have partial understanding. We understand why Higgs field of the sort that we have in our universe can't interact with the electromagnetic field, but we don't know why we had to have a Higgs field of that particular sort as opposed to higgsield of some other sort. And we certainly don't know why the electron fields interaction with the Higgs field is weak while the top quarkfield's interaction with the Higgs field is strong. We don't understand that pattern at all, and not that there haven't been many attempts to understand it. I, as a theoretical physicist, have tried a few times, many others have, and we have lots of great ideas, but we have no idea which one of these ideas, if any, is correct, And we keep hoping that particle physics experiments will give us some clues, and up to now, unfortunately they have not.
And it's really crucial because if the photon had even a tiny amount of mass, it wouldn't have this property that it's only a traveling wave, which would mean that you could catch up to it, you could see photons at rest. You could have like a handful of photons the way you could have a handful of electrons, and you could have them at various velocities, which would mean that observers wouldn't have to see the speed of light always as the speed of light it would feel like a very different universe.
It certainly would feel very different because there would be situations in which light and radio waves from a single event would arrive at different times. Right, there would be distortions of things that you see. I mean, you can sort of imagine if sound waves didn't all arrive at the same time, if the speed of sound weren't basically a constant. Just think what would happen to music. You play a piano and then the low notes arrive late and later than the I mean, it would make a messag thing.
The cellists have to play ahead of the violinists.
Speaking would be tough, right, you know, it would be a very different world. And so it is an important feature of our world. Not only that speeds of different frequencies of light would be different, but there's another consequence which in a way might be even more important depending on how much mass photons would have, which is that the range of electric and magnetic fields would not be as large. The connection is not obvious, and the reason has to do with the following that the way that the Higgs field changes the resonant frequency of another field is it makes it stiffer, It makes it more difficult for it to vibrate, but even more generally, it makes it more difficult for it to change to vary. And so when you have an electrically charged object, it can make in our universe an electric field that goes out into the stars. A planet can have a magnetic field that goes way out beyond where the planet is, and that's very important for us because the magnetic field of the Earth deflects particles from the Sun that are flung out during solar flares, and it protects us from the dam that such particles would do. But if the photon had a mass, or more precisely, if the electromagnetic field had a resonant frequency, that in turn would mean that the electromagnetic field would have more difficulty spreading out and magnetic fields wouldn't spread as far, and so you could end up with a situation where the magnetic field of the Earth might not reach out beyond the surface of the Earth, and then we would not be protected from these solar storms. So you know, we'd survive because evolution is that way, right, Evolution would find a way to create life that could survive all of that. Right, we wouldn't, but we are certainly dependent upon this particular feature of the universe, and so you know that's one of the many ways in which the details of particle physics affect the universe on a macro scale.
Well, I think my last question for you is to try to interpret what this all means. You've painted a picture of the universe as filled with waves, and in your book, near the end, you write the universe rings everywhere in everything, which I thought was very poetic. But it makes me wonder why is this? Like, why is it that the mathematics of waves, which are very simple and beautiful, are everywhere. Why are waves all over our universe, both fundamental and emergent at so many different scales. What does that say about the universe that waves are everywhere?
Well, I think maybe that question has two parts to it. The first is why are waves everywhere? Even in the macroscopic universe? Why do we see ocean waves and seismic waves, and waves and rubber and if you look closely, as find waves in metal, If you strike a bell, there's waves inside the way. Why is that? And that turns out to be a consequence of a simple idea, which is that if I have a substance which is fairly uniform and spread out like a chunk of metal, then it is very easy to cause waves to occur. Let's take the example of just water. Maybe that's simplest. If you take a huge bucket of water or a big pond or something, why is it so easy to get ripples in it? Well, it's because it's so easy to do something to one little piece of the water. Put your hand in the water in one place, but that is then going to have an impact on the bits of the water right around it, which in turn is going to have an impact on the parts of the water right around them. You do something locally to the water, but then the water can bring that effect outward further and further away from where you pressed on the water or hit the water, whatever it is you did to it. And that propagation of an initial effect through this uniform material almost automatically leads to waves. The math of waves drops out of the equations, no matter what their details.
So as long as you have a material where information doesn't propagate instantly, and you're going to get propagation of information and those are waves.
Yeah, and it needs to be a uniform material because if it isn't uniform, if it's just an agglomeration of lots of different things, then as things move out, they'll move out of completely different speeds depending on exactly what they run into. But when you have a single material like water or air, the speed at which things propagate is constant or near constant, and so as things propagate out, they do so in a nice uniform way, and that allows you to get ripples, where you get waves which are simple and remain simple as they travel. So that's true. In any material that's uniform, you almost always can get waves of a certain type. So that's why they're ubiquitous around us in ordinary materials. Now, if you think the universe is like a material, it's certainly a uniform, leaving aside places where there's actually stuff. But if you go out into the deep space, by whatever space is, it's the same in all directions. It's the same in all places. And we know this because we can measure what the laws of nature are by looking at stars or looking at other things in space, and the stars are the same basically all across the universe. We don't see big differences, so we know the universe is remarkably uniform, and so to the extent it's a uniform material like thing, the fact that it has waves in it is no surprise. But we don't know why it's a uniform thing, and so at some level there's still plenty of why questions that are out there for which we don't know answers. That's kind of where we are.
Wonderful Well, tell us again the title of your book and where listeners can find it if they'd like to understand even deeper all of these concepts.
Well, the title I came up with, and I'm delighted that the publisher accepted it is waves in an impossible see, beautiful waves being us the stuff we're made from, and the impossible sea being this space we live in. That's kind of like a material and kind of isn't. And the book is available at any of your independent local bookstores, and of course at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all the other monsters that are happy out there to show you the full range of books that are available in the world. But yes, it's going to be widely carried in bookstores and you should definitely check it out.
Wonderful Well, thanks again very much, for coming on to talk to us about all these incredible concepts and sharing your particular view of the universe with all of us.
Thank you so much, Dan, It's been really fun, all right, interesting conversation there, sort of like a new way to look at the world and to look at physics and the nature of reality.
Almost. Yeah, I hope that it gives listeners and readers of the book a new way to think about these objects that form the foundations of our whole world. That when you take your body apart and imagine that it's made out of atoms and protons and electrons, that you think about those particles a little bit differently. Maybe you replace your high school concept of tron is a tiny little blue ball with a little ripple in that electron field, and have a better understanding for what's rippling there and why the electron has mass, and how it's all connected to the Higgs Boson.
Well, I was waving in and out of the interview a little bit. So then the idea is that everything is a wave. So it was wave, would you say, is a better word to describe what's going on at the fundamental levels.
Math's vision is that everything is a wave. A wave in these things we call quantum fields that we don't really understand. But if you dig into what it means for a quantum field to do some waving, it can give you a better understanding of what motion is, of what mass is, of what energy is, and how the Higgs boson gives those particles mass, not by filling the universe with molasses that slows things down, but by changing how those fields resonate, which really is what mass is all about. So standing wave resonance and a quantum field.
Mmm.
Interesting.
Well, another cool idea out there, and it may be a revolutionary way to look at the universe on this journey to figure out how everything works.
That's right, Matt Strassler is not just a super smart theoretical physicist. He really does have a gift for accessible explanations of deeply important concepts using intuitive ideas. Sometimes he makes up his own words like wavehicles, because he wants to avoid the baggage of words you've already heard. But if you listen carefully and follow along, I really think it can give you a deeper understanding of quantum fields.
All right, Well, check out his book Waves in an Impossible Scene. We hope to enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, this word, Instant, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the universe is a product of iHeartRadio. More podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
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