WavesInImpossibleSea

Waves In an Impossible Sea (Matt Strassler)

Definitely learned a lot.
The fact that waves of light and undulations of space share remarkable properties (travel at same speed and cannot be overtaken) suggests that the two might be profoundly related. Perhaps they are different aspects of the same underlying structure?
Why is there a single speed restruction that applies to all objects ? Perhaps electrons and quarks too are a part of the same structure that incoporates light, gravitational waves, and space.
It seems as thought we are made from waves of the universe. We are aspects of the universe, as seismic waves are aspects of rock and sounds waves are aspects of the air.
The Higgs phib has a number of variantss. "Theres this substance, like a soup, that fulls the universe; thats the Higgs field. As objects move thorugh it, the soup slows them down, and that how they get mass."

Its remarkable how such a short story can be wrong about so many things at once – wrong about "soup", wrong about mass, wrong about motion.

At stake is nothing less than the principle of relativity.

The Higgs phib butchers the relativity principle. This make the attempted explanation Higgs role in nature completely counterproductive : it makes it more confusing.

One of the most important lessons of human history: Common sense is a thoroughly unreliable guide to the workings of the natural world. No matter how strong our intuition may be, we must be prepared do let it go.
Each minute the Earth travels (relative to the galaxys center) a distance comparable to its diameter.
The foundations of physics remained stable for 2 centuries, until Einstein realized that even the time that elapses between one event and another is a matter of perspective. Despite this revolutionary idea, the central principle that steady motion is undetectable is preserved. This core precept of relativity may well be the oldest law of physics never to have been rejected or significantly improved.
Your motion is undetectable because it has no perspective-independent meaning in our universe.
Relativity explains why airplanes take off into the wind whenever possible. For the wings to generate enough lift for flight, a plane needs a minimum of airspeed. Into the wind gives more airspeed for less groundspeed.

The same goes for landing: when flying into the wind the plane can stay afloat with a much lower ground speed and therefore needs less runway to come to a stop.
The property called mass is a form of tenaciousness, of stubbornness in the face of change. An objects mass is an intransigence that hinders any attempt to alter the objects motion – to accelerate.
A false friend is a work in another language or dialect that sounds like one you know, making it seem as thought it needs no special definition.
"Electrons are massive particles" In English, this claim is bizarre; an electron is exceedingly tiny, so the sentence seems ridiculous. In physics dialect, where massive is redefined to mean "possessing nonzero mass"
The Higgs field is responsible for an intrinsic property of particles, not for a relative one.
Historically, the discovery of photons was a conceptual turning point. It raised the question: Why does anything have rest mass ?
Our universe is less elegant but more vibrant that a potential universe in which nothing had mass.

It is rest mass that makes it all possilble: the atoms, stars, roses, books and brains of our living universe.
One of the most important skills young physicists aquire is a sense of when and how to be imprecise.
100,000 is trh enumber of words in this book.
The length of a typical human cell is ~100,000 times smaller than the height of a human. (We have ~1e13 - 1e14 cells)
Atoms are 100,000 times smaller than a cell. (The number of atoms in a human body is 1e28
What we experinece as ordinary existence is an illusion created for us by our brains. It is based on the interaction of our senses with the physical world, not on the physical world directly. The illusion has to help us survive in the real world, so it had better have something to do with reality; it needs to inform us when theres a fruit tree or a hungry tiger nearby. But beyond that, there is no reason that it needs to be scientifically accurate. The reason that many objects in the world seem opaque and impenetrable is this: for most practical purposes in human life, they act as though they are. But while evoution focuses on what is practical, physics is about what is real, and there's no reason they should agree.
A neutron star: has the mass of an ordinary star, but it is much smaller than the Earth. This shows that ordinary material can be dramatically compressed, serving as additional evidence of atoms remarkable emptiness.
A nucleas is about 100,000 smaller than an atom
Protons and Neutrons are far more complex than atoms. Each one is made from an army of particles that rush around at or near the cosmic speed limit, pulling vigorously on one another. This type of pull, which is as fundamental in nature as the other forces is called the strong nuclear force.
The simple 3-quark picture, and old idea from the 60s, is the proton phib.
As of 2023, we cannot go down another factor of 100,000. Using the LHC, we have learned that elementary particles are at least 100,000 times smaller than an atomic nucleas.
(Large)cities -> human –> cell –> atom –> nulcear –> LHC (edge of knowledge) 100 km
The photon of sunlight gets its energy from the Suns inner furnace, a natural nuclear reactor, that can convert protons into neutrons. In the end, the enrgy we obtain from food orginates with subatomic partilces.
An objects rest mass is the quantity of energy inside, not the quantity of matter inside. Its not that energy and mass are the same thing, or equivalent in general. Its more specific than that: the rest mass of an object arises from the energy stored within it.
The lesson of E = mc² is that intransigence, the stubborness that resists changes in motion, comes form energy.
The reason that a protons rest mass is much larger than the sum of its quark rest masses is that the particles whizing around within it carry a lot of motion energy.
The idea that we ourselves are made from waves is confusing at best. We never enoucnter ordinary objects that are obviously made out of waves.
Frequency and amplitude keep out of each others way.
One field can surve as the environment for another. Thats the main role of the Higgs field: to serve as an environment for a host of other fields. When switched on it shifts their resonant frequencies.
Traveling waves arent related to resonance, so you can choose and control a traveling waves frequency as well as its amplitude.
Thought a wave is, in a sense, made from its medium, it has an almost independent existence. The medium can do one thing while a wave in the medium does something completely different.
Rainbow: Have you ever wondered why they are so narrow ?
The sky is not blue: Its appears blue to the human brain. In reality the visible light coming fomr the sky is a rich blend of wave with all the frequencies of the rainbow.
Our eyes arent transparent windows that show us things as they are; instead our visual systems creat images for us.
An important reason that deep space is not empty space is that it is filled with microwave photons from the big bang.
Sound is both a wave in air and a wave in the wind. Those are two perspectives on the same thing Media perspective vs field perspective
When it comes to light waves, and almost all other wave of the universe, the field-centric perspective is the only one we currently have. Not only have we never observed the corresponding medium, but we're not even assured of its existence. That why physicists have no choice but to adopt the field-centric view, incomplete as it may see … and indeed may be.
With GR Einstein gave us our fist concrete example of how an elemetary field could be described as a property of a medium. (gravity as warped space) Its still the only one.
Although empty space is apparently a medium that serves as the universe fabric and brings about gravity's pull and gravitational waves, the principle of relativityrequires that it be undetectable and forever remain so.
Gravitational waves have to travel at c, otherwise you could violate the principle of relativity !
Empty space and luminiferous aether refuse to give us any hint of our motion through them, indeed any direct hint that they exist at all.
The problem of theluminiferous aether troubled physicists for much of the 19C. On the one hand, as the Earch spins and orbits the Sun it carries us through the luminiferous aether without losing its atmosphere or slowing down. That suggest that the aethers interaction with ordinary matter is very weak. And yet the interaction of light waves with ordinary material isnt weak at all; that why most objects are opaque. How does the medium, when inert, manage to leave ordinary material alone, even though its ripples do note?
Einstein proposed that light could be a field without a medium. This was logically consistent mathematically. Ten years later, Einstein reconsidered his views. By then hed realized that empty space is the gravitational fields medium and that it has all the quirks of the luminiferous aether, including amotionality and the "nightmare" property that you can catch or escape something moving at c. Empty space is to the gravitational field as the luminiferous aether is to the electromagnetic field. This led Einstein to conclude that the luminiferous aether probably does exist after all.

Einsteins gravitiaional field in the full four space dimensions would appear as multiplefields: a gravitational fields (bending), an electromagnetic field (leaning) and one more field (compression) often called the radion.

Theres no experimental evidence for this idea, and it still might be the case that the electromagnetic field is a Cheshire Cat field, with no medium. In fact, all the elementary fields might be Cheshire cat fields, wiht the gravitational field the long exception. Perhaps Einstein was right the first time
Empty space doesnt actually exist ? This may well sound ludicrous But remember the story of color – how real it seems to be, even though its largely manufactured in the human brian.

We have a remarkably clear picture of what the known elementary fields do. Despite this we have barely any concept of what they are – assuming thats even a question we should be trying to answer.
Plank introduced his constant while trying to explain how hot objects glow, he suspected it had to do with how atoms work. Einstein's proposal was that this formula tells us how light works. That was bold and suprising, physicists thought they already knew how light works.
Even thoguht electrons spread around their atomic nuclei and in a sense do occupy the whole atom, they dont really make it full.
The electrons vibration energy is what gives it rest mass. All vibrating things have energy, even if they're not going anywhere. So an electron even when stationary, has to have energy.
For an elementary particle, rest mass represents its energy of being which in turn is set by the resonant frequency of its field. This explains why rest mass has everything to do with resonance. Fields that can resonate have particples with rest mass.
How can every single electron hvae exactly the same rest mass ? Resonance.
Everything is made of waves, quantum particles. Nothing is made of particles, in the English sense of the word. Space is not, in fact, empty. Its no longer clear that we should ask whether empty space contains a medium instead it is a medium. At a minimum, it is the medium for the gravitational field. That field is just one of many elementary fields. Its not clear whether the other fields have media, perhaps they do not.
The Higgs field doesnt point, a field that doesnt point cant create a force on objects; a force needs a direction, but a nonpointing field has none to give it. Nonpointing fields are unique in their ability to remain hidden.
Gravity's restoring effect causes a displaced pendulum to swing resonantly. Analogously, the Higgs fields restoring effect, countering any nonzero value for the other fields and driving their values back towards zero, making standing waves in those fields possible.
The electron field can resonate because is subject to a restoring effect. That effect is generated by the Higgs field. It acts as the electrons fields stiffening agent in much the same way as gravity acts as the stiffening agent for the waves in Fig 48.
The plank mass is the rest mass of the smallest possible black hole in our universe. It is also the largest rest mass that an elementary particle can have without becoming a black hole.
The Higgs field is stiff. It can get stiffness – lot of it – from an entirely unexpected place. It can get it from the fields its trying to stiffen.

This is a form of feedback. It potentially undermines the whole idea of a stiffening agent. What was supposed to be the stiffenermay end up the stiffenee.

The Higgs field stiffens various other fields, but because those fields enormous vacuum energy then depends on teh Higgs field's value, they in turn stiffen the Higgs field even more than it stiffens them. As a result, the Higgs boson's rest mass would be comparable to the Plank mass
It might be that each fields feedback is far weeker than we naively think. That would happen if the Higgs field was composite.
How did protons and neutrons come to exist (and why are all protons identical) ?

One of the greatest successes of QFT is its explanation of the existence of protons and neutrons. These emerge in a very complicated fashion, from the interactions of the quark and gluon fields. That their properties (and those of their shorter-lived cousins) can be predicted successfully provides unequivocal evidence that fields are subject to the cosmic certianty limits (QM).

The logic of why electrons are identical (resonant frequency of the electron field) doesnt directly apply to protons and neutrons. The answer is disipation. A proton is simply the ground state of two up quarks and a down quark.

Becuase fundamental particles are identical, relatively simple objects built from them will usually have unique and definite ground states, which they will quickly reach after some dissipation. Any large and complicated system is different. It has so many ways to arrange itself that its lowest-energy configuration cannot be quickly attained, and even if it could reach it it could not reamain there at room temperature. This is why the objects of the macroscopic world are never exactly alike.

WavesInImpossibleSea

Waves In an Impossible Sea (Matt Strassler)

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