Mass, Weight, and Fields
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...
View ArticleBeyond the Book: The Ambiguities of Scientific Language
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...
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About the News that Antimatter Doesn’t “Fall Up”
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...
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The Impossible Commentary: Newton, Gravity, and the Speed of the Moon
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...
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The Impossible Commentary: Is Gravity a Force? Is it an Illusion?
[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,...
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What [Really] Causes our Twice-Daily Ocean Tides?
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...
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A Half Century Since the Birth of QCD
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...
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Is Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity Truly Elegant?
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...
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Heads Up — Northern Lights Possible in Next 24 Hours
[Note added: the predicted storm has begun, as of about 1000 UTC, 5:00 AM NYC time; good for early birds on the west coast and those in Asia.] If you live in Canada, Europe or the northern half of the...
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What Ocean Tides Teach Us About the Sun and Moon
The Moon has a four-week cycle; it is full every four weeks (actually every 29.5 days). But ocean tides exhibit a two-week cycle; they are large one week and then smaller the next. Specifically, as in...
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The Value of Check-It-Yourself Science
A couple of years ago I wrote a series of posts (see below) showing how anyone, with a little work, can verify the main facts about the Earth, Moon, Sun and planets. This kind of “Check-It-Yourself”...
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Why is it So Hard to Measure the Distance to the Sun?
(This is the second post in a series; here’s post #1.) It’s not too hard to measure the distance to the Moon; the Greeks did it over two thousand years ago. First you measure the size of the Moon,...
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How Far Could the Sun Possibly Be?
(This is the third post in a series, though it can be read independently; here are post #1 and post #2; and post #4 blows this one out of the water, so don’t miss it!) Measuring the distance to the...
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How “Shooting Stars” Measure the Distance to the Sun
(This is the fourth post in a series, though it can be read independently; here are post #1 , post #2 , and post #3.) For many years, I thought that measuring the distance to the Sun was quite...
View ArticleAbout the Future Circular Collider (FCC)
A number of people have asked me my opinion concerning CERN‘s proposal for a new, larger and more powerful particle physics collider… or rather, two completely different colliders that would operate...
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Estimating the Distance to Jupiter in My Backyard
Last night, using the methods I described as part of my check-it-yourself astronomy series, I estimated the distance to the planet Jupiter using nothing more than my eyes, a protractor, and a simple...
View ArticleNew Webpage Posted: A Core Effect of Quantum Physics
A central issue in discussions of particle physics’ present and future is known as the hierarchy puzzle. Although I discuss the hierarchy — its confusing nature and the debates that it generates — in...
View ArticleAnother New Webpage: the Zero-Point Energy of a Guitar String
In my last post, I introduced a new webpage concerning “zero-point energy”, the core concept that lies at the heart of the hierarchy puzzle. I have now posted the next webpage in the series, which...
View ArticleThe Next Webpage: The Zero-Point Energy of a Cosmic Field
My two new webpages from earlier this week addressed the zero-point energy for the simple case of a ball on a spring and for the much richer case of a guitar string; the latter served as a warmup to...
View ArticleArticle 4 on Zero-Point Energy: Mass, Fermions, and a Good Wrong Idea
I have posted my fourth article discussing zero-point energy. (Here are the first, the second, and the third, which covered respectively the zero-point energy of a ball on a spring, a guitar string,...
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