Strassler recently spoke with Gizmodo about the books origins and goals.
Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
And I was wondering if you have thought about the same thing, and how you see that relationship.
An artist’s concept of a particle collision.Illustration: Jurik Peter (Shutterstock)
But of course, they are profoundly connected.
But the stuff thats inside of us is also mostly empty.
Its the same emptiness.
Image: Basic Books
And so there is no distinction between the outer-ness and the inner-ness.
Its the same stuff doing many of the same things.
Were not disconnected from that larger universe.
Were actually, in some sense, made from it.
Whenever Im slightly stressed out, I remind myself that I am just dying particles.
Strassler: We are much more than that.
But even when we say we are particles, we are missing something.
Across the entire universe.
Thats a very different way of understanding what were made from.
Were not made from these little localized things that move around in a universe.
Were made from ripples of a universe, and that is a very different picture.
When you were writing the book, did you have a specific reader in mind?
Who do you hope will, you know, stumble across this title and pick it up?
And in particular a way of understanding what the Higgs field is all about.
For those readers, its something they will not have seen before.
Theyre hard because the universe is hard.
Its hard for me.
I cant make it any easier than it is for me.
Gizmodo: Thats going to be the headline.
Physicist Confesses: Its Hard For Me, Too.
Im happy with that.
Gizmodo: How did this book emerge from the work that youve been doing for years?
Strassler: I was a full-time academic scientist for a good two decades.
I had always been interested in doing public outreach.
But I had never had really that much time being a full-time scientist.
There was a certain moment in my career where it wasnt clear what I wanted to do next.
And I started a blog at that point.
The Higgs field affects our lives in all sorts of ways.
There wasnt any way to write the book without starting with those things.
How does it all fit together?
But you have to spend two-thirds of the book to get to that point.
Strassler: There is that risk, right?
They are questions about daily life.
And the fact is that these subjects, which seem remote and very esoteric… theyre not.
Theyre deeply ingrained in ordinary human experience.
They are the foundations of our daily experiences.
Its just not going to happen.
Its more about writing the least-wrong thing than the most-right thing.
You wrote a book that grapples with complex science.
How were you checking to verify that this would actually grok to the average reader?
Strassler: It helps that I have had the blog for 10 years.
I also have some humility about how well I have achieved this goal.
Thats partly because I know these are difficult subjects.
For example, the figures, some will be animated on the website to give greater clarity.
The goal is to really explain the science, and Im not done with that part.
Gizmodo: Its been over ten years since the Higgs discovery.
And so its kind of a perfect moment to describe what we know and what we dont.
And really break it into those two parts.
There were no huge surprises that completely changed the way we think about things.
To use a cliche, its really more like the end of the beginning here.
We have achieved something that is really remarkable in the past 125 years.
What are you most excited about on the physical horizon?
Strassler: All the way up to the discovery of the Higgs boson, there has been a path.
And for the first time in 150 years, that is no longer true.
We do not now have a clear path.
We have many possible paths, and we dont really know which one is the best one.
And this is part of why there is so much controversy about particle physics right now.
Its because there are definitely things that we know give us a decent chance of finding something new.
Because that would make it a lot easier to know what to do next.
And the machine will run for 10 more years, producing 10 times as much data.
So we do have that opportunity.
But, I would like a clue from nature before answering that question.
Do you anticipate that kind of juicing the the collider will yield results?
Strassler: Im not a person to express optimism or pessimism about what nature may deliver to us.
I mean, I dont think I have the insights into nature to guess.
So, I think people are sometimes too quick to imagine that, oh well, the LHC looked.
No, no, no, no.
And we may just need to be really imaginative about how we analyze the data at the LHC.
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