Tonight! Mars Meets the Moon (and Ducks Behind It)

Happy New Year! 2025 is the centenary of some very important events in the development of quantum physics — the birth of new insights, of new mathematics, and of great misconceptions. For this reason, I’ve decided that this year I’ll devote more of this blog to quantum fundamentals, and take on some of the tricky […]

When it comes to the weak nuclear force and why it is weak, there’s a strange story which floats around. It starts with a true but somewhat misleading statement: This is misleading because fields mediate forces, not particles; it’s the W and Z fields that are the mediators for the weak nuclear force, just as […]

In a previous post, I showed you that the Standard Model and its special angle θw , approximately 30 degrees, does a pretty good job of predicting a whole host of processes in the Standard Model. I focused attention on the decays of the Z boson, but there were many more processes mentioned in the […]

Well, gosh… what nice news as 2024 comes to a close… My book has received a ringing endorsement from Ethan Siegel, the science writer and Ph.D. astrophysicist who hosts the well-known, award-winning blog “Starts with a Bang“. Siegel’s one of the most reliable and prolific science writers around — he writes for BigThink and has […]

This week I’ll be at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and I’ll be giving a public talk for a general audience at 4 pm on Thursday, December 5th. If you are in the area, please attend! And if you know someone at the University of Michigan or in the Ann Arbor area who […]