R eality often seems stranger and more dazzling than the most inspired fiction. Space, for instance, can warp, stretch, and ripple, like rubber, as Ei

We Are Made of Waves

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2024-06-07 11:00:06

R eality often seems stranger and more dazzling than the most inspired fiction. Space, for instance, can warp, stretch, and ripple, like rubber, as Einstein taught us. And yet we travel through it, as passengers on Earth, at 150 miles per second—without feeling the slightest resistance. How can that be?

This is among the questions with which Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, opens his new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean. His answer: Our tangible world—chairs and trees and dogs and human beings—exists not “within” the universe but is made “of” the universe itself, built from the same waves that constitute space.

How do we understand those waves? With quantum field theory, which Strassler argues underlies all of reality. It tells us that everything in our universe is made up of fields, much like our familiar electric and magnetic fields. Particles like protons, electrons, and Higgs bosons are excitations of these fields. How these fields are built and give rise to particles is at the heart of Strassler’s book.

These are weighty concepts, and yet Strassler writes with enviable conversational simplicity, drawing parallels between the waves and vibrations we know in our everyday lives—especially those in music (of which he is a connoisseur)—and the waves and particles of modern physics. In places, he coins delightfully pithy phrases that feel intuitive, for instance the “Higgsiferous ether” for the Higgs field which is at the heart of what imparts mass to certain particles in the universe. The law of inertia is the “coasting law.” A scalar field—a field for a property, like temperature or pressure, which is defined only by a value at every point in space and not a direction—is “non-pointing.”