The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace once told the story of a demon. The demon knows all the laws of physics, and is so smart that he can do an infinite number of calculations in his head. If you told him the exact state of the universe at one point in time, then he would be […]
Reasons to Panic about the Hierarchy Problem
This is intended to be kind of a sequel to one of my previous posts, which attempted to convey the vibes surrounding renormalization: the systematic ignorance of physics at small scales. If you read the thing, you may recall that I justified renormalization with the argument that physics at different scales mostly don’t effect each other. Gallileo’s pendulum […]
A Little Patch of Spacetime
Recently there’s been a lot of buzz around the idea that the universe is a big simulation. The idea is pretty out there, right? What if I was to tell you that us humans have been creating universes on computers, taking into account the most fundamental of physics, detailed to some of the smallest length scales that […]
No seriously what is Entropy
I always found the popular science description of entropy as ‘disorder’ as a bit unsatisfying. It has a level of subjectivity that the other physical quantities don’t. Temperature, for example, is easy- we all experience low and high temperatures, so can readily accept that there’s a number which quantifies it. It’s a similar story for things […]
Hitchhiker’s guide to an infinity-free theory
Quantum field theory is the theoretical framework of particle physics. Without it, we never could have worked out what an atom is made of, understood the forces that govern its content, or predicted the Higgs boson. But when it was first being established in the first half of the 20th century, it came across an apparently […]
What’s the Matter with Antimatter?
Why are we here? Ok this is a uselessly vague question; I’ll rephrase. Under what mechanism did the stars, planets, life, and all that come about? Ask a particle physicist this, and they may be tempted to drag you to the nearest blackboard, write down four lines of maths, and stare at you expectantly as if […]
Little Knobs on the Control Panel of the Universe
How do forces work on the quantum scale? Noone can truly picture how quantum particles interact via quantum forces, so we’re limited to analogies. The following is an analogy that I think exposes some of the key features. Consider the asteroid belt that lies between mars and jupiter… Quantum forces and the asteroid belt The only […]
