Matt Strassler’s journey into fundamental physics culminates in a brilliant explanation of the Higgs field. Enjoy this exclusive interview.
It’s rare that a book comes along that changes the way experts in their field think about the fundamentals, while simultaneously being accessible and informative to those without expert knowledge themselves. That’s why, as 2024 winds down, it’s a no-brainer selection to choose Matt Strassler’s incomparable new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How everyday life emerges from the cosmic ocean, as this year’s best science book. (Yes, even in a year where I myself wrote my own book!) Strassler, a world-renowned expert in particle physics in his own right (and longtime science blogger), takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of physics from a conceptual point of view.
Even classic topics such as Galileo’s relativity and Newtonian gravity are presented in novel, accessible ways, with common historical terms like “Newton’s first law” replaced by the more intuitive ones such as the “coasting law.” Strassler takes the reader on similar journeys through other classical topics such as mass, waves, and fields before entering the more unfamiliar world of the quantum, which suddenly seems more…
