A delicate balance. In summary, nuclei are held together by a delicate balance among (a) the attractive strong force between nucleons, (b) the electrical repulsion between protons, (c) the dilution of...
Mass is Inertia......In physics, mass means the tendency of an object to resist changes in course or speed. It is what physicists call inertia. Inertia is a kind of I don't like to be pushed feeling....
Field Collapse. The answer to Schrodinger's dilemma is what we now call field collapse. In QFT, when a field quantum interacts, it must interact as a unit. Half of the quantum cannot do one thing whil...
Feynman converts! According to Frank Wilczek, Feynman eventually lost confidence in his particles-only view of nature:Feynman told me that when he realized that his theory of photons and electrons is...
Apparently it did not occur to Feynman that these discrete clicks could also be produced by field quanta that live and die as a unit.
We assert that the atom in reality is merely the...phenomena of an electron wave captured, as it were, by the nucleus of the atom...From the point of view of wave mechanics, the [particle picture] wou...
There is another reason why imaginary color is an appropriate tool for visualizing fields. You may be surprised to hear this, but the colors that we perceive in nature are also imaginary; they exist o...
That the physics community has so ignored the only understandable, paradox-free picture of nature that we have boggles my mind. Maybe physicists like being seen as high priests who are entrusted with...
Mass is not weight.....Weight is the pull of gravity -the downward force exerted by the earth. If there is no gravity there is no weight, but there is still inertia. In ordinary speech the two concept...
Limitation of color. There is, of course, a limit to how far the use of color can take us. A single color can help us visualize a field that is otherwise invisible, but it cannot inform us about the c...
In this chapter we will look at the entire edifice of QFT. We will see that it is based on three simple principles. We will also list some of its achievements, including some new insights and understa...
In QFT, the various fields, even the matter field, appear separately, each with its own equation and its own behavior. They are not combined into a single field as Einstein hoped, but they are related...
I once read that for every equation, you lose a thousand readers.
I believe that common sense is choosing, wherever possible, the simplest, most intuitively-satisfying explanation that is consistent with observations.
The move from a particle description to a field description will be especially fruitful if the fields obey simple equations, so that we can calculate the future values of fields from the values they h...
The helium nucleus, for example, contains two protons and two neutrons. If the neutrons were not there, the electrical repulsion between the protons would overcome the strong binding force. However if...
So if you want, you can believe that gravitational effects are due to a curvature of space-time (even if you can't picture it). Or, like Weinberg, Wilczek (and me), you can view gravity as a force fie...
My mission soon turned into a labor of love, with emphasis on labor. I had not anticipated the breadth and depth of the subject, or the drama as our greatest minds waged what I think is our greatest b...
MASS INCREASESThe final paradox of relativity is the increase in mass due to motion. Mass increase has been observed experimentally in particle accelerators, with increases as great as 3000% for parti...
It may seem strange that the same term that slows the spatial evolution of a field also causes it to oscillate, but it is actually straightforward mathematics to show that the frequency of oscillation...