American Scientist

WAVES IN AN IMPOSSIBLE SEA: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean. Matt Strassler. 384 pp. Basic Books, 2024. $32.00.

Why is it that certain fundamental particles and more complicated objects such as rocks, apples, and stars have mass? This question, it turns out, is an important one that contemporary physicists are trying to address. The origin of mass is a topic that has been front and center in particle physics for several decades and is featured in the popular scientific press with varying regularity.

Whenever particle physicists explain their scientific discipline and their enthusiasm for fundamental physics to the general public, you might hear statements such as “The Higgs field gives all other fundamental particles mass.” Discussions of this so-called Higgs mechanism spiked dramatically in 2012, when researchers at CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle associated to the Higgs field.

Dismay with the different analogies and narratives used to explain how the Higgs field manages to achieve its mass-rendering function is what prompted theoretical physicist Matt Strassler to write Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean. In the book, Strassler argues that simplified analogies used to explain complex scientific principles are often seriously flawed in one way or another, causing confusion in the general public or giving them the wrong ideas about how things work. Not only does Strassler set out to explain what the Higgs mechanism is really about, but he also explains how many contemporary physicists view the world and the intersection between the cosmos, quantum physics, and everyday life.

If making these aspects of physics accessible to the general reader sounds like a difficult mission, it is—but Strassler does it elegantly and successfully. The first third of the book focuses on some basic foundational concepts: things such as motion, mass, and energy, as well as the concept of relativity, from Galileo to Einstein. The next third of the material addresses vibrations, waves, and fundamentals of music, with the idea that the universe is similar to a musical instrument with its fields and waves. Strassler explains the physics of sound and light, and then brings readers to larger concepts, such as waves of the universe, which then leads us to fields: what a field is, what is this mass given by the Higgs field, and what a fundamental particle is. Finally, the last third of the book is about the quantum realm, which is, admittedly, a complicated and confusing topic. But Strassler keeps it simple, tying questions into previously discussed material on particles and waves.

The cosmos, stunningly strange and unrelentingly contrary to common sense, infiltrates our every moment.

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Throughout the book, Strassler reminds us about “the most important lesson of modern physics: there’s absolutely nothing mundane about ordinary life. The cosmos, stunningly strange and unrelentingly contrary to common sense, infiltrates our every moment.” We humans are oblivious to most of the natural phenomena that exist, due to the limitations of our measuring instruments (our eyes and ears, for example) and our lack of experience with anything that is too tiny, too enormous, too dense, or too fast. Strassler explains:

People who claim to believe only what their senses tell them are missing out on the vast majority of what there is to know in the universe. They are also deceiving themselves. After all, even a cell phone exploits the unseen and unheard and unfelt. The fact that modern gadgets seem like magic, making use of the universe beyond human senses, points out yet again the weakness of common sense in the physical world.

In physics, a field is an object, usually something we can measure, that is defined at all points in space. For example, if we restrict our universe to a long metal bar, the temperature along the bar is a field: It has a value at all positions along the bar. A wave is a propagating perturbation in the field. For example, if we heat up one end of the long bar, the temperature perturbation—temperature wave—will move along the bar and, after some time, we should be able to measure how much the other end of the bar has warmed up. The properties of the temperature waves are related to the properties of the temperature field, including how fast the temperature waves propagate. If we were to turn on an external magnetic field (such as by placing the bar inside a very large electromagnet), the properties of the temperature field would change as a function of the value of the magnetic field. These changes, in turn, modify the properties of the temperature waves.

In particle physics, particles are waves in fundamental fields: A photon is a perturbation in the electromagnetic field, and an electron is a perturbation in the electron field (not to be confused with the electric field!). Like the magnetic field in the metal-bar example above, the value of the Higgs field impacts the properties of all the fundamental fields (for example, the quark field or the electron field) and sets some of the properties—in this case, the mass—of the particles associated to those fields. What the CERN experiments did was to perturb the Higgs field—confirming that it really exists—and observe the consequences of those perturbations.

Strassler acknowledges the difficulty in understanding many of the concepts and terms in physics, admitting that even Einstein’s formula of relativity is fairly ambiguous. He writes:

A friend of mine, astonished to learn of these ambiguities in mass and energy, suggested that physicists might need some adult supervision—perhaps a committee of outsiders to oversee our terminology. Not an unreasonable idea, I agreed. But sadly, no language experts watch over us, and so physics dialect is as messy as the history that has given rise to it. New terms may make sense at the moment that they are invented, but as gaps in knowledge are filled in over time, the original terms often end up seeming inappropriate.

Strassler also expresses how unsatisfying, and yet how successful, the language we use in fundamental particle physics is: “In short, we have a remarkably clear (if incomplete) picture of what the known elementary fields do. Despite this, we have barely any concept of what they are—assuming that’s even a question we should be trying to answer.”

Strassler raises big questions for readers, but given the scope of the subject, the book inevitably leaves out material. Though this is understandable, I have some lingering questions. I bring them up not so much as criticisms, but to whet the appetite of those who want to hear more about fundamental particle physics, though Waves in an Impossible Sea is quite thorough as it is. Some of my questions include: Why do we need this Higgs story anyway? Can’t each of the different fields have their own unrelated mass, without the help of the Higgs field? Why is asking about the origin of the fundamental particle masses such an important question? A few of these questions are discussed in passing at different points in the book, but I am not sure that the readers plagued by these types of questions will come out of the experience completely satisfied.

Waves in an Impossible Sea is for anyone who wants a compelling (and accurate!) description of our current understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions. It is clear and accessible to everyone interested in and excited about science, which is no surprise: Strassler has been dedicating a large portion of his time to thinking deeply about the main concepts and questions in fundamental physics and how these ideas can be communicated to a broad audience, as evidenced by his blog. The book is not a trivial read—a deep appreciation of the material discussed here requires a serious intellectual investment—but it will be a satisfying and enlightening one.