I’ve called myself a String Theorist, who learned to describe the world in terms of subatomic lengths of string that move in ten dimensions (nine of space and one of time),
But in practice I’ve been more of a Particle Theorist, describing the world not in terms of short lengths of string but rather with particles that each occupy a single point in space,
More specifically, I’ve been an Amplitudeologist, part of a trendy new tribe trying to make particle physics predictions a breeze, a tribe which sometimes includes Sheldon Cooper,
In terms of my career, I climbed all the way from PhD to a Permanent Researcher, hired by a government lab to research whatever I thought ought to be researched,
And now? I’m off to my next adventure.
Nowadays, instead of doing the science, I write about it. Sometimes, that writing is paid, science journalism for online magazines and news sites and science communications consulting for companies. The rest, I write here, on this blog, once a week. I try to explain physics as best I can, as accessibly as I can. These days, I think I do that pretty well. I talk about how science gets done, and how the public finds out about it. I try to understand what’s new on the horizon, and take you along in my understanding. I keep up with the big stories from my old life, for those who follow that world and want a closer look. In general, I try to correct misunderstandings, to say something other people aren’t, or something my readers might not have heard.
4 gravitons 
Hi Matt,
I have just found your nice blog via your great Ars Technica article 🙂
You are obviously not only an awesome theoretical physicist to be, but a great writer too !
Very cool things you are working on, I am curious about what will come out of this in the future …
Cheers
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Thanks! This is very well done.
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Quick Q, if there are gravitons, how-many are there (as in 4 gauge bosons for electroweak, 8 gluons . . so howmany gravitons)? I know that you gauge SO(4) or something like that . . (from being a PP back in the 1990s . .).
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Just one. There’s actually a theorem that if you have any massless, gravity-like fields, then all such fields must be identical: you can’t have different “colors” of gravity like you can with gluons.
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Any of you and/or other “scattering folks” on Twitter?
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I’ve got a link to my twitter in the header at the top of the blog, and I linked to JJ Carrasco’s twitter in the post. I don’t know any other amplitudes people who are on twitter.
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Maybe I missed who you actually are, but it seems like you have an anonymous or at least non-obvious real identity associated with this blog. Why is that?
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Non-obvious is a good way of putting it. It’s not impossible to find, but it takes some work and some knowledge, which keeps bots and malicious actors from carrying through to my personal life.
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I am an old retiree who has no formal background in physics or math. The question I have came to me as I read your article on “decay of the vacuum” in Quanta Magazine.
The article contained numbers like 10^790 and 10^794. Could 10^790 be written in “English” as the word “billion” written down 87 times preceded by the words “10 million”?
I ask because I would like to “share” that number with a few Facebook friends.
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Indeed, that’s the right number of billions to include. Sounds like a fun post!
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You are …
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Put your name somewhere, man. Till today I thought you were Luboš Motl! 😆
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Of all the people I could be! Good grief!
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