Four Gravitons and a…What Exactly Are You Now?

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I cleaned up my “Who Am I?” page this week, and some of you might notice my title changed. I’m no longer a Postdoc. As of this month, I’m an Assistant Professor.

Before you start congratulating me too much, saying I’ve made it and so on…to be clear, I’m not that kind of Assistant Professor.

Universities in Europe and the US work a bit differently. The US has the tenure-track system: professors start out tenure-track, and have a fixed amount of time to prove themselves. If they do, they get tenure, and essentially permanent employment. If not, they leave.

Some European countries are starting to introduce a tenure track, sometimes just university by university or job-by-job. For the rest, professors are divided not into tenured and tenure-track, but into permanent and fixed-term. Permanent professors are permanent in the way a normal employee of a company would be: they can still be fired, but if not their contract continues indefinitely. Fixed-term professors, then, have contracts for just a fixed span of time. In some cases this can be quite short. In my case, it’s one year.

Some US readers might be thinking this sounds a bit like an Adjunct. In a very literal sense that’s right, in Danish my title is Adjunkt. But it’s not the type of Adjunct you’re thinking of. US universities employ Adjuncts primarily for teaching. They’re often paid per class, and re-hired each year (though with no guarantees, leading to a lot of stress). That’s not my situation. I’m paid a fixed salary, and my primary responsibility is research, not teaching. I also won’t be re-hired next year, unless I find a totally different source of funding. Practically speaking, my situation is a lot like an extra year of Postdoc.

There are some differences. I’m paid a little more than I was as a Postdoc, and I have a few more perks. I’m getting more pedagogy training in the spring, I don’t know if I would have gotten that opportunity if I was still just a Postdoc. It’s an extra level of responsibility, and that does mean something.

But it does also mean I’m still looking for a job. Once again I find myself in application season: polishing my talks and crossing my fingers, not knowing exactly where I’ll end up.

Stop Listing the Amplituhedron as a Competitor of String Theory

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The Economist recently had an article (paywalled) that meandered through various developments in high-energy physics. It started out talking about the failure of the LHC to find SUSY, argued this looked bad for string theory (which…not really?) and used it as a jumping-off point to talk about various non-string “theories of everything”. Peter Woit quoted it a few posts back as kind of a bellwether for public opinion on supersymmetry and string theory.

The article was a muddle, but a fairly conventional muddle, explaining or mis-explaining things in roughly the same way as other popular physics pieces. For the most part that didn’t bug me, but one piece of the muddle hit a bit close to home:

The names of many of these [non-string theories of everything] do, it must be conceded, torture the English language. They include “causal dynamical triangulation”, “asymptotically safe gravity”, “loop quantum gravity” and the “amplituhedron formulation of quantum theory”.

I’ve posted about the amplituhedron more than a few times here on this blog. Out of every achievement of my sub-field, it has most captured the public imagination. It’s legitimately impressive, a way to translate calculations of probabilities of collisions of fundamental particles (in a toy model, to be clear) into geometrical objects. What it isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, is a theory of everything.

To be fair, the Economist piece admits this:

Most attempts at a theory of everything try to fit gravity, which Einstein describes geometrically, into quantum theory, which does not rely on geometry in this way. The amplituhedron approach does the opposite, by suggesting that quantum theory is actually deeply geometric after all. Better yet, the amplituhedron is not founded on notions of spacetime, or even statistical mechanics. Instead, these ideas emerge naturally from it. So, while the amplituhedron approach does not as yet offer a full theory of quantum gravity, it has opened up an intriguing path that may lead to one.

The reasoning they have leading up to it has a few misunderstandings anyway. The amplituhedron is geometrical, but in a completely different way from how Einstein’s theory of gravity is geometrical: Einstein’s gravity is a theory of space and time, the amplituhedron’s magic is that it hides space and time behind a seemingly more fundamental mathematics.

This is not to say that the amplituhedron won’t lead to insights about gravity. That’s a big part of what it’s for, in the long-term. Because the amplituhedron hides the role of space and time, it might show the way to theories that lack them altogether, theories where space and time are just an approximation for a more fundamental reality. That’s a real possibility, though not at this point a reality.

Even if you take this possibility completely seriously, though, there’s another problem with the Economist’s description: it’s not clear that this new theory would be a non-string theory!

The main people behind the amplituhedron are pretty positively disposed to string theory. If you asked them, I think they’d tell you that, rather than replacing string theory, they expect to learn more about string theory: to see how it could be reformulated in a way that yields insight about trickier problems. That’s not at all like the other “non-string theories of everything” in that list, which frame themselves as alternatives to, or even opponents of, string theory.

It is a lot like several other research programs, though, like ER=EPR and It from Qubit. Researchers in those programs try to use physical principles and toy models to say fundamental things about quantum gravity, trying to think about space and time as being made up of entangled quantum objects. By that logic, they belong in that list in the article alongside the amplituhedron. The reason they aren’t is obvious if you know where they come from: ER=EPR and It from Qubit are worked on by string theorists, including some of the most prominent ones.

The thing is, any reason to put the amplituhedron on that list is also a reason to put them. The amplituhedron is not a theory of everything, it is not at present a theory of quantum gravity. It’s a research direction that might shed new insight about quantum gravity. It doesn’t explicitly involve strings, but neither does It from Qubit most of the time. Unless you’re going to describe It from Qubit as a “non-string theory of everything”, you really shouldn’t describe the amplituhedron as one.

The amplituhedron is a really cool idea, one with great potential. It’s not something like loop quantum gravity, or causal dynamical triangulations, and it doesn’t need to be. Let it be what it is, please!

Sandbox Collaboration

Amplitudes 2021 Retrospective

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Phew!

Now that I’ve rested up after this year’s Amplitudes, I’ll give a few of my impressions.

Overall, I think the conference went pretty well. People seemed amused by the digital Niels Bohr, even if he looked a bit like a puppet (Lance compared him to Yoda in his final speech, which was…apt). We used Gather.town, originally just for the poster session and a “virtual reception”, but later we also encouraged people to meet up in it during breaks. That in particular was a big hit: I think people really liked the ability to just move around and chat in impromptu groups, and while nobody seemed to use the “virtual bar”, the “virtual beach” had a lively crowd. Time zones were inevitably rough, but I think we ended up with a good compromise where everyone could still see a meaningful chunk of the conference.

A few things didn’t work as well. For those planning conferences, I would strongly suggest not making a brand new gmail account to send out conference announcements: for a lot of people the emails went straight to spam. Zulip was a bust: I’m not sure if people found it more confusing than last year’s Slack or didn’t notice it due to the spam issue, but almost no-one posted in it. YouTube was complicated: the stream went down a few times and I could never figure out exactly why, it may have just been internet issues here at the Niels Bohr Institute (we did have a power outage one night and had to scramble to get internet access back the next morning). As far as I could tell YouTube wouldn’t let me re-open the previous stream so each time I had to post a new link, which probably was frustrating for those following along there.

That said, this was less of a problem than it might have been, because attendance/”viewership” as a whole was lower than expected. Zoomplitudes last year had massive numbers of people join in both on Zoom and via YouTube. We had a lot fewer: out of over 500 registered participants, we had fewer than 200 on Zoom at any one time, and at most 30 or so on YouTube. Confusion around the conference email might have played a role here, but I suspect part of the difference is simple fatigue: after over a year of this pandemic, online conferences no longer feel like an exciting new experience.

The actual content of the conference ranged pretty widely. Some people reviewed earlier work, others presented recent papers or even work-in-progress. As in recent years, a meaningful chunk of the conference focused on applications of amplitudes techniques to gravitational wave physics. This included a talk by Thibault Damour, who has by now mostly made his peace with the field after his early doubts were sorted out. He still suspected that the mismatch of scales (weak coupling on the one hand, classical scattering on the other) would cause problems in future, but after his work with Laporta and Mastrolia even he had to acknowledge that amplitudes techniques were useful.

In the past I would have put the double-copy and gravitational wave researchers under the same heading, but this year they were quite distinct. While a few of the gravitational wave talks mentioned the double-copy, most of those who brought it up were doing something quite a bit more abstract than gravitational wave physics. Indeed, several people were pushing the boundaries of what it means to double-copy. There were modified KLT kernels, different versions of color-kinematics duality, and explorations of what kinds of massive particles can and (arguably more interestingly) cannot be compatible with a double-copy framework. The sheer range of different generalizations had me briefly wondering whether the double-copy could be “too flexible to be meaningful”, whether the right definitions would let you double-copy anything out of anything. I was reassured by the points where each talk argued that certain things didn’t work: it suggests that wherever this mysterious structure comes from, its powers are limited enough to make it meaningful.

A fair number of talks dealt with what has always been our main application, collider physics. There the context shifted, but the message stayed consistent: for a “clean” enough process two or three-loop calculations can make a big difference, taking a prediction that would be completely off from experiment and bringing it into line. These are more useful the more that can be varied about the calculation: functions are more useful than numbers, for example. I was gratified to hear confirmation that a particular kind of process, where two massless particles like quarks become three massive particles like W or Z bosons, is one of these “clean enough” examples: it means someone will need to compute my “tardigrade” diagram eventually.

If collider physics is our main application, N=4 super Yang-Mills has always been our main toy model. Jaroslav Trnka gave us the details behind Nima’s exciting talk from last year, and Nima had a whole new exciting talk this year with promised connections to category theory (connections he didn’t quite reach after speaking for two and a half hours). Anastasia Volovich presented two distinct methods for predicting square-root symbol letters, while my colleague Chi Zhang showed some exciting progress with the elliptic double-box, realizing the several-year dream of representing it in a useful basis of integrals and showcasing several interesting properties. Anne Spiering came over from the integrability side to show us just how special the “planar” version of the theory really is: by increasing the number of colors of gluons, she showed that one could smoothly go between an “integrability-esque” spectrum and a “chaotic” spectrum. Finally, Lance Dixon mentioned his progress with form-factors in his talk at the end of the conference, showing off some statistics of coefficients of different functions and speculating that machine learning might be able to predict them.

On the more mathematical side, Francis Brown showed us a new way to get numbers out of graphs, one distinct but related to our usual interpretation in terms of Feynman diagrams. I’m still unsure what it will be used for, but the fact that it maps every graph to something finite probably has some interesting implications. Albrecht Klemm and Claude Duhr talked about two sides of the same story, their recent work on integrals involving Calabi-Yau manifolds. They focused on a particular nice set of integrals, and time will tell whether the methods work more broadly, but there are some exciting suggestions that at least parts will.

There’s been a resurgence of the old dream of the S-matrix community, constraining amplitudes via “general constraints” alone, and several talks dealt with those ideas. Sebastian Mizera went the other direction, and tried to test one of those “general constraints”, seeing under which circumstances he could prove that you can swap a particle going in with an antiparticle going out. Others went out to infinity, trying to understand amplitudes from the perspective of the so-called “celestial sphere” where they appear to be governed by conformal field theories of some sort. A few talks dealt with amplitudes in string theory itself: Yvonne Geyer built them out of field-theory amplitudes, while Ashoke Sen explained how to include D-instantons in them.

We also had three “special talks” in the evenings. I’ve mentioned Nima’s already. Zvi Bern gave a retrospective talk that I somewhat cheesily describe as “good for the soul”: a look to the early days of the field that reminded us of why we are who we are. Lance Dixon closed the conference with a light-hearted summary and a look to the future. That future includes next year’s Amplitudes, which after a hasty discussion during this year’s conference has now localized to Prague. Let’s hope it’s in person!

Busy Organizing Amplitudes 2021

Next Week, Amplitudes 2021!

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I calculate things called scattering amplitudes, the building-blocks of predictions in particle physics. I’m part of a community of “amplitudeologists” that try to find better ways to compute these things, to achieve more efficiency and deeper understanding. We meet once a year for our big conference, called Amplitudes. And this year, I’m one of the organizers.

This year also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Niels Bohr Institute, so we wanted to do something special. We found a group of artists working on a rendering of Niels Bohr. The original idea was to do one of those celebrity holograms, but after the conference went online we decided to make a few short clips instead. I wrote a Bohr-esque script, and we got help from one of Bohr’s descendants to get the voice just-so. Now, you can see the result, as our digital Bohr invites you to the conference.

We’ll be livestreaming the conference on the same YouTube channel, and posting videos of the talks each day. If you’re curious about the latest developments in scattering amplitudes, I encourage you to tune in. And if you’re an amplitudeologist yourself, registration is still open!

Of Cows and Razors

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Last week’s post came up on Reddit, where a commenter made a good point. I said that one of the mysteries of neutrinos is that they might not get their mass from the Higgs boson. This is true, but the commenter rightly points out it’s true of other particles too: electrons might not get their mass from the Higgs. We aren’t sure. The lighter quarks might not get their mass from the Higgs either.

When talking physics with the public, we usually say that electrons and quarks all get their mass from the Higgs. That’s how it works in our Standard Model, after all. But even though we’ve found the Higgs boson, we can’t be 100% sure that it functions the way our model says. That’s because there are aspects of the Higgs we haven’t been able to measure directly. We’ve measured how it affects the heaviest quark, the top quark, but measuring its interactions with other particles will require a bigger collider. Until we have those measurements, the possibility remains open that electrons and quarks get their mass another way. It would be a more complicated way: we know the Higgs does a lot of what the model says, so if it deviates in another way we’d have to add more details, maybe even more undiscovered particles. But it’s possible.

If I wanted to defend the idea that neutrinos are special here, I would point out that neutrino masses, unlike electron masses, are not part of the Standard Model. For electrons, we have a clear “default” way for them to get mass, and that default is in a meaningful way simpler than the alternatives. For neutrinos, every alternative is complicated in some fashion: either adding undiscovered particles, or unusual properties. If we were to invoke Occam’s Razor, the principle that we should always choose the simplest explanation, then for electrons and quarks there is a clear winner. Not so for neutrinos.

I’m not actually going to make this argument. That’s because I’m a bit wary of using Occam’s Razor when it comes to questions of fundamental physics. Occam’s Razor is a good principle to use, if you have a good idea of what’s “normal”. In physics, you don’t.

To illustrate, I’ll tell an old joke about cows and trains. Here’s the version from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time:

There are three men on a train. One of them is an economist and one of them is a logician and one of them is a mathematician. And they have just crossed the border into Scotland (I don’t know why they are going to Scotland) and they see a brown cow standing in a field from the window of the train (and the cow is standing parallel to the train). And the economist says, ‘Look, the cows in Scotland are brown.’ And the logician says, ‘No. There are cows in Scotland of which at least one is brown.’ And the mathematician says, ‘No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown.’

One side of this cow appears to be very fluffy.

If we want to be as careful as possible, the mathematician’s answer is best. But we expect not to have to be so careful. Maybe the economist’s answer, that Scottish cows are brown, is too broad. But we could imagine an agronomist who states “There is a breed of cows in Scotland that is brown”. And I suggest we should find that pretty reasonable. Essentially, we’re using Occam’s Razor: if we want to explain seeing a brown half-cow from a train, the simplest explanation would be that it’s a member of a breed of cows that are brown. It would be less simple if the cow were unique, a brown mutant in a breed of black and white cows. It would be even less simple if only one side of the cow were brown, and the other were another color.

When we use Occam’s Razor in this way, we’re drawing from our experience of cows. Most of the cows we meet are members of some breed or other, with similar characteristics. We don’t meet many mutant cows, or half-colored cows, so we think of those options as less simple, and less likely.

But what kind of experience tells us which option is simpler for electrons, or neutrinos?

The Standard Model is a type of theory called a Quantum Field Theory. We have experience with other Quantum Field Theories: we use them to describe materials, metals and fluids and so forth. Still, it seems a bit odd to say that if something is typical of these materials, it should also be typical of the universe. As another physicists in my sub-field, Nima Arkani-Hamed, likes to say, “the universe is not a crappy metal!”

We could also draw on our experience from other theories in physics. This is a bit more productive, but has other problems. Our other theories are invariably incomplete, that’s why we come up with new theories in the first place…and with so few theories, compared to breeds of cows, it’s unclear that we really have a good basis for experience.

Physicists like to brag that we study the most fundamental laws of nature. Ordinarily, this doesn’t matter as much as we pretend: there’s a lot to discover in the rest of science too, after all. But here, it really makes a difference. Unlike other fields, we don’t know what’s “normal”, so we can’t really tell which theories are “simpler” than others. We can make aesthetic judgements, on the simplicity of the math or the number of fields or the quality of the stories we can tell. If we want to be principled and forego all of that, then we’re left on an abyss, a world of bare observations and parameter soup.

If a physicist looks out a train window, will they say that all the electrons they see get their mass from the Higgs? Maybe, still. But they should be careful about it.

Lessons From Neutrinos, Part II

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Last week I talked about the history of neutrinos. Neutrinos come in three types, or “flavors”. Electron neutrinos are the easiest: they’re produced alongside electrons and positrons in the different types of beta decay. Electrons have more massive cousins, called muon and tau particles. As it turns out, each of these cousins has a corresponding flavor of neutrino: muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos.

For quite some time, physicists thought that all of these neutrinos had zero mass.

(If the idea of a particle with zero mass confuses you, think about photons. A particle with zero mass travels, like a photon, at the speed of light. This doesn’t make them immune to gravity: just as no light can escape a black hole, neither can any other massless particle. It turns out that once you take into account Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity cares about energy, not just mass.)

Eventually, physicists started to realize they were wrong, and neutrinos had a small non-zero mass after all. Their reason why might seem a bit strange, though. Physicists didn’t weigh the neutrinos, or measure their speed. Instead, they observed that different flavors of neutrinos transform into each other. We say that they oscillate: electron neutrinos oscillate into muon or tau neutrinos, which oscillate into the other flavors, and so on. Over time, a beam of electron neutrinos will become a beam of mostly tau and muon neutrinos, before becoming a beam of electron neutrinos again.

That might not sound like it has much to do with mass. To understand why it does, you’ll need to learn this post’s lesson:

Lesson 2: Mass is just How Particles Move

Oscillating particles seem like a weird sort of evidence for mass. What would be a more normal kind of evidence?

Those of you who’ve taken physics classes might remember the equation $F=ma$ . Apply a known force to something, see how much it accelerates, and you can calculate its mass. If you’ve had a bit more physics, you’ll know that this isn’t quite the right equation to use for particles close to the speed of light, but that there are other equations we can use in a similar way. In particular, using relativity, we have $E^2=p^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4$ . (At rest, $p=0$ , and we have the famous $E=mc^2$ ). This lets us do the same kind of thing: give something a kick and see how it moves.

So let’s say we do that: we give a particle a kick, and measure it later. I’ll visualize this with a tool physicists use called a Feynman diagram. The line represents a particle traveling from one side to the other, from “kick” to “measurement”:

Because we only measure the particle at the end, we might miss if something happens in between. For example, it might interact with another particle or field, like this:

If we don’t know about this other field, then when we try to measure the particle’s mass we will include interactions like this. As it turns out, this is how the Higgs boson works: the Higgs field interacts with particles like electrons and quarks, changing how they move, so that they appear to have mass.

Quantum particles can do other things too. You might have heard people talk about one particle turning into a pair of temporary “virtual particles”. When people say that, they usually have a diagram in mind like this:

In particle physics, we need to take into account every diagram of this kind, every possible thing that could happen in between “kick” and measurement. The final result isn’t one path or another, but a sum of all the different things that could have happened in between. So when we measure the mass of a particle, we’re including every diagram that’s allowed: everything that starts with our “kick” and ends with our measurement.

Now what if our particle can transform, from one flavor to another?

Now we have a new type of thing that can happen in between “kick” and measurement. And if it can happen once, it can happen more than once:

Remember that, when we measure mass, we’re measuring a sum of all the things that can happen in between. That means our particle could oscillate back and forth between different flavors many many times, and we need to take every possibility into account. Because of that, it doesn’t actually make sense to ask what the mass is for one flavor, for just electron neutrinos or just muon neutrinos. Instead, mass is for the thing that actually moves: an average (actually, a quantum superposition) over all the different flavors, oscillating back and forth any number of times.

When a process like beta decay produces an electron neutrino, the thing that actually moves is a mix (again, a superposition) of particles with these different masses. Because each of these masses respond to their initial “kick” in different ways, you see different proportions of them over time. Try to measure different flavors at the end, and you’ll find different ones depending on when and where you measure. That’s the oscillation effect, and that’s why it means that neutrinos have mass.

It’s a bit more complicated to work out the math behind this, but not unreasonably so: it’s simpler than a lot of other physics calculations. Working through the math, we find that by measuring how long it takes neutrinos to oscillate we can calculate the differences between (squares of) neutrino masses. What we can’t calculate are the masses themselves. We know they’re small: neutrinos travel at almost the speed of light, and our cosmological models of the universe have surprisingly little room for massive neutrinos: too much mass, and our universe would look very different than it does today. But we don’t know much more than that. We don’t even know the order of the masses: you might assume electron neutrinos are on average lighter than muon neutrinos, which are lighter than tau neutrinos…but it could easily be the other way around! We also don’t know whether neutrinos get their mass from the Higgs like other particles do, or if they work in a completely different way.

Unlike other mysteries of physics, we’ll likely have the answer to some of these questions soon. People are already picking through the data from current experiments, seeing if they hint towards one order of masses or the other, or to one or the other way for neutrinos to get their mass. More experiments will start taking data this year, and others are expected to start later this decade. At some point, the textbooks may well have more “normal” mass numbers for each of the neutrinos. But until then, they serve as a nice illustration of what mass actually means in particle physics.

Lessons From Neutrinos, Part I

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Some of the particles of the Standard Model are more familiar than others. Electrons and photons, of course, everyone has heard of, and most, though not all, have heard of quarks. Many of the rest, like the W and Z boson, only appear briefly in high-energy colliders. But one Standard Model particle is much less exotic, and nevertheless leads to all manner of confusion. That particle is the neutrino.

Neutrinos are very light, much lighter than even an electron. (Until relatively recently, we thought they were completely massless!) They have no electric charge and they don’t respond to the strong nuclear force, so aside from gravity (negligible since they’re so light), the only force that affects them is the weak nuclear force. This force is, well, weak. It means neutrinos can be produced via the relatively ordinary process of radioactive beta decay, but it also means they almost never interact with anything else. Vast numbers of neutrinos pass through you every moment, with no noticeable effect. We need enormous tanks of liquid or chunks of ice to have a chance of catching neutrinos in action.

Because neutrinos are both ordinary and unfamiliar, they tend to confuse people. I’d like to take advantage of this confusion to teach some physics. Neutrinos turn out to be a handy theme to convey a couple blog posts worth of lessons about why physics works the way it does.

I’ll start on the historical side. There’s a lesson that physicists themselves learned in the early days:

Lesson 1: Don’t Throw out a Well-Justified Conservation Law

In the early 20th century, physicists were just beginning to understand radioactivity. They could tell there were a few different types: gamma decay released photons in the form of gamma rays, alpha decay shot out heavy, positively charged particles, and beta decay made “beta particles”, or electrons. For each of these, physicists could track each particle and measure its energy and momentum. Everything made sense for gamma and alpha decay…but not for beta decay. Somehow, they could add up the energy of each of the particles they could track, and find less at the end than they did at the beginning. It was as if energy was not conserved.

These were the heady early days of quantum mechanics, so people were confused enough that many thought this was the end of the story. Maybe energy just isn’t conserved? Wolfgang Pauli, though, thought differently. He proposed that there had to be another particle, one that no-one could detect, that made energy balance out. It had to be neutral, so he called it the neutron…until two years later when James Chadwick discovered the particle we call the neutron. This was much too heavy to be Pauli’s neutron, so Edoardo Amaldi joked that Pauli’s particle was a “neutrino” instead. The name stuck, and Pauli kept insisting his neutrino would turn up somewhere. It wasn’t until 1956 that neutrinos were finally detected, so for quite a while people made fun of Pauli for his quixotic quest.

Including a Faust parody with Gretchen as the neutrino

In retrospect, people should probably have known better. Conservation of energy isn’t one of those rules that come out of nowhere. It’s deeply connected to time, and to the idea that one can perform the same experiment at any time in history and find the same result. While rules like that sometimes do turn out wrong, our first expectation should be that they won’t. Nowadays, we’re confident enough in energy conservation that we plan to use it to detect other particles: it was the main way the Large Hadron Collider planned to try to detect dark matter.

As we came to our more modern understanding, physicists started writing up the Standard Model. Neutrinos were thought of as massless, like photons, traveling at the speed of light. Now, we know that neutrinos have mass…but we don’t know how much mass they have. How do we know they have mass then? To understand that, you’ll need to understand what mass actually means in physics. We’ll talk about that next week!

The Winding Path of a Physics Conversation

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In my line of work, I spend a lot of time explaining physics. I write posts here of course, and give the occasional public lecture. I also explain physics when I supervise Master’s students, and in a broader sense whenever I chat with my collaborators or write papers. I’ll explain physics even more when I start teaching. But of all the ways to explain physics, there’s one that has always been my favorite: the one-on-one conversation.

Talking science one-on-one is validating in a uniquely satisfying way. You get instant feedback, questions when you’re unclear and comprehension when you’re close. There’s a kind of puzzle to it, discovering what you need to fill in the gaps in one particular person’s understanding. As a kid, I’d chase this feeling with imaginary conversations: I’d plot out a chat with Democritus or Newton, trying to explain physics or evolution or democracy. It was a game, seeing how I could ground our modern understanding in concepts someone from history already knew.

I’ll never get a chance in real life to explain physics to a Democritus or a Newton, to bridge a gap quite that large. But, as I’ve discovered over the years, everyone has bits and pieces they don’t yet understand. Even focused on the most popular topics, like black holes or elementary particles, everyone has gaps in what they’ve managed to pick up. I do too! So any conversation can be its own kind of adventure, discovering what that one person knows, what they don’t, and how to connect the two.

Of course, there’s fun in writing and public speaking too (not to mention, of course, research). Still, I sometimes wonder if there’s a career out there in just the part I like best: just one conversation after another, delving deep into one person’s understanding, making real progress, then moving on to the next. It wouldn’t be efficient by any means, but it sure sounds fun.

4 gravitons

The trials and tribulations of four gravitons and a physicist