Waves in an Impossible Sea

What Hacker News says

1. financetechbroMar 2025
   If you want to learn more of about current theory and experiments I suggest you pick up “Waves in an impossible sea” by Matt Strassler
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2. pantulisMar 2025
   Strassler is usually more technical than your run-of-the-mill popsci writer. But his book "Waves in an impossible sea" is much more accessible.
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3. rfonsecaFeb 2025
   The book Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler goes deep into explaining precisely this. https://profmattstrassler.com/waves-in-an-impossible-sea/
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4. jmcclellSep 2024
   The book Waves in an Impossible Sea really goes into some depth on this (for a layman -- which I am) and tries to drive home the point that there are two perspectives one might take. There's the perspective of the medium and the perspective of the field.

   Using wind, as an example, we can measure the wind speed/direction at various points in a given space. We don't need to know what wind is to feel its effects. Instead, we might view it as a force wave that propagates through space and interacts with everyday objects. The measurements of this force that we take at various points in space across a given area form what we might call the Wind Field. We don't need to know the nature of the medium these wind waves propagate through in order to study wind and how it interacts with other objects. This is the field perspective.

   Of course, we know that wind is really an effect of air molecules moving through space. That is, the medium for wind is the atmosphere. This gives us deeper insight into what wind is and how it works. This is the medium perspective.

   According to the book, we don't know what the media for the elementary particles are or if there even are any. Our intuition based on waves that we see in everyday life tell us that there must be some medium through which the wave can propagate, but thus far we have found no such medium for waves such as light.

   We just know there are measurable properties that we can measure across points in space and we have created mathematical objects (fields) to represent this. From there, we can construct theories and make predictions based on these models.

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5. layer8Jun 2024
   There are no good analogies I know of. I wouldn't say it's like binary in any way, but I also wouldn't say that that everything builds up from binary in CS. There is really no particular relation to (or benefits of having) computer expertise.

   Two recent popular books about QFT are:

   Matt Strassler’s Waves in an Impossible Sea (no math, just hand-wavy analogies): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB3LZXR9/

   Sean Carroll’s Quanta and Fields (tries to give you a basic understanding of the actual math): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593186605/

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6. mannykannotJun 2024
   There's an association here to another topic which came up recently: a review of Matt Strassler's new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea [1]. Professor Strassler says a big motivation for writing this book was what he calls 'phibs': 'explanations' of physics so bowdlerized that they are not just uninformative, but at least misleading and sometimes outright wrong. The particular phib which got him started was a commonly-repeated attempt to give an idea of how the Higgs field gives rise to the masses of certain particles [2]

   [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607307

   [2] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field...

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