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Eighteenth-century chemists famously jumped the gun by using the ancient Greek word “atoms,” referring to the indivisibly small building-blocks of matter, to label the units of chemical elements. Nowadays we know that these atoms are not fundamental, they’re themselves made of smaller particles. But why is it that the particles and fields of the Standard Model come together to form these particular atoms? Let’s find out.

And here is the Q&A video, featuring both a brief appearance from Ariel and a plot of honest experimental constraints.

Why is matter solid, if it’s made out of quantum waves? The answer is revealed in this action-packed episode. It involves Fermi statistics, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and the spin-statistics connection. All illustrated with delightful visual aids.

And here is the Q&A video. Among other things, we talk about what “matter” means to a cosmologist.

Gravity! This one’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser. We take advantage of some of our previous discussion of curvature and spacetime, but we also talk about Einstein’s physical motivations for inventing general relativity, and the origin of gravitational time dilation and the like.

And here is the associated Q&A video. Distinguished mostly by a deeper dive into black holes, including the information-loss puzzle.

Finally a reward for the hard work we did in the last few videos! (Not that hard work isn’t its own reward.) This week we talk about Gauge Theory, explaining how the forces of nature arise because of local symmetries in quantum fields.

And here is the Q&A video, where we go into more specifics about the Higgs mechanism, how it gives mass to particles, and how that plays out in the Standard Model of particle physics.

Cheating by having two ideas this week. But they are big ones. We talk about how “parallel transport” of vectors allows us to define curvature intrinsically, and leads us to the Riemann curvature tensor. Then we move to topology, in particular homotopy groups, which show up in physics all the time.

And here is the associated Q&A video, where we talk a bit about embeddings, tensor components, topological defects, and more.

After three videos in a row about quantum field theory, we bring things a bit more down to earth by talking about the sizes of things. Mostly about particles and atoms; the sizes of people and planets will have to come later.

And here is the associated Q&A video:

The third installment of a little trilogy about the basics of quantum field theory. First we explained free fields, and why they led to particles; then we added interactions and used Feynman diagrams to calculate them; and today we’re going to deal with pesky infinities by introducing effective field theories. A wild ride!

And here is the associated Q&A video:

Last time we figured out that when you start with a theory of noninteracting fields and quantized it, you could think of the result as a theory of noninteracting particles. Now we let those particles interact, and describe what happens using Feynman diagrams.

And here is the associated Q&A video:

We’ve talked about the quantum mechanics of particles, now it’s time to apply those ideas to fields. It requires a bit of effort to understand how a quantum field — which is really a wave on top of a wave, when you think about it — ends up looking like particles in the right circumstances. But it’s worth it.

And here is the Q&A video. I talk a bit about different kinds of fields, and why the Dirac or Klein-Gordon equations are not relativistic versions of the Schrödinger equation.