About Aron Wall
I am a Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Before that, I read Great Books at St. John's College (Santa Fe), got my physics Ph.D. from U Maryland, and did my postdocs at UC Santa Barbara, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Stanford. The views expressed on this blog are my own, and should not be attributed to any of these fine institutions.
Recently I ran across a pretty good explanation of the Higgs mechanism (hat tip Siris) by a certain Rob Knopp, which I thought I'd link to because of its connection with my previous post on fields. When I first looked … Continue reading →
What is the world made out of? In the most usual formulations of our current best theories of physics, the answer is fields. What are those? Well, if you know what a function is, you're already most of the way … Continue reading →
Science requires Approximations. Every kind of professional activity changes the way you think. It rewires your brain so that even when you're off the job, things start looking a certain way. For example, to a computer programmer everything looks like … Continue reading →
Tomorrow is election day here in the US, so I'm going to have a post about elections. It's strictly nonpartisan—people seeking bile can look elsewhere. People often say things like "I'm not voting because it's unlikely that one vote could … Continue reading →
Previously, I described the main formula of Special Relativity: This formula tells us the amount of distance squared between two points (if ) or the amount of duration squared (if ). (By using some trigonometry we can also use this … Continue reading →