What Is Light?

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There are a lot of different criticisms of scientific papers because they're structured in a way that, you know, here's what I set out to test. Our ideas of light often our first experiences with with light might be based on our everyday experience and certainly based on understanding it as a wave. On the question of what is light is the answer it depends on what experiment you're running. Sometimes it's a particle sometimes it's a wave. But somehow out the first concept that we learn of something like that first time you ever saw a picture of an atom and the particles in it were little bilead balls really hard to shakereally hard to shake.

Physics has always sought to deepen our understanding of the nature of matter and the world around us. But how do you conduct experiments with the fundamental building blocks of existence? How do you manipulate a particle a trillion times smaller than a grain of sand? How do you cause a proton to sail around a twenty-seven-kilometer-long loop 11,000 times per second? And, crucially, why is all this important? In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the experiments that changed the course of history.

Shermer and Sheehy discuss: what it’s like being a female physicist in a mostly male field • Does science progress through falsification, confirmation, consensus, or Bayesian reasoning? • atoms, light, Higgs Boson, time, gravity, dark energy, dark matter, string theory, radioactivity • Gold Foil Experiment • cloud chambers • particle accelerators • splitting the atom • Is there a place for God in scientific epistemology? • Is math all there is? Is math universal? • other universes, dimensions, and the multiverse.

Suzie Sheehy is a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time between research groups at the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne. She is currently focused on developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine. The Matter of Everything is her first book.