Building particle physics from the bottom up

If you are a physics student, you have probably felt that understanding physical phenomena involves finding the correct set of equations to describe them, and very carefully solving these equations without making any mistakes.

But, surprisingly, it turns out that physical phenomena are often incredibly constrained by asking for consistency with basic physical principles, and one can more quickly and reliably "just write down the correct final answer" by making sure these are satisfied. In this talk, I will put this philosophy into practice, and show how doing physics in this way is much more forgiving of little mistakes, as we let the consistency conditions guide both our thinking and our computations.

I will start with some simple examples of everyday physics and build up to understanding how relativity and quantum mechanics strongly constrain and dictate the allowed interactions of elementary particles. I will end by explaining how this way of approaching physical problems is even more powerful in the context of the most fundamental observables in particle physics -- scattering amplitudes.