The Quantum Story

NOTE EDITORE

The twentieth century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world's leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the pinnacle of wonderment and to the very depths of human despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed weapons with the capacity to destroy our reality, whilst at the same time denying us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend it. Almost everything we think we know about the nature of our world comes from one theory of physics. This theory was discovered and refined in the first thirty years of the twentieth century and went on to become quite simply the most successful theory of physics ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the twenty-first century technology that we have learned to take for granted. But its success has come at a price, for it has at the same time completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at the level of its most fundamental constituents. Rejecting the fundamental elements of uncertainty and chance implied by quantum theory, Albert Einstein once famously declared that 'God does not play dice'. Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it. The charismatic American physicist Richard Feynman went further: he claimed that nobody understands it. This is quantum theory, and this book tells its story. Jim Baggott presents a celebration of this wonderful yet wholly disconcerting theory, with a history told in forty episodes -- significant moments of truth or turning points in the theory's development. From its birth in the porcelain furnaces used to study black body radiation in 1900, to the promise of stimulating new quantum phenomena to be revealed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider over a hundred years later, this is the extraordinary story of the quantum world. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.

SOMMARIO

1 - An Act of Desperation: Berlin 19002 - Independent Energy Quanta: Bern 19053 - Quantum Numbers and Quantum Jumps: Manchester 19134 - Wave-particle Duality: Paris 19235 - Strangely Beautiful Interior: Helgoland 19256 - A Late Erotic Outburst: Swiss Alps 19257 - The Self-rotating Electron: Leiden 19258 - Quantum Probability: Göttingen 19269 - The Whole Idea of Quantum Jumps Necessarily Leads to Nonsense: Copenhagen 192610 - Uncertainty Principle: Copenhagen 192711 - The Copenhagen Interpretation: Copenhagen 192712 - Complementarity: Lake Como 192713 - Gedankenexperiment: Brussels 192714 - An Absolute Wonder: Cambridge 192715 - A Certain Unreasonableness: Brussels 193016 - A Bolt from the Blue: Copenhagen 193517 - The Paradox of Schrödinger's Cat: Oxford 193518 - Crisis: Shelter Island 194719 - Quantum Electrodynamics: Oldstone 194920 - Gauge Symmetry and Gauge Theories: Princeton 195421 - Three Quarks for Muster Mark: Pasadena 196322 - The Higgs Mechanism: Edinburgh 196523 - Electro-weak Unification: Harvard 196724 - Deep Inelastic Scattering: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center 196725 - Asymptotic Freedom and Quantum Chromodynamics: Harvard 197326 - The November Revolution: Brookhaven and SLAC 197427 - The W and Z Bosons: CERN 198328 - Completing the Picture: Fermilab 199429 - Hidden Variables: Princeton 195130 - Bell's Theorem: Geneva 196431 - The Aspect Experiments: Paris 198232 - Beating the Uncertainty Principle: Albuquerque 199133 - Three-photon GHZ States: Vienna 200034 - Reality, Whether Local or Not: Vienna 200735 - That Damned Equation: Princeton 196736 - The First Superstring Revolution: Aspen 198437 - The Quantum Structure of Space: Santa Barbara 198638 - No Consistency Without Contingency: Durham 199539 - The Second Superstring Revolution: Los Angeles 199540 - Resolving the Impasse: CERN 2008

AUTORE

Jim Baggott is a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to work with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation (OUP, 2015), Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle' (OUP, 2012), and A Beginner's Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005).

ALTRE INFORMAZIONI

• Condizione: Nuovo
• ISBN: 9780198784777
• Collana: Oxford Landmark Science
• Dimensioni: 233 x 37.9 x 160 mm Ø 674 gr
• Formato: Brossura
• Illustration Notes: Two 8pp black and white plate sectionn, 26 black and white line drawings
• Pagine Arabe: 496