Download or read book What Is Real written by Adam Becker and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science." --New York Times Book Review An Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review Longlisted for PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Longlisted for Goodreads Choice Award Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's solipsistic and poorly reasoned Copenhagen interpretation. Indeed, questioning it has long meant professional ruin, yet some daring physicists, such as John Bell, David Bohm, and Hugh Everett, persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. What Is Real? is the gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth. "An excellent, accessible account." --Wall Street Journal "Splendid. . . . Deeply detailed research, accompanied by charming anecdotes about the scientists." --Washington Post

Download or read book Quantum Legacies written by David Kaiser and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ideas at the root of quantum theory remain stubbornly, famously bizarre: a solid world reduced to puffs of probability; particles that tunnel through walls; cats suspended in zombielike states, neither alive nor dead; and twinned particles that share entangled fates. For more than a century, physicists have grappled with these conceptual uncertainties while enmeshed in the larger uncertainties of the social and political worlds around them, a time pocked by the rise of fascism, cataclysmic world wars, and a new nuclear age. In Quantum Legacies, David Kaiser introduces readers to iconic episodes in physicists’ still-unfolding quest to understand space, time, and matter at their most fundamental. In a series of vibrant essays, Kaiser takes us inside moments of discovery and debate among the great minds of the era—Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking, and many more who have indelibly shaped our understanding of nature—as they have tried to make sense of a messy world. Ranging across space and time, the episodes span the heady 1920s, the dark days of the 1930s, the turbulence of the Cold War, and the peculiar political realities that followed. In those eras as in our own, researchers’ ambition has often been to transcend the vagaries of here and now, to contribute lasting insights into how the world works that might reach beyond a given researcher’s limited view. In Quantum Legacies, Kaiser unveils the difficult and unsteady work required to forge some shared understanding between individuals and across generations, and in doing so, he illuminates the deep ties between scientific exploration and the human condition.

Download or read book Helgoland written by Carlo Rovelli and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of 2021 by the Financial Times and a Best Science Book of 2021 by The Guardian “Rovelli is a genius and an amazing communicator… This is the place where science comes to life.” ―Neil Gaiman “One of the warmest, most elegant and most lucid interpreters to the laity of the dazzling enigmas of his discipline...[a] momentous book” ―John Banville, The Wall Street Journal A startling new look at quantum theory, from the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Anaximander. One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it.

Download or read book Einstein s Unfinished Revolution written by Lee Smolin and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A daring new vision of the quantum universe, and the scandals controversies, and questions that may illuminate our future--from Canada's leading mind on contemporary physics. Quantum physics is the golden child of modern science. It is the basis of our understanding of atoms, radiation, and so much else, from elementary particles and basic forces to the behaviour of materials. But for a century it has also been the problem child of science, plagued by intense disagreements between its intellectual giants, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking, over the strange paradoxes and implications that seem like the stuff of fantasy. Whether it's Schrödinger's cat--a creature that is simultaneously dead and alive--or a belief that the world does not exist independently of our observations of it, quantum theory is what challenges our fundamental assumptions about our reality. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, globally renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin provocatively argues that the problems which have bedeviled quantum physics since its inception are unsolved for the simple reason that the theory is incomplete. There is more, waiting to be discovered. Our task--if we are to have simple answers to our simple questions about the universe we live in--must be to go beyond it to a description of the world on an atomic scale that makes sense. In this vibrant and accessible book, Smolin takes us on a journey through the basics of quantum physics, introducing the stories of the experiments and figures that have transformed the field, before wrestling with the puzzles and conundrums that they present. Along the way, he illuminates the existing theories about the quantum world that might solve these problems, guiding us toward his own vision that embraces common sense realism. If we are to have any hope of completing the revolution that Einstein began nearly a century ago, we must go beyond quantum mechanics as we know it to find a theory that will give us a complete description of nature. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, Lee Smolin brings us a step closer to resolving one of the greatest scientific controversies of our age.

Download or read book Quantum Reality written by Nick Herbert and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-09-21 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clearly explained layman's introduction to quantum physics is an accessible excursion into metaphysics and the meaning of reality. Herbert exposes the quantum world and the scientific and philosophical controversy about its interpretation.

Download or read book Beyond Weird written by Philip Ball and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-10-14 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seem obvious or right at all—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.

Download or read book New Research in Quantum Physics written by Volodymyr Krasnoholovets and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This outstanding new volume brings together state of the art developments in quantum physics. The forefront of contemporary advances in physics lies in the submicroscopic regime, whether it be in atomic, nuclear, condensed-matter, plasma, or particle physics, or in quantum optics, or even in the study of stellar structure. All are based upon quantum theory (i.e., quantum mechanics and quantum field theory) and relativity, which together form the theoretical foundations of modern physics. a range of possible values are in quantum theory constrained to have discontinuous, or discrete, values. The intrinsically deterministic character of classical physics is replaced in quantum theory by intrinsic uncertainty. According to quantum theory, electromagnetic radiation does not always consist of continuous waves; instead it must be viewed under some circumstances as a collection of particle-like photons, the energy and momentum of each being directly proportional to its frequency (or inversely proportional to its wavelength, the photons still possessing some wavelike characteristics). Classical Concepts (Millard Baublitz, JR, Boston University); Irreversible Time Flow and Hilbert Space Structure (Pavel Kundrat, Milos V. Lokajicek, Institute of Physics, AVCR, Czech Republic); Time as a Dynamical Variable (Z. Y. Wang, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and B. Chen, University of Central Florida); Gamow Vectors and Time Asymmetric Quantum Mechanics (M. Gadella, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain, and S. Wickramasekara, St. Olaf College); Nonperturbative Methods in Quantum Mechanics: The Gaussian Functional Approach (J. Casahorran, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain); Wave Packet Dynamics and Tunneling in External Time Dependent Fields: A Semiclassical Real-Time Approach (Markus Saltzer and Joachim Ankerhold, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg, Germany); Finite Size Scaling in Quantum Mechanics (Sabre Kais, Purdue University and Pablo Serra, Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Argentina); Nonlocality in Time of Interaction in Theories with Disparate Energy Scales (Renat Kh. Gainutdinov and Aigul A. Mutygullina, Kazan State University, Russia); Classical and Quantum Mechanics of A

Download or read book Developments in Quantum Physics written by Frank H. Columbus and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forefront of contemporary advances in physics lies in the submicroscopic regime, whether it be in atomic, nuclear, condensed-matter, plasma, or particle physics, or in quantum optics, or even in the study of stellar structure. All are based upon quantum theory (i.e., quantum mechanics and quantum field theory) and relativity, which together form the theoretical foundations of modern physics. Many physical quantities whose classical counterparts vary continuously over a range of possible values are in quantum theory constrained to have discontinuous, or discrete, values. The intrinsically deterministic character of classical physics is replaced in quantum theory by intrinsic uncertainty. According to quantum theory, electromagnetic radiation does not always consist of continuous waves; instead, it must be viewed under some circumstances as a collection of particle-like photons, the energy and momentum of each being directly proportional to its frequency (or inversely proportional to its wavelength, the photons still possessing some wavelike characteristics).

Download or read book How the Hippies Saved Physics written by David Kaiser and published by W.W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, quantum information theory is among the most exciting scientific frontiers, attracting billions of dollars in funding and thousands of talented researchers. But as MIT physicist and historian David Kaiser reveals, this cutting-edge field has a surprisingly psychedelic past. How the Hippies Saved Physics introduces us to a band of freewheeling physicists who defied the imperative to "shut up and calculate" and helped to rejuvenate modern physics. For physicists, the 1970s were a time of stagnation. Jobs became scarce, and conformity was encouraged, sometimes stifling exploration of the mysteries of the physical world. Dissatisfied, underemployed, and eternally curious, an eccentric group of physicists in Berkeley, California, banded together to throw off the constraints of the physics mainstream and explore the wilder side of science. Dubbing themselves the "Fundamental Fysiks Group," they pursued an audacious, speculative approach to physics. They studied quantum entanglement and Bell's Theorem through the lens of Eastern mysticism and psychic mind-reading, discussing the latest research while lounging in hot tubs. Some even dabbled with LSD to enhance their creativity. Unlikely as it may seem, these iconoclasts spun modern physics in a new direction, forcing mainstream physicists to pay attention to the strange but exciting underpinnings of quantum theory. A lively, entertaining story that illuminates the relationship between creativity and scientific progress, How the Hippies Saved Physics takes us to a time when only the unlikeliest heroes could break the science world out of its rut.

Download or read book Something Deeply Hidden written by Sean Carroll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As you read these words, copies of you are being created. Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of twentieth-century physics. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time. His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything. Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: Physics has been in crisis since 1927. Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gaps—which have come to be simply ignored. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand. Academics discourage students from working on the "dead end" of quantum foundations. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. There are many, many Sean Carrolls. Many of every one of us. Copies of you are generated thousands of times per second. The Many-Worlds theory of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didn't happen. Step-by-step in Carroll's uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established. Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe. We are on the threshold of a new understanding—of where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of.

Download or read book Quantum Aspects of Life written by Derek Abbott and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2008-09-12 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the hotly debated question of whether quantum mechanics plays a non-trivial role in biology. In a timely way, it sets out a distinct quantum biology agenda. The burgeoning fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum technology, and quantum information processing are now strongly converging. The acronym BINS, for Bio-Info-Nano-Systems, has been coined to describe the synergetic interface of these several disciplines. The living cell is an information replicating and processing system that is replete with naturally-evolved nanomachines, which at some level require a quantum mechanical description. As quantum engineering and nanotechnology meet, increasing use will be made of biological structures, or hybrids of biological and fabricated systems, for producing novel devices for information storage and processing and other tasks. An understanding of these systems at a quantum mechanical level will be indispensable. Contents:Foreword (Sir R Penrose)Emergence and Complexity:A Quantum Origin of Life? (P C W Davies)Quantum Mechanics and Emergence (S Lloyd)Quantum Mechanisms in Biology:Quantum Coherence and the Search for the First Replicator (J Al-Khalili & J McFadden)Ultrafast Quantum Dynamics in Photosynthesis (A O Castro, F F Olsen, C F Lee & N F Johnson)Modelling Quantum Decoherence in Biomolecules (J Bothma, J Gilmore & R H McKenzie)The Biological Evidence:Molecular Evolution: A Role for Quantum Mechanics in the Dynamics of Molecular Machines that Read and Write DNA (A Goel)Memory Depends on the Cytoskeleton, but is it Quantum? (A Mershin & D V Nanopoulos)Quantum Metabolism and Allometric Scaling Relations in Biology (L Demetrius)Spectroscopy of the Genetic Code (J D Bashford & P D Jarvis)Towards Understanding the Origin of Genetic Languages (A D Patel)Artificial Quantum Life:Can Arbitrary Quantum Systems Undergo Self-Replication? (A K Pati & S L Braunstein)A Semi-Quantum Version of the Game of Life (A P Flitney & D Abbott)Evolutionary Stability in Quantum Games (A Iqbal & T Cheon)Quantum Transmemetic Intelligence (E W Piotrowski & J S≈adkowski)The Debate:Dreams versus Reality: Plenary Debate Session on Quantum Computing (For Panel: C M Caves, D Lidar, H Brandt, A R Hamilton, Against Panel: D K Ferry, J Gea-Banacloche, S M Bezrukov, L B Kish, Debate Chair: C R Doering, Transcript Editor: D Abbott)Plenary Debate: Quantum Effects in Biology: Trivial or Not? (For Panel: P C W Davies, S Hameroff, A Zeilinger, D Abbott, Against Panel: J Eisert, H M Wiseman, S M Bezrukov, H Frauenfelder, Debate Chair: J Gea-Banacloche, Transcript Editor: D Abbott)Nontrivial Quantum Effects in Biology: A Skeptical Physicist's View (H Wiseman & J Eisert)That's Life! — The Geometry of π Electron Clouds (S Hameroff) Readership: Graduate students and researchers in quantum physics, biophysics, nanosciences, quantum chemistry, mathematical biology and complexity theory, as well as philosophers of science. Keywords:Quantum Biology;Quantum Computation;Quantum Mechanics;Biophysics;Nanotechnology;Quantum Technology;Quantum Information Processing;Bio-Info-Nano-Systems (BINS);Emergence;Complexity;Complex Systems;Cellular Automata;Game Theory;Biomolecules;Photosynthesis;DNA;Genetic Code;DecoherenceKey Features:Is structured in a debate style, where contributors argue opposing positionsBrings together some of the finest minds and latest developments in the fieldIs entirely unique and there are no competing titles

Download or read book Frontiers in Quantum Physics Research written by Frank H. Columbus and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new book examines new research in the exploding field of quantum physics. The forefront of contemporary advances in physics lies in the submicroscopic regime, whether it be in atomic, nuclear, condensed-matter, plasma, or particle physics, or in quantum optics, or even in the study of stellar structure. All are based upon quantum theory (i.e., quantum mechanics and quantum field theory) and relativity, which together form the theoretical foundations of modern physics. Many physical quantities whose classical counterparts vary continuously over a range of possible values are in quantum theory constrained to have discontinuous, or discrete, values. The intrinsically deterministic character of classical physics is replaced in quantum theory by intrinsic uncertainty. According to quantum theory, electromagnetic radiation does not always consist of continuous waves; instead it must be viewed under some circumstances as a collection of particle-like photons, the energy and momentum of each being directly proportional to its frequency (or inversely proportional to its wavelength, the photons still possessing some wavelike characteristics).

Download or read book Quantum Mind and Social Science written by Alexander Wendt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique contribution to the understanding of social science, showing the implications of quantum physics for the nature of human society.

Download or read book New Topics in Quantum Physics Research written by Volodymyr Krasnoholovets and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the various branches of physics differ in their experimental methods and theoretical approaches, certain general principles apply to all of them. The forefront of contemporary advances in physics lies in the submicroscopic regime, whether it be in atomic, nuclear, condensed-matter, plasma, or particle physics, or in quantum optics, or even in the study of stellar structure. All are based upon quantum theory (i.e., quantum mechanics and quantum field theory) and relativity, which together form the theoretical foundations of modern physics. Many physical quantities whose classical counterparts vary continuously over a range of possible values are in quantum theory constrained to have discontinuous, or discrete, values. The intrinsically deterministic character of classical physics is replaced in quantum theory by intrinsic uncertainty. According to quantum theory, electromagnetic radiation does not always consist of continuous waves; instead it must be viewed under some circumstances as a collection of particle-like photons, the energy and momentum of each being directly proportional to its frequency (or inversely proportional to its wavelength, the photons still possessing some wavelike characteristics). This book presents state of art research from around the world.

Download or read book From Data to Quanta written by Slobodan Perovic and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Niels Bohr was a central figure in quantum physics, well-known for his work on atomic structure and his contributions to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this book, philosopher Slobodan Perović explores the way Bohr practiced and understood physics, and the implications of this for our understanding of modern science, especially contemporary quantum experimental physics. Perović's method of studying Bohr is philosophical-historical, and his aim is to make sense of both Bohr's understanding of physics and his method of inquiry. He argues that in several important respects, Bohr's vision of physics was driven by his desire to develop a comprehensive perspective on key features of experimental observation as well as emerging experimental work. Perović uncovers how Bohr's distinctive breakthrough contributions are characterized by a multi-layered, phased approach of building on basic experimental insights inductively to develop intermediary and overarching hypotheses. The strengths and limitations of this approach, in contrast to the mathematically or metaphysically driven approaches of other physicists at the time, made him a thoroughly distinctive kind of theorist and scientific leader. Once we see that Bohr played the typical role of a laboratory mediator, and excelled in the inductive process this required, we can fully understand the way his work was generated, the role it played in developing novel quantum concepts, and its true limitations, as well as current adherence to and use of Bohr's complementarity approach among contemporary experimentalists"--

Download or read book Quantum Steampunk written by Nicole Yunger Halpern and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The science-fiction genre known as steampunk juxtaposes futuristic technologies with Victorian settings. This fantasy is becoming reality at the intersection of two scientific fields-twenty-first-century quantum physics and nineteenth-century thermodynamics, or the study of energy-in a discipline known as quantum steampunk"--

Download or read book The Possibility Principle written by Mel Schwartz and published by Sounds True. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How would you like to experience your life? It’s an intriguing question, and yet we’ve been conditioned to believe our life visions and goals are often unattainable—until now. With The Possibility Principle, psychotherapist Mel Schwartz offers a revolutionary approach to living the life we choose. Though science has vastly expanded our knowledge, it has also led us to adopt a worldview where we see ourselves as insignificant specks living in a mechanical universe. Now, insights from quantum physics reveal that our universe is, in fact, a vibrantly intelligent reality and that each of us plays a vital role in shaping it. In this groundbreaking book, Schwartz shows us how to integrate this new quantum worldview into our everyday lives, allowing us to transcend our limitations and open to infinite possibilities. The Possibility Principle reveals how we can apply the three core tenets of quantum physics—inseparability, uncertainty, and potentiality—to live the life we choose, free from the wounds of our past and the constraints of our old beliefs. You can learn to: Develop a mastery of your thinking as you free yourself from the replication of old thought patterns • Utilize the concept of wave collapse to realize that you are not imprisoned by your genes, brain chemistry, or past traumas • Overcome anxiety and depression through a shift of mind • Thrive in resilient relationships and develop powerful communication skills that foster empowerment and intimate connection • Embrace uncertainty to ride the waves of personal change