Download or read book Carbon Queen written by Maia Weinstock and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of trailblazing physicist Mildred Dresselhaus, who expanded our understanding of the physical world. As a girl in New York City in the 1940s, Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus was taught that there were only three career options open to women: secretary, nurse, or teacher. But sneaking into museums, purchasing three-cent copies of National Geographic, and devouring books on the history of science ignited in Dresselhaus (1930–2017) a passion for inquiry. In Carbon Queen, science writer Maia Weinstock describes how, with curiosity and drive, Dresselhaus defied expectations and forged a career as a pioneering scientist and engineer. Dresselhaus made highly influential discoveries about the properties of carbon and other materials and helped reshape our world in countless ways—from electronics to aviation to medicine to energy. She was also a trailblazer for women in STEM and a beloved educator, mentor, and colleague. Her path wasn’t easy. Dresselhaus’s Bronx childhood was impoverished. Her graduate adviser felt educating women was a waste of time. But Dresselhaus persisted, finding mentors in Nobel Prize–winning physicists Rosalyn Yalow and Enrico Fermi. Eventually, Dresselhaus became one of the first female professors at MIT, where she would spend nearly six decades. Weinstock explores the basics of Dresselhaus’s work in carbon nanoscience accessibly and engagingly, describing how she identified key properties of carbon forms, including graphite, buckyballs, nanotubes, and graphene, leading to applications that range from lighter, stronger aircraft to more energy-efficient and flexible electronics.

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 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 The World According to Physics written by Jim Al-Khalili and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scale -- Space and time -- Energy and matter -- The quantum world -- Thermodynamics and the arrow of time -- Unification -- The future of physics -- The usefulness of physics -- Thinking like a physicist.

Download or read book Neutrino Mass written by Guido Altarelli and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-02-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviews the current state of knowledge of neutrino masses and the related question of neutrino oscillations. After an overview of the theory of neutrino masses and mixings, detailed accounts are given of the laboratory limits on neutrino masses, astrophysical and cosmological constraints on those masses, experimental results on neutrino oscillations, the theoretical interpretation of those results, and theoretical models of neutrino masses and mixings. The book concludes with an examination of the potential of long-baseline experiments. This is an essential reference text for workers in elementary-particle physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics.

Download or read book Quantum Reality written by Jim Baggott and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory. It is also completely mad. Although the theory quite obviously works, it leaves us chasing ghosts and phantoms; particles that are waves and waves that are particles; cats that are at once both alive and dead; and lots of seemingly spooky goings-on. But if we're prepared to be a little more specific about what we mean when we talk about 'reality' and a little more circumspect in the way we think a scientific theory might represent such a reality, then all the mystery goes away. This shows that the choice we face is actually a philosophical one. Here, Jim Baggott provides a quick but comprehensive introduction to quantum mechanics for the general reader, and explains what makes this theory so very different from the rest. He also explores the processes involved in developing scientific theories and explains how these lead to different philosophical positions, essential if we are to understand the nature of the great debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. Moving forwards, Baggott then provides a comprehensive guide to attempts to determine what the theory actually means, from the Copenhagen interpretation to many worlds and the multiverse. Richard Feynman once declared that 'nobody understands quantum mechanics'. This book will tell you why.

Download or read book At the Edge of Time written by Dan Hooper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new look at the first few seconds after the Big Bang—and how research into these moments continues to revolutionize our understanding of our universe Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history. Delving into the remarkable science of cosmology, Dan Hooper describes many of the extraordinary and perplexing questions that scientists are asking about the origin and nature of our world. Hooper examines how we are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang and test promising theories for how and why our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. We may be poised to finally discover how dark matter was formed during our universe’s first moments, and, with new telescopes, we are also lifting the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it. Wrestling with the mysteries surrounding the initial moments that followed the Big Bang, At the Edge of Time presents an accessible investigation of our universe and its origin.

Download or read book Void written by James Owen Weatherall and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Physics of Wall Street “deftly explains all you wanted to know about nothingness—a.k.a. the quantum vacuum” (Priyamvada Natarajan, author of Mapping the Heavens). James Owen Weatherall’s bestselling book, The Physics of Wall Street, was named one of Physics Today’s five most intriguing books of 2013. In this work, he takes on a fundamental concept of modern physics: nothing. The physics of stuff—protons, neutrons, electrons, and even quarks and gluons—is at least somewhat familiar to most of us. But what about the physics of nothing? Isaac Newton thought of empty space as nothingness extended in all directions, a kind of theater in which physics could unfold. But both quantum theory and relativity tell us that Newton’s picture can’t be right. Nothing, it turns out, is an awful lot like something, with a structure and properties every bit as complex and mysterious as matter. In his signature lively prose, Weatherall explores the very nature of empty space—and solidifies his reputation as a science writer to watch. Included on the 2017 Best Book List by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “An engaging and interesting account.”—The Economist “Readers get a dose of biography while following such figures as Einstein, Dirac, and Newton to see how top theories about the void have been discovered, developed, and debunked. Weatherall’s clear language and skillful organization adroitly combines history and physics to show readers just how much ‘nothing really matters.’”—Publishers Weekly

Download or read book The Demon in the Machine written by Paul Davies and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A gripping new drama in science ... if you want to understand how the concept of life is changing, read this' Professor Andrew Briggs, University of Oxford When Darwin set out to explain the origin of species, he made no attempt to answer the deeper question: what is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question. Life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. And yet, huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery. So can life be explained by known physics and chemistry, or do we need something fundamentally new? In this penetrating and wide-ranging new analysis, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name, a domain where computing, chemistry, quantum physics and nanotechnology intersect. At the heart of these diverse fields, Davies explains, is the concept of information: a quantity with the power to unify biology with physics, transform technology and medicine, and even to illuminate the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe. From life's murky origins to the microscopic engines that run the cells of our bodies, The Demon in the Machine is a breath-taking journey across the landscape of physics, biology, logic and computing. Weaving together cancer and consciousness, two-headed worms and bird navigation, Davies reveals how biological organisms garner and process information to conjure order out of chaos, opening a window on the secret of life itself.

Download or read book New Physics Framework written by Dan S. Correnti and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2012-07-22 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “New Physics Framework” proposes physical models of the photon and electron and more complex derivatives, namely proton, neutron, atom, molecule, and gas structures. Physical models are also proposed for the four fundamental forces. Establishment of all of these models is based on the substantiation of the electron model and its derived mathematics. By understanding and substantiating the electron model, we can now physically understand phenomena such as the magnetic dipole moment, electromagnetic radiation, electric force, heat, movement of radiation into and out of hydrogen atoms, Pauli's exclusion principle, Lenz's law, the Lamb shift, and mass and its increase with velocity. Understanding whether dark matter and energy are relevant is also studied. /// “New Physics Framework” greatly simplifies our understanding of the physical world. The framework dispenses with the requirement of abstract models described by complex and abstract mathematics. Merging of quantum mechanics with general relativity, which are based on separate unrelated theories, is not required in the new framework, where the four fundamental forces work at the atomic level and gravity works at large scales as well.

Download or read book The End of Everything written by Katie Mack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mack looks at five ways the universe could end, and the lessons each scenario reveals about the most important concepts in cosmology. --From publisher description.

Download or read book Visions of Discovery written by Raymond Y. Chiao and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 827 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World-leading researchers, including Nobel Laureates, explore the most basic questions of science, philosophy, and the nature of existence.

Download or read book God and the New Physics written by P. C. W. Davies and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1984-10-16 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the discoveries of twentieth-century physics--relativity and the quantum theory--demand a radical reformulation of the fundamentals of reality and a way of thinking, that is closer to mysticism than materialism.

Download or read book Modern Particle Physics written by Mark Thomson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 825 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unique in its coverage of all aspects of modern particle physics, this textbook provides a clear connection between the theory and recent experimental results, including the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. It provides a comprehensive and self-contained description of the Standard Model of particle physics suitable for upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students studying experimental particle physics. Physical theory is introduced in a straightforward manner with full mathematical derivations throughout. Fully-worked examples enable students to link the mathematical theory to results from modern particle physics experiments. End-of-chapter exercises, graded by difficulty, provide students with a deeper understanding of the subject. Online resources available at www.cambridge.org/MPP feature password-protected fully-worked solutions to problems for instructors, numerical solutions and hints to the problems for students and PowerPoint slides and JPEGs of figures from the book"--

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 Time And Beauty Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies written by Adrian Bejan and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and beauty are two of our most visceral perceptions. Yet, their nature is seldom questioned. In this ground-breaking new work, Adrian Bejan — a true 'original' among physicists — explains, in a scholarly yet colorful style, the scientific basis for the perception of time and beauty.Organized into three main ideas, the book begins first with the perception of time. The author expounds on why we feel that time flies faster as we get older. Perceived time, also called 'mind time,' is different from clock time. In this context, time is another word for 'perceived change'. Next, readers will discover that beauty is appealing because beautifully-shaped images are scanned faster by two eyes. To observe our immediate surroundings and to understand them faster is highly advantageous to survival; hence, there is an underlying evolutionary advantage to our discernment for ideal ratios, shapes, and beauty at large. Finally, time and beauty are jointly understood to explain why the global pandemic had decelerated our mind time. This understanding arms us with techniques to slow down our mind time (which accelerates with age), and to create the conditions for living longer and more creatively.Scientists may have contemplated aspects of time and beauty separately. In contrast, the author submits an original and rewarding approach to understanding them together. In the process, key questions to our cognition are answered. Why does the mind 'try' to make sense of a new mental image? Why is there a natural tendency to organize a new input and mentally position it among past perceptions? Through physics, the book offers a general answer: to empower the individual with speed and clarity of thought, understanding, decision-making and movement. The same answer holds for the other disparate perceptions illustrated in this book, from time and beauty to ideas, message, shape, perspective, art, science, illusions, and dreams.

Download or read book Indirect Searches for New Physics written by Alexey A. Petrov and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to discuss the search for new physics in charged leptons, neutrons, and quarks in one coherent volume. The area of indirect searches for new physics is highly topical; though no new physics particles have yet been observed directly at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the methods described in this book will provide researchers with the necessary tools to keep searching for new physics. It describes the lines of research that attempt to identify quantum effects of new physics particles in low-energy experiments, in addition to detailing the mathematical basis and theoretical and phenomenological methods involved in the searches, whilst making a clear distinction between model-dependent and model-independent methods employed to make predictions. This book will be a valuable guide for graduate students and early-career researchers in particle and high energy physics who wish to learn about the techniques used in modern predictions of new physics effects at low energies, whilst also serving as a reference for researchers at other levels. Key features: • Takes an accessible, pedagogical approach suitable for graduate students and those seeking an overview of this new and fast-growing field • Illustrates common theoretical trends seen in different subfields of particle physics • Valuable both for researchers in the phenomenology of elementary particles and for experimentalists