Download or read book The Trouble with Physics written by Lee Smolin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sample Text

Download or read book Not Even Wrong written by Peter Woit and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not Even Wrong is a fascinating exploration of our attempts to come to grips with perhaps the most intellectually demanding puzzle of all: how does the universe work at its most fundamnetal level? The book begins with an historical survey of the experimental and theoretical developments that led to the creation of the phenomenally successful 'Standard Model' of particle physics around 1975. Despite its successes, the Standard Model does not answer all the key questions and physicists continuing search for answers led to the development of superstring theory. However, after twenty years, superstring theory has failed to advance beyond the Standard Model. The absence of experimental evidence is at the core of this controversial situation which means that it is impossible to prove that superstring theory is either right or wrong. To date, only the arguments of the theory's advocates have received much publicity. Not Even Wrong provides readers with another side of the story.

Download or read book Warped Passages written by Lisa Randall and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The universe has many secrets. It may hide additional dimensions of space other than the familier three we recognize. There might even be another universe adjacent to ours, invisible and unattainable . . . for now. Warped Passages is a brilliantly readable and altogether exhilarating journey that tracks the arc of discovery from early twentieth-century physics to the razor's edge of modern scientific theory. One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lisa Randall provides astonishing scientific possibilities that, until recently, were restricted to the realm of science fiction. Unraveling the twisted threads of the most current debates on relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity, she explores some of the most fundamental questions posed by Nature—taking us into the warped, hidden dimensions underpinning the universe we live in, demystifying the science of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond our own.

Download or read book Quantum Theory Groups and Representations written by Peter Woit and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text systematically presents the basics of quantum mechanics, emphasizing the role of Lie groups, Lie algebras, and their unitary representations. The mathematical structure of the subject is brought to the fore, intentionally avoiding significant overlap with material from standard physics courses in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. The level of presentation is attractive to mathematics students looking to learn about both quantum mechanics and representation theory, while also appealing to physics students who would like to know more about the mathematics underlying the subject. This text showcases the numerous differences between typical mathematical and physical treatments of the subject. The latter portions of the book focus on central mathematical objects that occur in the Standard Model of particle physics, underlining the deep and intimate connections between mathematics and the physical world. While an elementary physics course of some kind would be helpful to the reader, no specific background in physics is assumed, making this book accessible to students with a grounding in multivariable calculus and linear algebra. Many exercises are provided to develop the reader's understanding of and facility in quantum-theoretical concepts and calculations.

Download or read book The Strangest Man written by Graham Farmelo and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Dirac was among the great scientific geniuses of the modern age. One of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, the most revolutionary theory of the past century, his contributions had a unique insight, eloquence, clarity, and mathematical power. His prediction of antimatter was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of physics. One of Einstein’s most admired colleagues, Dirac was in 1933 the youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Dirac’s personality is legendary. He was an extraordinarily reserved loner, relentlessly literal-minded and appeared to have no empathy with most people. Yet he was a family man and was intensely loyal to his friends. His tastes in the arts ranged from Beethoven to Cher, from Rembrandt to Mickey Mouse. Based on previously undiscovered archives, The Strangest Man reveals the many facets of Dirac’s brilliantly original mind. A compelling human story, The Strangest Man also depicts a spectacularly exciting era in scientific history.

Download or read book Why String Theory written by Joseph Conlon and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physics World's 'Book of the Year' for 2016 An Entertaining and Enlightening Guide to the Who, What, and Why of String Theory, now also available in an updated reflowable electronic format compatible with mobile devices and e-readers. During the last 50 years, numerous physicists have tried to unravel the secrets of string theory. Yet why do these scientists work on a theory lacking experimental confirmation? Why String Theory? provides the answer, offering a highly readable and accessible panorama of the who, what, and why of this large aspect of modern theoretical physics. The author, a theoretical physics professor at the University of Oxford and a leading string theorist, explains what string theory is and where it originated. He describes how string theory fits into physics and why so many physicists and mathematicians find it appealing when working on topics from M-theory to monsters and from cosmology to superconductors.

Download or read book Farewell to Reality written by Jim Baggott and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From acclaimed science author Jim Baggot, a lively, provocative, and “intellectually gratifying” critique of modern theoretical physics (The Economist). Where does one draw the line between solid science and fairy-tale physics? Jim Baggott argues that there is no observational or experimental evidence for many of the ideas of modern theoretical physics: super-symmetric particles, super strings, the multiverse, the holographic principle, or the anthropic cosmological principle. Unafraid to challenge prominent theorists, Baggott offers engaging portraits of many central figures of modern physics, including Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, John D. Barrow, Brian Greene, and Leonard Susskind. Informed, comprehensive, and balanced, Farewell to Reality discusses the latest ideas about the nature of physical reality while clearly distinguishing between fact and fantasy, providing essential and entertaining reading for everyone interested in what we know and don’t know about the nature of the universe and reality itself.

Download or read book The Aggregate Production Function and the Measurement of Technical Change written by Jesus Felipe and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative and stimulating book represents a fundamental critique of the aggregate production function, a concept widely used in macroeconomics.

Download or read book Shell Beach written by Jesper Møller Grimstrup and published by Dansk Isbn-Kontor. This book was released on 2021-01-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does a final theory really exist? And what does it feel like to spend your life searching for it? These are some of the questions the theoretical physicist Jesper Møller Grimstrup writes about in Shell Beach. It is a book about quantum gravity, about white-water kayaking, and about a life in science. It is about conferences and smoky offices, about the quest for a final theory, and about hitchhiking illegally through Tibet. Jesper Møller Grimstrup has been an active researcher in theoretical physics for the past 20 years and in Shell Beach, he combines his research in high energy physics with his personal adventures. It is a story that involves not only the science but also Kafka's novels, sci-fi movies, and surfing giant waves off the southern shores of Iceland. Shell Beach consists of several intertwined tracks, where hardcore meets soft-core. First, there is the science, which starts with quantum mechanics and relativity and then passes through the standard model of particle physics to end up with modern topics such as noncommutative geometry and loop quantum gravity. Second, there the philosophy, the idea of a final theory, and what we might expect to find, should our search one day come to an end. And finally, there is the personal journey, that begins with a young scientist with independent ideas, who is eventually pushed into an orbit without a job and funded by crowdsourcing. In fact, Shell Beach is the outcome of a crowdfunding campaign that Jesper Møller Grimstrup ran in 2016 - it is one of the perks to his supporters. A key theme in Shell Beach is the idea, that the theory of everything could turn out to be conceptually empty and tell us little of significance. That it will not provide us with answers to our most urgent questions such as "why are we here?" This idea, which Grimstrup's own candidate for a final theory exemplifies, is illustrated through literature and film, and is followed by the question: "what will it do to us if we find that theory?" What will happen to us, seekers of truth, if we actually find what we have been searching for and it turns out to be different than what we had hoped for? Where will we go when there is nowhere else to look for answers? Shell Beach is a rare peek behind the scenes of contemporary high-energy physics and mathematics, where Jesper Møller Grimstrup has been an insider in several of the key research communities such as loop quantum gravity and noncommutative geometry. In his book, Grimstrup invites the reader into the engine room of modern theoretical physics to see how this world works, who is in power, and what the struggle among researchers for ideas and academic position feels like. Shell Beach ends with the author taking the highly unusual step of creating a crowdfunding campaign for then as the first in the world to conduct his research outside of academia financed by private sponsors. Above all Shell Beach is a book about waterfalls. According to Grimstrup, doing research in theoretical physics is like kayaking huge waterfalls in slow-motion: "Our waterfalls are the ideas we pursue and like all big waterfalls you cannot scout them thoroughly from the riverbank - the only way to find out is to enter the main current and go over the edge". THE PRESS WROTE ABOUT THE DANISH EDITION: "Jesper Møller Grimstrup has written a formidable book. I have read many books about physics and science but none that compares to his book" - Jens Ramskov, Science Editor, Ing.dk" It hits the bullseye ... I followed all the trails, fascinated and nicely included. This is not an easy book to reference ... but if you seek the big question you'll end up with even more" - Maria Helleberg, POV-international

Download or read book Not Even Wrong written by Martin Orans and published by Chandler & Sharp Publishers, Incorporated. This book was released on 1996 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Not Even Wrong written by Paul Collins and published by Bloomsbury USA. This book was released on 2004-04-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Paul Collins's son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head...but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation-or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted-will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world. In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, Collins's travels take him from an English churchyard to the Seattle labs of Microsoft, and from a Wisconsin prison cell block to the streets of Vienna. It is a story that reaches from a lonely clearing in the Black Forest into the London palace of King George I, from Defoe and Swift to the discovery of evolution; from the modern dawn of the computer revolution to, in the end, the author's own household. Not Even Wrong is a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology - a meditation on what "normal" is, and how human genius comes to us in strange and wondrous forms.

Download or read book Lost in Math written by Sabine Hossenfelder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "provocative" book (New York Times), a contrarian physicist argues that her field's modern obsession with beauty has given us wonderful math but bad science. Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these "too good to not be true" theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.

Download or read book Through Two Doors at Once written by Anil Ananthaswamy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself--and continues to almost two hundred years later. Many of science's greatest minds have grappled with the simple yet elusive "double-slit" experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newton. Nearly a century later, Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles, and the experiment became key to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality. Richard Feynman held that the double slit embodies the central mystery of the quantum world. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this ingenious experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe. How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle exist before we look at it, or does the very act of looking create reality? Are there hidden aspects to reality missing from the orthodox view of quantum physics? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there's no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double slit? With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world and through history, down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. Through Two Doors at Once is the most fantastic voyage you can take.

Download or read book Formulations of General Relativity written by Kirill Krasnov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carefully documenting the different formulations of general relativity, the author reveals valuable insight into the nature of the gravitational force and its interaction with matter. This book will interest graduate students and researchers in the fields of general relativity, gravitational physics and differential geometry.

Download or read book Trespassing on Einstein s Lawn written by Amanda Gefter and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS In a memoir of family bonding and cutting-edge physics for readers of Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality and Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?, Amanda Gefter tells the story of how she conned her way into a career as a science journalist—and wound up hanging out, talking shop, and butting heads with the world’s most brilliant minds. At a Chinese restaurant outside of Philadelphia, a father asks his fifteen-year-old daughter a deceptively simple question: “How would you define nothing?” With that, the girl who once tried to fail geometry as a conscientious objector starts reading up on general relativity and quantum mechanics, as she and her dad embark on a life-altering quest for the answers to the universe’s greatest mysteries. Before Amanda Gefter became an accomplished science writer, she was a twenty-one-year-old magazine assistant willing to sneak her and her father, Warren, into a conference devoted to their physics hero, John Wheeler. Posing as journalists, Amanda and Warren met Wheeler, who offered them cryptic clues to the nature of reality: The universe is a self-excited circuit, he said. And, The boundary of a boundary is zero. Baffled, Amanda and Warren vowed to decode the phrases—and with them, the enigmas of existence. When we solve all that, they agreed, we’ll write a book. Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is that book, a memoir of the impassioned hunt that takes Amanda and her father from New York to London to Los Alamos. Along the way, they bump up against quirky science and even quirkier personalities, including Leonard Susskind, the former Bronx plumber who invented string theory; Ed Witten, the soft-spoken genius who coined the enigmatic M-theory; even Stephen Hawking. What they discover is extraordinary: the beginnings of a monumental paradigm shift in cosmology, from a single universe we all share to a splintered reality in which each observer has her own. Reality, the Gefters learn, is radically observer-dependent, far beyond anything of which Einstein or the founders of quantum mechanics ever dreamed—with shattering consequences for our understanding of the universe’s origin. And somehow it all ties back to that conversation, to that Chinese restaurant, and to the true meaning of nothing. Throughout their journey, Amanda struggles to make sense of her own life—as her journalism career transforms from illusion to reality, as she searches for her voice as a writer, as she steps from a universe shared with her father to at last carve out one of her own. It’s a paradigm shift you might call growing up. By turns hilarious, moving, irreverent, and profound, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn weaves together story and science in remarkable ways. By the end, you will never look at the universe the same way again. Praise for Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn “Nothing quite prepared me for this book. Wow. Reading it, I alternated between depression—how could the rest of us science writers ever match this?—and exhilaration.”—Scientific American “To Do: Read Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. Reality doesn’t have to bite.”—New York “A zany superposition of genres . . . It’s at once a coming-of-age chronicle and a father-daughter road trip to the far reaches of this universe and 10,500 others.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Download or read book String Theory and the Scientific Method written by Richard Dawid and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: String theory has played a highly influential role in theoretical physics for nearly three decades and has substantially altered our view of the elementary building principles of the Universe. However, the theory remains empirically unconfirmed, and is expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. So why do string theorists have such a strong belief in their theory? This book explores this question, offering a novel insight into the nature of theory assessment itself. Dawid approaches the topic from a unique position, having extensive experience in both philosophy and high-energy physics. He argues that string theory is just the most conspicuous example of a number of theories in high-energy physics where non-empirical theory assessment has an important part to play. Aimed at physicists and philosophers of science, the book does not use mathematical formalism and explains most technical terms.

Download or read book Higher Speculations written by Helge Kragh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, people have tried to construct 'theories of everything': highly ambitious attempts to understand nature in its totality. This account presents these theories in their historical contexts, from little-known hypotheses from the past to modern developments such as the theory of superstrings, the anthropic principle, and ideas of many universes, and uses them to problematize the limits of scientific knowledge. Do claims to theories of everything belong to science at all? Which are the epistemic standards on which an alleged scientific theory of the universe - or the multiverse - is to be judged? Such questions are currently being discussed by physicists and cosmologists, but rarely within a historical perspective. This book argues that these questions have a history and that knowledge of the historical development of 'higher speculations' may inform and qualify the current debate on the nature and limits of scientific explanation.