Download or read book Physics for the Rest of Us written by Roger Stanley Jones and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents ten key ideas for an easily understandable view of physics.
Download or read book Physics as Metaphor written by Roger Stanley Jones and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rocket Science for the Rest of Us written by Ben Gilliland and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unsure about the big scientific ideas of today? This book is full of cutting-edge concepts about space and our Universe made simple. The media reports on the latest scientific discoveries and breakthroughs can seem like an alien language, from black holes to dark matter and exoplanets to leap seconds. Finally, get to grips with these difficult concepts by reading Ben Gilliland's unique take on them. Rocket Science for the Rest of Us takes complex scientific ideas and breaks them down for the non-scientist, from explaining the size of the Universe to how black holes work, Schroedinger's cat, and the Higgs boson. Difficult ideas and theories are compared to everyday things we are familiar with - forces become armies and electrons have personalities. This book will have you saying "I get it now!" over and over again. You no longer have to be a rocket scientist to understand rocket science. Reviews: "Detailed diagrams are one of the book's strongest points, as they provide the clearest explanations of difficult physics concepts." - Booklist
Download or read book Physics for the Rest of Us written by Roger Stanley Jones and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Physics Makes Us Free written by J. T. Ismael and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of the universe. Can it really be that even while you toss and turn late at night in the throes of an important decision and it seems like the scales of fate hang in the balance, that your decision is a foregone conclusion? Can it really be that everything you have done and everything you ever will do is determined by facts that were in place long before you were born? This problem is one of the staples of philosophical discussion. It is discussed by everyone from freshman in their first philosophy class, to theoretical physicists in bars after conferences. And yet there is no topic that remains more unsettling, and less well understood. If you want to get behind the façade, past the bare statement of determinism, and really try to understand what physics is telling us in its own terms, read this book. The problem of free will raises all kinds of questions. What does it mean to make a decision, and what does it mean to say that our actions are determined? What are laws of nature? What are causes? What sorts of things are we, when viewed through the lenses of physics, and how do we fit into the natural order? Ismael provides a deeply informed account of what physics tells us about ourselves. The result is a vision that is abstract, alien, illuminating, and-Ismael argues-affirmative of most of what we all believe about our own freedom. Written in a jargon-free style, How Physics Makes Us Free provides an accessible and innovative take on a central question of human existence.
Download or read book Commonly Asked Questions in Physics written by Andrew Rex and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2014-02-12 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 300 years since Newton’s seminal work, physics has explained many things that used to be mysterious. Particularly in the last century, physics has addressed a range of questions, from the smallest fundamental particles to the large-scale structure and history of the entire universe. But there are always more questions. Suitable for a wide audience, Commonly Asked Questions in Physics covers a broad scope of subjects, from classical physics that goes back to the age of Newton to new ideas just formulated in the twenty-first century. The book highlights the core areas of physics that predate the twentieth century, including mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, and thermodynamics. It also focuses on modern physics, covering quantum mechanics, atomic and nuclear physics, fundamental particles, and relativity. Each chapter explains the numbers and units used to measure things and some chapters include a "Going Deeper" feature that provides more mathematical details for readers who are up to the challenge. The suggested readings at the end of each chapter range from classic textbooks to some of the best books written for the general public, offering readers the option to study the topic in more depth. Physics affects our lives nearly every day—using cell phones, taking x-rays, and much more. Keeping the mathematics at a very basic level, this accessible book addresses many physics questions frequently posed by physics students, scientists in other fields, and the wider public.
Download or read book Physics for the Rest of Us written by Martin Nikolo and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text introduces a nonscientist to physics in a plain and simple language. The author uses humor and more than 80 drawings to talk about physics in a world all around us. Emphasis is made to keep the explanations conceptual so no math background is needed. This text has been used to teach physics at a magnet middle school and also as intro to physics for non majors at St. Louis university. The style is light and humorous which makes the text easy to read by anyone.
Download or read book Physics for Future Presidents written by Richard Muller and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn the science behind the headlines in this work that outlines the tools of terrorists, the dangers of nuclear power, and the reality of global warming.
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 A Different Universe written by Robert B Laughlin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-07-31 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Nobel-winning physicist argues that fundamental physical laws are found not in the world of atoms, but in the macroscopic world around us In this age of superstring theories and Big Bang cosmology, we're used to thinking of the unknown as impossibly distant from our everyday lives. But in A Different Universe, Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin argues that the scientific frontier is right under our fingers. Instead of looking for ultimate theories, Laughlin considers the world of emergent properties-meaning the properties, such as the hardness and shape of a crystal, that result from the organization of large numbers of atoms. Laughlin shows us how the most fundamental laws of physics are in fact emergent. A Different Universe is a truly mind-bending book that shows us why everything we think about fundamental physical laws needs to change.
Download or read book The Physics of Wall Street written by James Owen Weatherall and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young scholar tells the story of the physicists and mathematicians who created the models that have become the basis of modern finance and argues that these models are the "solution" to--not the source of--our current economic woes.
Download or read book Special Topics in Calamity Physics written by Marisha Pessl and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-08-03 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the Year Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.
Download or read book The Mathematics of Relativity for the Rest of Us written by Louis S. Jagerman and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mathematics of Relativity for the Rest of Us is intended to give the generally educated reader a thorough and factual understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity - including the difficult mathematical concepts, even if the reader is not trained in higher mathematics.
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 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 101 Things You Don t Know about Science and No One Else Does Either written by James Trefil and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1997 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores scientific questions on a variety of topics including astronomy, genetics, geology, and information technology.
Download or read book Spooky Action at a Distance written by George Musser and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long-listed for the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "An important book that provides insight into key new developments in our understanding of the nature of space, time and the universe. It will repay careful study." --John Gribbin, The Wall Street Journal "An endlessly surprising foray into the current mother of physics' many knotty mysteries, the solving of which may unveil the weirdness of quantum particles, black holes, and the essential unity of nature." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) What is space? It isn't a question that most of us normally ask. Space is the venue of physics; it's where things exist, where they move and take shape. Yet over the past few decades, physicists have discovered a phenomenon that operates outside the confines of space and time: nonlocality-the ability of two particles to act in harmony no matter how far apart they may be. It appears to be almost magical. Einstein grappled with this oddity and couldn't come to terms with it, describing it as "spooky action at a distance." More recently, the mystery has deepened as other forms of nonlocality have been uncovered. This strange occurrence, which has direct connections to black holes, particle collisions, and even the workings of gravity, holds the potential to undermine our most basic understandings of physical reality. If space isn't what we thought it was, then what is it? In Spooky Action at a Distance, George Musser sets out to answer that question, offering a provocative exploration of nonlocality and a celebration of the scientists who are trying to explain it. Musser guides us on an epic journey into the lives of experimental physicists observing particles acting in tandem, astronomers finding galaxies that look statistically identical, and cosmologists hoping to unravel the paradoxes surrounding the big bang. He traces the often contentious debates over nonlocality through major discoveries and disruptions of the twentieth century and shows how scientists faced with the same undisputed experimental evidence develop wildly different explanations for that evidence. Their conclusions challenge our understanding of not only space and time but also the origins of the universe-and they suggest a new grand unified theory of physics. Delightfully readable, Spooky Action at a Distance is a mind-bending voyage to the frontiers of modern physics that will change the way we think about reality.
