Download or read book The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr Pauli Dialogue written by J. Hendry and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many books have been written on the history of quantum mechanics. So far as I am aware, however, this is the first to incorporate the results of the large amount of detailed scholarly research completed by professional historians of physics over the past fifteen years. It is also, I believe, the first since Max Jammer's pioneering study of fifteen years ago to attempt a genuine 'history' as opposed to a mere technical report or popular or semi-popular account. My aims in making this attempt have been to satisfy the needs of historians of science and, more especially, to promote a serious interest in the history of science among phYSicists and physics students. Since the creation of quantum mechanics was inevitably a technical process conducted through the medium of technical language it has been impossible to avoid the introduction of a large amount of such language. Some acquaintance with quantum mechanics, corresponding to that obtained through an undergraduate physics course, has accordingly been assumed. I have tried to ensure, however, that such an acquaintance should be sufficient as well as necessary, and even someone with only the most basic grounding in physics should be able with judicious skip ping, to get through the book. The technical details are essential to the dialogue, but the plot proceeds and can, I hope, be understood on a non technical level.
Download or read book The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr Pauli Dialogue written by John Hendry and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Quantum Dialogue written by Mara Beller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Science is rooted in conversations," wrote Werner Heisenberg, one of the twentieth century's great physicists. In Quantum Dialogue, Mara Beller shows that science is rooted not just in conversation but in disagreement, doubt, and uncertainty. She argues that it is precisely this culture of dialogue and controversy within the scientific community that fuels creativity. Beller draws her argument from her radical new reading of the history of the quantum revolution, especially the development of the Copenhagen interpretation. One of several competing approaches, this version succeeded largely due to the rhetorical skills of Niels Bohr and his colleagues. Using extensive archival research, Beller shows how Bohr and others marketed their views, misrepresenting and dismissing their opponents as "unreasonable" and championing their own not always coherent or well-supported position as "inevitable." Quantum Dialogue, winner of the 1999 Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the Journal of the History of Ideas, will fascinate everyone interested in how stories of "scientific revolutions" are constructed and "scientific consensus" achieved. "[A]n intellectually stimulating piece of work, energised by a distinct point of view."—Dipankar Home, Times Higher Education Supplement "[R]emarkable and original. . . . [Beller's] arguments are thoroughly supported and her conclusions are meticulously argued. . . . This is an important book that all who are interested in the emergence of quantum mechanics will want to read."—William Evenson, History of Physics Newsletter
Download or read book The Innermost Kernel written by Suzanne Gieser and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-02-14 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of W. Pauli's Scientific Correspondence by Springer-Verlag has motivated a vast research activity on Pauli's role in modern science. This excellent treatise sheds light on the ongoing dialogue between physics and psychology.
Download or read book The Message of the Atoms written by Kalervo V. Laurikainen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When I meet a difficult problem, I begin to go around it, approaching it again and again from different directions. If I persistently continue these approaches, it can happen that no problem remains. (RolfNevanlinna, in a private discussion.) In 1976, after a mainly administrative period of some 15 years, I spent a couple of months at CERN, working in the Pauli Collection. When I found the Pauli-Fierz correspondence, I had the intuitive feeling that there was the key: that "it was an objective description, and that it was the only possible objective description" for the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Here I have cited Bohr in his 'last interview' (see Chap. 7), which I became acquainted with only later, but I was immediately convinced that Pauli's view was more profound than anything else I had read about in quantum mechanics. However, nowadays the investigation of the foundations of quantum theory is dominated by 'realism', which means that the influence of the psyche on our conception of reality is ignored. This book is an attempt to show that this is not possible in quantum mechanics.
Download or read book Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom written by Helge Kragh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom gives a comprehensive account of the birth, development, and decline of Bohr's atomic theory. It presents the theory in a broad context which includes not only its technical aspects, but also its reception, dissemination, and applications in both physics and chemistry.
Download or read book Quantum written by Manjit Kumar and published by Icon Books Ltd. This book was released on 2008-10-02 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This is about gob-smacking science at the far end of reason ... Take it nice and easy and savour the experience of your mind being blown without recourse to hallucinogens' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian For most people, quantum theory is a byword for mysterious, impenetrable science. And yet for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves. In this magisterial book, Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly-written history of this fundamental scientific revolution, and the divisive debate at its core. Quantum theory looks at the very building blocks of our world, the particles and processes without which it could not exist. Yet for 60 years most physicists believed that quantum theory denied the very existence of reality itself. In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar shows how the golden age of physics ignited the greatest intellectual debate of the twentieth century. Quantum theory is weird. In 1905, Albert Einstein suggested that light was a particle, not a wave, defying a century of experiments. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Erwin Schrodinger's famous dead-and-alive cat are similarly strange. As Niels Bohr said, if you weren't shocked by quantum theory, you didn't really understand it. While "Quantum" sets the science in the context of the great upheavals of the modern age, Kumar's centrepiece is the conflict between Einstein and Bohr over the nature of reality and the soul of science. 'Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved', lamented the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. But in "Quantum", Kumar brings Einstein back to the centre of the quantum debate. "Quantum" is the essential read for anyone fascinated by this complex and thrilling story and by the band of brilliant men at its heart.
Download or read book Quantum Drama written by Jim Baggott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-25 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate and its continuing legacy In 1927, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein began a debate about the interpretation and meaning of the new quantum theory. This would become one of the most famous debates in the history of science. At stake were an understanding of the purpose, and defense of the integrity, of science. What (if any) limits should we place on our expectations for what science can tell us about physical reality? Our protagonists slowly disappeared from the vanguard of physics, as its centre of gravity shifted from a war-ravaged Continental Europe to a bold, pragmatic, post-war America. What Einstein and Bohr had considered to be matters of the utmost importance were now set aside. Their debate was regarded either as settled in Bohr's favour or as superfluous to real physics. But the debate was not resolved. The problems of interpretation and meaning persisted, at least in the minds of a few stubborn physicists, such as David Bohm and John Bell, who refused to stop asking awkward questions. The Bohr-Einstein debate was rejoined, now with a new set of protagonists, on a small scale at first. Through their efforts, the debate was revealed to be about physics after all. Their questions did indeed have answers that could be found in a laboratory. As quantum entanglement became a real physical phenomenon, whole new disciplines were established, such as quantum computing, teleportation, and cryptography. The efforts of the experimentalists were rewarded with shares in the 2022 Nobel prize in physics. As Quantum Drama reveals, science owes a large debt to those who kept the discussions going against the apathy and indifference of most physicists before definitive experimental inquiries became possible. Although experiment moved the Bohr-Einstein debate to a new level and drew many into foundational research, it has by no means removed or resolved the fundamental question. There will be no Nobel prize for an answer. That will not shut off discussion. Our Drama will continue beyond our telling of it and is unlikely to reach its final scene before science ceases or the world ends.
Download or read book Einstein s Struggles with Quantum Theory written by Dipankar Home and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-11-13 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an account of all aspects of Einstein’s achievements in quantum theory, his own views, and the progress his work has stimulated since his death. While some chapters use mathematics at an undergraduate physics level, a path is provided for the reader more concerned with ideas than equations, and the book will benefit to anybody interested in Einstein and his approach to the quantum.
Download or read book 137 Jung Pauli and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession written by Arthur I. Miller and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The history is fascinating, as are the insights into the personalities of these great thinkers." —New Scientist Is there a number at the root of the universe? A primal number that everything in the world hinges on? This question exercised many great minds of the twentieth century, among them the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Their obsession with the power of certain numbers—including 137, which describes the atom’s fine-structure constant and has great Kabbalistic significance—led them to develop an unlikely friendship and to embark on a joint mystical quest reaching deep into medieval alchemy, dream interpretation, and the Chinese Book of Changes. 137 explores the profound intersection of modern science with the occult, but above all it is the tale of an extraordinary, fruitful friendship between two of the greatest thinkers of our times. Originally published in hardcover as Deciphering the Cosmic Number.
Download or read book The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics written by Claudio Garola and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2000 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a sample of the present research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related topics by collecting the papers of the Italian scholars who attended the conference entitled ?The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics ? Historical Analysis and Open Questions? (Lecce, 1998). The perspective of the book is interdisciplinary, and hence philosophical, historical and technical papers are gathered together so as to allow the reader to compare different viewpoints and cultural approaches. Most of the papers confront, directly or indirectly, the objectivity problem, taking into account the positions of the founders of QM or more recent developments. More specifically, the technical papers in the book pay special attention to the interpretation of the experiments on Bell's inequalities and to decoherence theory, but topics on unsharp QM, the consistent-history approach, quantum probability and alternative theories are also discussed. Furthermore, a number of historical and philosophical papers are devoted to Planck's, Weyl's and Pauli's thought, but topics such as quantum ontology, predictivity of quantum laws, etc., are treated.
Download or read book A History of the Ideas of Theoretical Physics written by S. D'Agostino and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a perspective on the history of theoretical physics over the past two hundreds years. It comprises essays on the history of pre-Maxwellian electrodynamics, of Maxwell's and Hertz's field theories, and of the present century's relativity and quantum physics. A common thread across the essays is the search for and the exploration of themes that influenced significant con ceptual changes in the great movement of ideas and experiments which heralded the emergence of theoretical physics (hereafter: TP). The fun. damental change involved the recognition of the scien tific validity of theoretical physics. In the second half of the nine teenth century, it was not easy for many physicists to understand the nature and scope of theoretical physics and of its adept, the theoreti cal physicist. A physicist like Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the eminent contributors to the new discipline, confessed in 1895 that, "even the formulation of this concept [of a theoretical physicist] is not entirely without difficulty". 1 Although science had always been divided into theory and experiment, it was only in physics that theoretical work developed into a major research and teaching specialty in its own right. 2 It is true that theoretical physics was mainly a creation of tum of-the century German physics, where it received full institutional recognition, but it is also undeniable that outstanding physicists in other European countries, namely, Ampere, Fourier, and Maxwell, also had an important part in its creation.
Download or read book Deciphering the Cosmic Number written by Arthur I Miller and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-03-24 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary story of psychoanalyst Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli and their struggle to quantify the unconscious. In 1932, the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli met the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Pauli was fascinated by the inner reaches of his own psyche and not afraid to dabble in the occult, while Jung looked to science for answers to the psychological questions that tormented him. Their rich friendship led them, in Jung’s words, into “the no-man’s land between physics and the psychology of the unconscious . . . the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times.” Both were obsessed with the far-reaching significance of the number “137”—a primal number that seemed to hint at the origins of the universe itself. Their quest to solve its enigma led them on a lifelong journey into the ancient secrets of alchemy, the work of Johannes Kepler, and the Chinese Book of Changes. This is the captivating story of an extraordinary and fruitful collaboration between two of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Interpreting Physics written by Edward MacKinnon and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-11-23 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to offer a systematic account of the role of language in the development and interpretation of physics. An historical-conceptual analysis of the co-evolution of mathematical and physical concepts leads to the classical/quatum interface. Bohrian orthodoxy stresses the indispensability of classical concepts and the functional role of mathematics. This book analyses ways of extending, and then going beyond this orthodoxy orthodoxy. Finally, the book analyzes how a revised interpretation of physics impacts on basic philosophical issues: conceptual revolutions, realism, and reductionism.
Download or read book Weimar Culture And Quantum Mechanics Selected Papers By Paul Forman And Contemporary Perspectives On The Forman Thesis written by Alexei B Kojevnikov and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011-05-11 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of the scientific profession in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics. The Forman thesis became famous for its demonstration of the cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge, in particular by showing the historical connection between the culture of Weimar Germany — known for its irrationality and antiscientism — and the emerging concept of quantum acausality. From the moment of its publication, Forman's research provoked intense historical and philosophical debates. In 2007, participants at an international conference in Vancouver, Canada, discussed the implications of the Forman thesis for contemporary historiography. Their contributions collected in this volume represent cutting-edge research on the history of the quantum revolution and of German science.
Download or read book Foundations and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics written by Gennaro Auletta and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2001 with total page 1030 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is twofold: to provide a comprehensive account of the foundations of the theory and to outline a theoretical and philosophical interpretation suggested from the results of the last twenty years.There is a need to provide an account of the foundations of the theory because recent experience has largely confirmed the theory and offered a wealth of new discoveries and possibilities. On the other side, the following results have generated a new basis for discussing the problem of the interpretation: the new developments in measurement theory; the experimental generation of ?Schrdinger cats?; recent developments which allow, for the first time, the simultaneous measurement of complementary observables; quantum information processing, teleportation and computation.To accomplish this task, the book combines historical, systematic and thematic approaches.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Historical Case Studies written by Tilman Sauer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects reflections on the role of philosophy in case studies in the history of science. Case studies have played a prominent role in recent history and philosophy of science. They have been used to illustrate, question, explore, or explicate philosophical points of view. Even if not explicitly so, historical narratives are always guided by philosophical background assumptions. But what happens if different philosophies lead to different narratives of the same historical episodes? Can historical case studies decide between competing philosophical viewpoints? What are the criteria that a case study has to fulfill in order to be philosophically relevant? Bringing together leading practitioners in the fields of history and philosophy of the physical and the life sciences, this volume addresses this methodological problem and proposes ways of rendering explicit philosophical assumptions of historical work.
