Particle or Wave

by Anastopoulos, Charis

• ISBN13: 9780691135120
• ISBN10: 0691135126
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-07-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Particle or Waveis the first popular-level book to explain the origins and development of modern physical concepts about matter and the controversies surrounding them. The dichotomy between particle and wave reflects a dispute--whether the universe's most elementary building blocks are discrete or continuous in nature--originating in antiquity when philosophers first speculated about the makeup of the physical world. Charis Anastopoulos examines two of the earliest known theories about matter--the atomic theory, which attributed all physical phenomena to atoms and their motion in the void, and the theory of the elements, which described matter as consisting of the substances earth, air, fire, and water. He then leads readers up through the ages to the very frontiers of modern physics to reveal how these seemingly contradictory ideas still lie at the heart of today's continuing debates. Anastopoulos explores the revolutionary contributions of thinkers like Nicolas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. He shows how Einstein's ideas about relativity unify opposing concepts by identifying matter with energy, and how quantum mechanics goes even further by postulating the coexistence of the particle and the wave descriptions. Anastopoulos surveys the latest advances in physics on the fundamental structure of matter, including the theories of quantum fields and elementary particles, and new cutting-edge ideas about the unification of all forces. This book reveals how the apparent contradictions of particle and wave reflect very different ways of understanding the physical world, and how they are pushing modern science to the threshold of new discoveries.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xi
List of Tables	p. xv
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
A Note on Terminology	p. xix
Introduction	p. 1
From Myth to Machine: Images of Matter from Antiquity to Newtonian Mechanics	p. 9
First Questions	p. 9
The Two Paradigms	p. 12
Images of Synthesis	p. 19
The Roots of the New Era	p. 25
Mathematics and the World	p. 29
The Metaphor of the Machine	p. 41
Newton's Achievement	p. 47
Progress!: From Newtonian Mechanics to Nineteenth-Century Physics	p. 58
Newton's Successors	p. 58
The Atoms of Chemistry	p. 62
Energy: A First Encounter	p. 69
Light	p. 75
From Flow to Field	p. 80
Electricity and Magnetism	p. 85
Faraday and the Field	p. 89
Maxwell's Synthesis	p. 94
The Triumph of Mechanicism	p. 99
A New Arena is Built: Special Relativity and the Notion of Spacetime	p. 104
The Coming of the Twentieth Century	p. 104
Reference Systems and Inertial Frames	p. 105
Einstein's Solution	p. 112
The Union of Space and Time	p. 117
Mass Is Energy!	p. 122
The Symmetry Beneath: Symmetry in Physics-Spacetime Symmetries	p. 128
Symmetries in Physics Are Hidden	p. 128
Noether's Remarkable Theorem	p. 132
Space and Time Translations	p. 134
The Poincare Symmetry and the Origin of Particles	p. 138
General Relativity	p. 143
The Machine Breaks Down: The Development of Quantum Physics	p. 146
The Birth of Quantum Theory	p. 146
New Windows to the World	p. 154
The Adolescence of Quantum Theory	p. 159
Heisenberg's Revolution	p. 169
The Riposte: Schrondinger's Wave Mechanics	p. 178
Conflict and Reconciliation	p. 182
The Mature Quantum Theory	p. 190
So Familiar and Yet so Different: Spin, Quantum Phases, and Quantum Statistics	p. 198
The Discovery of Spin	p. 198
Quantum Phases	p. 206
Spin Is Discrete!	p. 212
Identical Things Cannot Be Distinguished	p. 218
Forging the Perfect Tool: The Development of Quantum Field Theory	p. 225
Quantum Light	p. 225
Dirac's Sea	p. 229
Antiparticles	p. 232
QED and Feynman Rules	p. 240
The Taming of Infinities	p. 247
The Basic Principles of Quantum Field Theory	p. 254
Three Elegant Symmetries: P, T, and C	p. 260
Pieces of a Puzzle: The Physics of Elementary Particles	p. 270
Radioactivity and Forces	p. 270
The Hunt for Symmetries	p. 276
The Breakdown of Simplicity	p. 286
Some Simplicity Restored	p. 294
Reaching the Limits: The Gauge Principle and the Standard Model	p. 303
The Birth of the Gauge Principle	p. 303
Yang-Mills Theories	p. 308
Symmetry Is Broken "Spontaneously"	p. 312
The Force That Binds	p. 329
The Standard Model	p. 337
Outlook: Unanswered Questions and Open Problems	p. 340
The Ancient Dilemma Revisited	p. 340
The Singular Status of Quantum Field Theory	p. 348
Grand Unified Theories, Supersymmetry, Superstrings, and All That	p. 352
Where Do We Go From Here?	p. 358
Notes	p. 367
Glossary	p. 397
Guide for Further Reading	p. 403
Index	p. 405
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