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Oxford University Press, USA
Mass: The Quest to Understand Matter from Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields
Mass: The Quest to Understand Matter from Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields
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Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly? We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers
of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents. Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of
philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific
discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass. How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin of mass, and its implications for our
understanding of the material world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the nature of matter, and
the fundamental related concept of mass.
Author: Jim Baggott
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 09/04/2017
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.20w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780198759713
Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/15/2017
Kirkus Reviews 06/15/2017
Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle' (OUP, 2012), A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2011) and A Beginner's Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), Quantum Reality: The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics -- A Game of Theories (OUP, 2020), and The Quantum
Cookbook: Mathematical Recipes for the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (OUP, 2020).
of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents. Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of
philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific
discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass. How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin of mass, and its implications for our
understanding of the material world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the nature of matter, and
the fundamental related concept of mass.
Author: Jim Baggott
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 09/04/2017
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.20w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780198759713
Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/15/2017
Kirkus Reviews 06/15/2017
About the Author
Jim Baggott, Freelance science writer
Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle' (OUP, 2012), A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2011) and A Beginner's Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), Quantum Reality: The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics -- A Game of Theories (OUP, 2020), and The Quantum
Cookbook: Mathematical Recipes for the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (OUP, 2020).
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