History Of Particle Theory: Between Darwin And ShakespeareWorld Scientific, 24 Ağu 2020 - 232 sayfa History of Particle Theory fills an important gap existing in the literature by discussing the impressive progress in understanding the elementary particles out of which all everyday objects are made. Most of this progress has happened in the last seventy years after the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) was perfected as an extremely accurate description of electromagnetic interactions. This astonishing sequence of discoveries was made hand in hand between theory and experiment. This book concentrates only on theory where giant steps were made by a series of exceptionally creative physicists, and this is portrayed as an essential part of the broader spectrum of human knowledge and culture, which is constantly being similarly extended by the creative individuals such as the two mentioned in the subtitle, Between Darwin and Shakespeare, who both significantly changed Western Civilization by ideas in Biology and in English Literature respectively.In the last forty years, the standard model has been confirmed again and again as the correct description of elementary particles up to energies of a thousand times the proton mass. In the discussion of particle theory and theoretical physics in general, the book starts from well over two thousand years ago, going back to the ancient Greeks such as Democritus and Archimedes, until the 17th century, when the extraordinary intellect of Newton changed everything by demonstrating that not only objects in the laboratory but also heavenly bodies are governed by mathematical equations. There followed what can be called Darwinian evolution in theoretical physics, survival of the fittest theories, by loose analogy with the origin of biological species.The present standard model of particle theory surely cannot be the final word because it contains far too many free parameters. The book contains a penultimate chapter discussing a number of such open problems which exist in particle theory. There is then a closing chapter, not related to the rest of the book, providing a series of quotations written in the 16th and 17th centuries by Shakespeare and here applied to particle theory. The inclusion of this is based on our premise that particle theory is just one out of several opportunities for exceptional human creativity. |
İçindekiler
1 | |
Gods Plan | 19 |
Renaissance | 35 |
Newtons Gravity | 57 |
Darwinian Evolution | 71 |
Particle Theory | 97 |
Order from Chaos | 121 |
Electroweak Unification | 137 |
Open Questions | 157 |
Shakespeare | 177 |
205 | |
Diğer baskılar - Tümünü görüntüle
Sık kullanılan terimler ve kelime öbekleri
ancient Greeks angular momentum Aristotle astronomer atomic theory atomists baryon Caesar called century Chapter charge chiral Christian classical colour considered constant Copernicus cosmology CP violation dark energy dark matter decay Democritus Dirac discovery discussed Earth Einstein electromagnetic electron electroweak entropy equation experiments fermions Feynman field flavour force Galileo gauge boson gauge group gauge symmetry Gell-Mann generalisation gluons God’s gravity hadrons Higgs boson idea instanton intentionally left blank ISBN Kepler L-handed leptons Lucretius mass massless mathematician mathematics matrix Mendeleev mesons mixing angle muon nature neutrino neutron Newton nuclear observed orbit parameters particle physics particle theory Pauli phase philosophy physicists pion Planck planets Plato Principia problem proton pseudoscalar quantum mechanics quantum number quarks and leptons rotation scalar scale scientific shown in Fig space–time spin standard model strong interactions superstring supersymmetry theoretical transformation Tycho unitary universe velocity wave function weak interactions Yukawa