Author: Robert Mills
Publisher: W. H. Freeman
ISBN: 9780716724360
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book

Book Description

Author: Jim Baggott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019253680X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
Today we are blessed with two extraordinarily successful theories of physics. The first is Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes the large-scale behaviour of matter in a curved spacetime. This theory is the basis for the standard model of big bang cosmology. The discovery of gravitational waves at the LIGO observatory in the US (and then Virgo, in Italy) is only the most recent of this theory's many triumphs. The second is quantum mechanics. This theory describes the properties and behaviour of matter and radiation at their smallest scales. It is the basis for the standard model of particle physics, which builds up all the visible constituents of the universe out of collections of quarks, electrons and force-carrying particles such as photons. The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in Geneva is only the most recent of this theory's many triumphs. But, while they are both highly successful, these two structures leave a lot of important questions unanswered. They are also based on two different interpretations of space and time, and are therefore fundamentally incompatible. We have two descriptions but, as far as we know, we've only ever had one universe. What we need is a quantum theory of gravity. Approaches to formulating such a theory have primarily followed two paths. One leads to String Theory, which has for long been fashionable, and about which much has been written. But String Theory has become mired in problems. In this book, Jim Baggott describes ": an approach which takes relativity as its starting point, and leads to a structure called Loop Quantum Gravity. Baggott tells the story through the careers and pioneering work of two of the theory's most prominent contributors, Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli. Combining clear discussions of both quantum theory and general relativity, this book offers one of the first efforts to explain the new quantum theory of space and time.

Author: S A Selesnick
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814483621
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Get Book

Book Description
In this expanded edition of Quanta, Logic and Spacetime, the logical base is greatly broadened and quantum-computational aspects of the approach are brought to the fore. The first two parts of this edition may indeed be regarded as providing a self-contained and logic-based foundation for — and an introduction to — the enterprise known as quantum computing. The rest of the work takes on the task (as in the first edition) of computing from first principles certain dynamical expressions which turn out to compare favorably with the Lagrangian densities of the (massless) Standard Model, including gravity. The logic of this process is now subject to greater formal rigor than was possible in the first edition, and the central thesis — that quantum physics at a fundamental level may itself be realized as a species of quantum computation — is strongly underscored. Errata Errata (159 KB) Contents:Preliminaries:FoundationsQuantum SetsGroup Duality, Coherence and Cyclic ActionsComputational Paradigms:Natural DeductionQuantum LogicThe Computational Resources of Quantum LogicThe Plenum:A Quantum NetTowards a Correspondence Principle for the Quantum NetA Correspondence Principle for the Quantum NetDynamics IDynamics IIComparisons, Interpretations and Speculations Readership: Mathematicians and physicists. Keywords:Quanta;Logic;Spacetime

Author: Carlo Rovelli
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735216118
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book

Book Description
One of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade "Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, Helgoland, and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.

Author: Carlo Rovelli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107069629
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book

Book Description
A comprehensible introduction to the most fascinating research in theoretical physics: advanced quantum gravity. Ideal for researchers and graduate students.

Author: Lawrence B. Crowell
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9812565159
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book

Book Description
Three key aspects of quantum gravity are considered in this book: phenomenology, potential experimental aspects and foundational theory. The phenomenology is the treatment of metric quantum fluctuations as torsional curves that deviate from classical expectations. This leads to possible experimental configurations that may detect such fluctuations. Most of these proposed experiments are quantum optical measurements of subtle quantum gravity effects in the interaction of photons and atoms. The foundational discussions attempt to find an substratum to string theories, which are motivated by the phenomenological treatment. Quantum gravity is not the quantization of general relativity, but is instead the embedding of quantum theory and gravitation into a more fundamental field theoretic framework.

Author: Edwin F. Taylor
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780716723271
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book

Book Description
This thoroughly up-to-date, highly accessible overview covers microgravity, collider accelerators, satellite probes, neutron detectors, radioastronomy, and pulsars.

Author: Sean Carroll
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524743038
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book

Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As you read these words, copies of you are being created. Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of twentieth-century physics. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time. His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything. Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: Physics has been in crisis since 1927. Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gaps—which have come to be simply ignored. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand. Academics discourage students from working on the "dead end" of quantum foundations. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. There are many, many Sean Carrolls. Many of every one of us. Copies of you are generated thousands of times per second. The Many-Worlds theory of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didn't happen. Step-by-step in Carroll's uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established. Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe. We are on the threshold of a new understanding—of where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of.

Author: Alexander Unzicker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book

Book Description
Alexander Unzicker is a theoretical physicist and writes about elementary questions of natural philosophy. His critique of contemporary physics Bankrupting Physics (Macmillan) received the 'Science Book of the Year' award (German edition 2010). With The Mathematical Reality, Unzicker presents his most fundamental work to date, which is the result of years of study of natural laws and their historical development.The discovery of fundamental laws of nature has influenced the fate of Homo sapiens more than anything else. Has modern physics already understood these laws? Many puzzles formulated by Albert Einstein or Paul Dirac are still unsolved today, in particular the meaning of fundamental constants. In this book, Unzicker contends that a rational description of nature must do without any constants.A methodological and historical analysis shows, however, that the underlying problem of physics is deep, unexpected and fatal: the concepts of space and time themselves, the basis of science since Newton, could be fundamentally inappropriate for the description of reality, although-or precisely because-they are so easily accessible to human perception.A new understanding of reality can only arise from mathematics. By exploring the three-dimensional unitary sphere, which could replace the concepts of space and time, the author presents a mathematical vision that points the way to a new understanding of reality.

Author: Hermann Weyl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Relativity (Physics)
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book

Book Description