Tavel (physics, Vassar College) developed the text from a course for nonscience majors over many years. He draws analogies from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and keeps the technical and mathematical details to the bare minimum. He does not provide a bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.

An exploration of various themes common to the broad tradition of Western philosophy. What do we mean by a relation? Is a relation a transcendental object or something only operative in the world of concrete things? What is the difference between a universal and particular? Is there clarity in the way we represent an object or only clarity in the way a thing is composed? What is the difference between knowledge before the fact (apriori) and knowledge after the fact (aposteriori)? These are all questions that pertain to our understanding of who we are and the world in which we live. Broader issues such as the relation between space and time, art and nature, are also touched on, with particular emphasis on modern developments in physics and biology. The fixity of space and time is something that has come to be questioned, as is the fixity and origin of the human species. These are dealt with in a way that is conformable to modern thinking yet which remains sensitive to broader historical concerns.

This completely revised second edition of our hugely popular book invites the reader to explore ten of the most important areas of modern physics: Symmetry, Lasers, Superconductivity, Bose-Einstein Condensation, Nanoscience, Quantum Computation, Chaos and Fractals, Stellar Evolution, Particles, and Cosmology.The new edition adds three new chapters in about a third of the book, covering the latest, hottest topics in contemporary physics: Bose-Einstein Condensate: Where Many Become One and How to Get There: Bose Statistics: Counting of the Indistinguishables; Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC): The Over-Population Crisis; Cooling and Trapping of Atoms: Towards BEC; Doppler Limit and its Break Down; Trapping of Cold Atoms: Magnetic and Magneto-Optic Trap; Evaporative Cooling; BEC Finally: But How do We Know?; BEC: What Good is it? Exploring Nanostructures: Towards the Bottom; The Rise of Nanoscience; Confined Systems; Quantum Devices; The Genius of Carbon; Spintronics; Nanos at Large. Quantum Computation and Information: Classical Computer; Quantum Computer; Quantum Gates; Deutsch's Algorithm; Finding the Period of a Function; Shor's Factorization Algorithm; Grover's Search Algorithm; Hardware and Error Correction; Cryptography; Quantum Teleportation.The authors give a fascinating, up-to-date account of the exciting advances in these fast-moving fields. Their emphasis is as much on describing natural phenomena as on attempting to explain them in terms of basic principles, replacing equations with physical insight. General readers and university undergraduates alike will find this unique book a useful guide to the worlds of modern physics, while the mature scientist will get an insightful survey of neighboring fields of research. For the teacher who takes a thematic approach to teaching physics, this book will be a complete source of current topics at the frontiers of research; and for the student, a valuable tool of study, made even more useful by numerous pertinent problems (with complete solutions) and references found at the end of each chapter.

This book analyzes recent physics plays, arguing that their enaction of concepts from the sciences they discuss alters the nature of the decisions made by the characters, changing the ethical judgements that might be cast on them. Recent physics plays regularly alter the shape of space-time itself, drawing together disparate moments, reversing the flow of time, creating apparent contradictions, and iterating scenes for multiple branches of counterfactual history. With these changes both causality and responsibility shift, variously. The roles of iconic scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, are interrogated for their dramatic value, placing history and dramatic license in tension. Cold War strategies and the limits of espionage highlight the emphatically personal involvement of ordinary individuals. This study is vital reading for those interested in physics plays and the relationship between the sciences and the humanities.

“A clear and succinct account of what physics fundamentally explains about the universe” (Choice). How do students learn about physics without picking up a 1,000-page textbook chock-full of complicated equations? The Physicist’s World is the answer. Here, Thomas Grissom explains clearly and succinctly what physics really is: the science of understanding how everything in the universe moves. From the earliest efforts by Pre-Socratic philosophers contemplating motion to the principal developments of physics through the end of the twentieth century, Grissom tells the unfolding story of our attempt to quantify the material world and to conceptualize the nature of physical laws. Through the centuries, questions about why things move proved to be unanswerable in any absolute, satisfying way. Instead, the question became how things move, a direction of thought that led to the rise of modern science. Physics emerged as a mathematical description of the motion of matter and energy, a description believed to be complete and exact, limited only by the precision of measurement. Grissom shows that in one of the great intellectual ironies, advancements in twentieth-century physics affirmed instead that this quantitative theory was capable of discovering its own limits. There is only so much that physics can reveal about the world. This is physics for the thinking person, especially students who enjoy learning concepts, histories, and interpretations without becoming mired in complex mathematical detail. A concise survey of the field of physics, Grissom’s book offers students and professionals alike a unique perspective on what physicists do, how physics is done, and how physicists view the world.

These essays on the conceptual understanding of modern physics strike directly at some of the principal difficulties faced by contemporary philos ophers of physical science. Moreover, they reverberate to earlier and classical struggles with those difficulties. Each of these essays may be seen as both a commentary on our predecessors and an original analytic interpretation. They come from work of the past decade, most from meetings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, and they demonstrate again how problematic the fundamentals of our understanding of nature still are. The themes will seem to be familiar but the variations are not only ingenious but also stimulating, in some ways counterpoint. And so once again we are confronted with issues of space and time, irreversibility and measurement, matter and process, hypothetical reality and verifiability, explanation and reduction, phenomenal base and sophisticated theory, unified science and the unity of nature, and the limits of conventionalism. We are grateful for the cooperation of our contributors, and in particular for the agreement of George Ellis and C. F. von Weizsiicker to allow us to use previously published papers.

The fundamental outlines of the physical world, from its tiniest particles to massive galaxy clusters, have been apparent for decades. Does this mean physicists are about to tie it all up into a neat package? Not at all. Just when you think you’re figuring it out, the universe begins to look its strangest. This eBook, “Ultimate Physics: From Quarks to the Cosmos,” illustrates clearly how answers often lead to more questions and open up new paths to insight. We open with “The Higgs at Last,” which looks behind the scenes of one of the most anticipated discoveries in physics and examines how this “Higgs-like” particle both confirmed and confounded expectations. In “The Inner Life of Quarks,” author Don Lincoln discusses evidence that quarks and leptons may not be the smallest building blocks of matter. Section Two switches from the smallest to the largest of scales, and in “Origin of the Universe,” Michael Turner analyzes a number of speculative scenarios about how it all began. Another two articles examine the mystery of dark energy and some doubts as to whether it exists at all. In the last section, we look at one of the most compelling problems in physics: how to tie together the very small and the very large – quantum mechanics and general relativity. In one article, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow argue that a so-called “theory of everything” may be out of reach, and in another, David Deutsch and Artur Ekert question the view that quantum mechanics imposes limits on knowledge, arguing instead that the theory has an intricacy that allows for new, practical technologies, including powerful computers that can reach their true potential.

Seeking Ultimates: An Intuitive Guide to Physics, Second Edition takes us on a journey that explores the limits of our scientific knowledge, emphasizing the gaps that are left. The book starts with everyday concepts such as temperature, and proceeds to energy, the Periodic Table, and then to more advanced ideas. The author examines the nature of ti

This exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves. “A must-read for anyone studying information science.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own intuitions about the world—including our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve: • perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense • different levels of infinity • the bizarre world of the quantum • the relevance of relativity theory • the causes of chaos theory • math problems that cannot be solved by normal means • statements that are true but cannot be proven Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.