Throughout history, people have tried to construct 'theories of everything': highly ambitious attempts to understand nature in its totality. This account presents these theories in their historical co
The conceptual changes brought by modern physics are important, radical and fascinating, yet they are only vaguely understood by people working outside the field. Exploring the four pillars of modern physics – relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles and cosmology – this clear and lively account will interest anyone who has wondered what Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger and Heisenberg were really talking about. The book discusses quarks and leptons, antiparticles and Feynman diagrams, curved space-time, the Big Bang and the expanding Universe. Suitable for undergraduate students in non-science as well as science subjects, it uses problems and worked examples to help readers develop an understanding of what recent advances in physics actually mean.
In 1938, at the age of 37, Enrico Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. That same year he emigrated from Italy to the United States and, in the course of his experiments, discovered nuclear fi
A primer on the evolution of particle physics and the search for the fundamental building blocks of matter, this book presents the full current body of understanding of particle physics in a way that
Quantum gravity is perhaps the most important open problem in fundamental physics. It is the problem of merging quantum mechanics and general relativity, the two great conceptual revolutions in the physics of the twentieth century. The loop and spinfoam approach, presented in this 2004 book, is one of the leading research programs in the field. The first part of the book discusses the reformulation of the basis of classical and quantum Hamiltonian physics required by general relativity. The second part covers the basic technical research directions. Appendices include a detailed history of the subject of quantum gravity, hard-to-find mathematical material, and a discussion of some philosophical issues raised by the subject. This fascinating text is ideal for graduate students entering the field, as well as researchers already working in quantum gravity. It will also appeal to philosophers and other scholars interested in the nature of space and time.
