You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book tells the fascinating story of the people and events behind the turbulent changes in attitudes to quantum theory in the second half of the 20th century. The huge success of quantum mechanics as a predictive theory has been accompanied, from the very beginning, by doubts and controversy about its foundations and interpretation. This book looks in detail at how research on foundations evolved after WWII, when it was revived, until the mid 1990s, when most of this research merged into the technological promise of quantum information. It is the story of the quantum dissidents, the scientists who brought this subject from the margins of physics into its mainstream. It is also a history of concepts, experiments, and techniques, and of the relationships between physics and the world at large, touching on themes such as the Cold War, McCarthyism, Zhdanovism, and the unrest of the late 1960s.
Weird Scientists is a sequel to Men of Manhattan. As I wrote the latter about the nuclear physicists who brought in the era of nuclear power, quantum mechanics (or quantum physics) was unavoidable. Many of the contributors to the science of splitting the atom were also contributors to quantum mechanics. Atomic physics, particle physics, quantum physics, and even relativity are all interrelated. This book is about the men and women who established the science that shook the foundations of classical physics, removed determinism from measurement, and created alternative worlds of reality. The book introduces fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics, roughly in the order they were discovered, as a launching point for describing the scientist and the work that brought forth the concepts.
Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory. It is also completely mad. Although the theory quite obviously works, it leaves us chasing ghosts and phantoms; particles that are waves and waves that are particles; cats that are at once both alive and dead; and lots of seemingly spooky goings-on. But if we're prepared to be a little more specific about what we mean when we talk about 'reality' and a little more circumspect in the way we think a scientific theory might represent such a reality, then all the mystery goes away. This shows that the choice we face is actually a philosophical one. Here, Jim Baggott provides a quick but comprehensive introduction to quantum me...
The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions explores the global spread of religions originating in Brazil, a country that has emerged as a major pole of religious innovation and production. Through ethnographically-rich case studies throughout the world, ranging from the Americas (Canada, the U.S., Peru, and Argentina) and Europe (the U.K., Portugal, and the Netherlands) to Asia (Japan) and Oceania (Australia), the book examines the conditions, actors, and media that have made possible the worldwide construction, circulation, and consumption of Brazilian religious identities, practices, and lifestyles, including those connected with indigenized forms of Pentecostalism and Catholicism, African-based ...
This book is the fruit of the research ECLAC has amassed, with ten chapters detailing the great strides that have been made of late in ICT. A distinguishing feature of this book is its multi-disciplinary approach to measuring the economic effects of these technologies, which incorporates the neo-classical growth accounting approach and the evolutionarystructuralistapproach. These approaches are noteworthy because, much like the primary message of ECLAC, they exemplify the pivotal importance of technical progress, productivity and structural transformation in economic growth. Innovation and Economic Development identifies several opportunities and challenges for bringing about a more dynamic role of ICT in the process of structural change and productivity growth and contends that accelerating the adoption and efficient use of ICT is essential to any strategy for further success.
Urban-oriented sensory analysis has a long tradition within the social sciences. However, in communication and cultural studies research, the sensorial orientation is still incipient. This publication is part of an ongoing call by Passeio, the platform for the study of art and urban culture of the Communication and Society Research Centre, for an organicist vision of the city, underlining the need to re-signify the role of the senses in the experience of everyday contemporary urban life. This book includes theoretical and/or empirical contributions from researchers in sociology, communication and cultural studies, who explore three fundamental questions: (a) the effects of the tourist era under the COVID-19 pandemic, (b) the role of music in the production of places and socialities; and (c) the importance of ambiances in the constitution of a carnal relationship with the city.
This book offers a history of the instrumentation used to materialize the early thought experiments devised in the Einstein-Bohr disputes over the foundations of quantum mechanics. It shows how the second world war and cold war fostered the development of materials, instruments, and systems that made it possible to create, manipulate, and detect single quantum systems, thus creating the material conditions for experiments in foundations of quantum mechanics and for a broad spectrum of experimental inquiries on the structure and properties of matter which underlay the creation of new research fields such as quantum optics, quantum information, and atomic, molecular, and optical physics. Discussing research and development performed in diverse contexts, this book reveals how physicists carried instruments, and the knowledge they embodied, through disciplinary and geographic frontiers to probe entanglement, a most intriguing feature of the quantum world.
Focusing on extreme environments, from Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the Arctic to the commercialization of Mt Everest, this volume examines global environmental margins, how they are conceived and how perceptions have changed. Mountaintops and Arctic environments are the settings of social encounters, political strategies, individual enterprises, geopolitical tensions, decolonial practises, and scientific experiments. Concentrating on mountaineering and Arctic exploration between 1880 – 1960, contributors to this volume show how environmental marginalisation has been discursively implemented and materially generated by foreign and local actors. It examines to what extent the status and...
This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of physics in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics.
"The book starts with a description of classical mechanics then discusses the quantum phenomena that require us to give up our commonsense classical intuitions. We consider the physical and conceptual arguments that led to the standard von Neumann-Dirac formulation of quantum mechanics and how the standard theory explains quantum phenomena. This includes a discussion of how the theory's two dynamical laws work with the standard interpretation of states to explain determinate measurement records, quantum statistics, interference effects, entanglement, decoherence, and quantum nonlocality. A careful understanding of how the standard theory works ultimately leads to the quantum measurement prob...