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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.
Observability and Scientific Realism It is commonly thought that the birth of modern natural science was made possible by an intellectual shift from a mainly abstract and specuJative conception of the world to a carefully elaborated image based on observations. There is some grain of truth in this claim, but this grain depends very much on what one takes observation to be. In the philosophy of science of our century, observation has been practically equated with sense perception. This is understandable if we think of the attitude of radical empiricism that inspired Ernst Mach and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, who powerfully influenced our century's philosophy of science. However, th...
This book offers the first comprehensive and authoritative text on the history of physics in Italy’s industrial and financial capital, from the foundation of the University of Milan’s Institute of Physics in 1924 up to the early 1960s, when it moved to its current location. It includes biographies and a historical-scientific analysis of the main research topics investigated by world-renowned physicists such as Aldo Pontremoli, Giovanni Polvani, Giovanni Gentile Jr., Beppo Occhialini, and Piero Caldirola, highlighting their contributions to the development of Italian physics in a national and international context. Further, the book provides a historical perspective on the interplay of physics and politics in Italy during both the Fascist regime and the postwar reconstruction period, which led to the creation of the CISE (Centro Informazioni Studi Esperienze, a research center for applied nuclear physics, funded by private industries) in 1946, and of the Milan division of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in 1951.
Quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles, seems to challenge common sense. Waves behave like particles; particles behave like waves. You can tell where a particle is, but not how fast it is moving--or vice versa. An electron faced with two tiny holes will travel through both at the same time, rather than one or the other. And then there is the enigma of creation ex nihilo, in which small particles appear with their so-called antiparticles, only to disappear the next instant in a tiny puff of energy. Since its inception, physicists and philosophers have struggled to work out the meaning of quantum mechanics. Some, like Niels Bohr, have responded to quantum mechan...
This is a collection of high-quality research papers in the philosophy of science, deriving from papers presented at the second meeting of the European Philosophy of Science Association in Amsterdam, October 2009.
This book provides an update on our understanding of strong interaction, with theoretical and experimental highlights included. It is divided into five sections. The first section is devoted to the investigations into and the latest results on the mechanism of quark confinement. The second and third sections focus respectively on light and heavy quarks (effective field theories, Schwinger-Dyson approach and lattice QCD results). The fourth section deals with the deconfinement mechanism and quark-gluon plasma formation signals. The last section presents highlights of experiments, new physics beyond QCD, and nonperturbative approaches in other theories (strings and SUSY) that may be useful in QCD.
The 20-year-old problem of the confinement and the resulting spectrum of the bound states is central to quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Many approaches have been tried starting from different points of view: the potential theory, the Bethe-Salpeter equation, string and flux tube models, bag models, vacuum structure, current algebra, lattice theory, and numerical simulations. Phenomenological assumptions and first-principle theoretical results or indications have been combined. Many partial successes have been attained, but a unified and comprehensive treatment is still lacking.In recent years, new attention has been given to the problem, both in terms of theoretical developments and for the purpose of evaluating the spectrum and other properties of the particles. In particular, attention has been focussed on areas like numerical simulations, the derivation of the potential, the use of the Bethe-Salpeter equation, the connection between the potential and the chiral symmetry approach.This workshop was an opportunity for a synthesis and a comparison of the different points of view.
Quantum chromodynamics is generally accepted to be the quantum field theory which describes the strong interactions in elementary particle physics. However, the question of the mechanism responsible for the “confinement” of the color degrees of freedom of quarks and gluons into hadrons still ranks as one of the most interesting open problems in physics.This proceedings volume summarizes the state of the art in this area of research. Mathematically inclined readers will find the articles based on monopoles, vortices, and topology most interesting. Meanwhile, lattice calculations can be performed for many important physical quantities. Their results can be used as guidelines for developing models of quark confinement. These models are indispensable for theoretical physicists performing calculations with the Bethe-Salpeter equation, Dyson-Schwinger equations, effective Hamiltonians, and potential models. The cross-fertilization of all these subfields of research becomes evident from the articles in this book. A few experimental papers are also included.
Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory. It is also completely baffling. From the moment of its inception, its founders struggled to understand its meaning. This struggle was most famously encapsulated in the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein; Quantum Drama tells the story of their engagement and its legacy.