Frontiers: Twentieth Century Physics

Cover
CRC Press, 04.01.2002 - 532 Seiten
The revolution in twentieth century physics has changed the way we think about space, time and matter and our own place in the universe. It has offered answers to many of the big questions of existence, such as the ultimate nature of things and the how the universe came into being. It has undermined our belief in a Newtonian mechanistic universe and a deterministic future, posing questions about parallel universes, time-travel and the origin and end of everything. At the same time we have witnessed amazing attempts at unification so that physicists are able to contemplate the discovery of a single 'theory of everything' from which we could derive the masses and types of all particles and their interactions. This book tells the story of these discoveries and the people who made them, largely through the work of Nobel Prize winning physicists.
 

Inhalt

OLD QUANTUM THEORY
3
A NEW QUANTUM THEORY 192530
32
QUANTUM MYSTERIES
65
QED
109
EXPLAINING MATTER
131
ATOMS AND NUCLEI
133
THE STANDARD MODEL
168
PARTICLE DETECTORS
190
COSMOLOGY
363
THERMODYNAMICS AND THE ARROW OF TIME
389
TIME TEMPERATURE AND CHANCE
391
TOWARD ABSOLUTE ZERO
422
CPT
442
APPENDICES
462
THE SCHRÖDINGER EQUATION
465
THE HYDROGEN ATOM
468

PARTICLE ACCELERATORS
207
TOWARD A THEORY OF EVERYTHING
225
SPACE AND TIME
247
THE SPEED OF LIGHT
249
SPECIAL RELATIVITY
263
GENERAL RELATIVITY
292
ASTROPHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY
315
OBSERVATIONAL ASTRONOMY
317
STARS AND DISTANCES
335
THE LORENTZ TRANSFORMATION EQUATIONS
470
THE SPEED OF ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES
472
THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS
473
GLOSSARY OF IMPORTANT IDEAS
481
TIMELINE OF MAJOR IDEAS
493
FURTHER READING
496
INDEX
499
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Autoren-Profil (2002)

Steve Adams is Head of Physics at the Westminster School, London. His first book was Relativity: An Introduction to Space-time Physics, published by Taylor & Francis in 1997.

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