Mass

The quest to understand matter from Greek atoms to quantum fields

Jim Baggott (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

368 Seiten

2017
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-875971-3 (ISBN)

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Jim Baggott explores how our understanding of the nature of matter, and its fundamental property of mass, has developed, from the ancient Greek view of indivisible atoms to quantum mechanics, dark matter, the Higgs field, and beyond. He shows how the stuff of the universe is proving more elusive and uncertain than we ever imagined.

Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly? We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents.

Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass.

How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin of mass, and its implications for our understanding of the material world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the nature of matter, and the fundamental related concept of mass.

Jim Baggott is a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to work with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation (OUP, 2015), Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle' (OUP, 2012), A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2011) and A Beginner's Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), Quantum Reality: The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics — A Game of Theories (OUP, 2020), and The Quantum Cookbook: Mathematical Recipes for the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (OUP, 2020).

PREFACE; PART I: ATOM AND VOID; PART II: MASS AND ENERGY; PART III: WAVE AND PARTICLE; PART IV: FIELD AND FORCE; EPILOGUE; ENDNOTES; GLOSSARY; BIBLIOGRAPHY; INDEX

Erscheinungsdatum	17.05.2017
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	173 x 241 mm
Gewicht	614 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
	Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie ► Mechanik
ISBN-10	0-19-875971-1 / 0198759711
ISBN-13	978-0-19-875971-3 / 9780198759713
Zustand	Neuware