創造性、想像力、理論物理学 The Beautiful Invisible : Creativity, Imagination, and Theoretical Physics

Vignale, Giovanni

Oxford Univ Pr（2011/04発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 303 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780199574841
• DDC分類 530

基本説明

Focuses on the concept of the 'abstract' - the invisible and universal patterns by which we attempt to grasp the reality.

Full Description

The realm of theoretical physics is teeming with abstract and beautiful concepts. And the task of imagining them is one that demands profound creativity, argues Giovanni Vignale. Explaining them is curiously akin to the craft of poets, or magical realist novelists such as Borges, and Musil, or Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.In this unusual and sometimes poetic book, Vignale presents his own unorthodox accounts of fundamental theoretical concepts such as Newtonian mechanics, superconductivity, and Einstein's theory of relativity, showing that what may seem at first quite simple in fact turns out to be much more profound. As we delve behind now-familiar metaphors such as 'electron spin' and 'black hole', the world that we take for granted melts away, leaving a glimpse of something much stranger.

Contents

Prologue ; 1. The way of the abstract ; 2. Limits ; 3. Laws are made to be broken ; 4. Of first and last things ; 5. Representations ; 6. The invisible light ; 7. The double helix ; 8. Quantum mechanics: the triumph of the abstract ; 9. Tales of quantum reality ; 10. The spinning electron and other metaphors ; 11. Margarita