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Full Description
Unlike many textbooks or popular science books, A Simple Guide to Popular Physics has truly been crafted for the uninitiated or those spooked by the subject's complexity.
Harris's inviting guide promises to give "absolute beginners" from "teens to centenarians" a basic grounding in particle physics, quantum physics, and cosmology-all without making readers do math. With the goal of introducing the basics and encouraging readers to explore more deeply afterwards, Harris notes "Like the fish we have no notion of what is beyond the boundaries of our knowledge, but unlike the fish, we know there is something." He starts by presenting those boundaries, the fundamentals of classic physics (Newton's law, states of matter, types of energy), with crisp clarity before laying out an accessible explanation of Einstein's theory of relativity, the structure of the atom, the mysteries of quantum mechanics and cosmology.
Readers will not need to search online for key terms or explanations of concepts that have been glossed over. Instead, one by one, with patience and good humor, Harris introduces each of these building blocks of our universe, taking a little time to invite readers to contemplate the momentousness of the information, as in the chapter titled nothing less than "What Is Reality?"
The watchword, here, is clarity, which Harris offers throughout, with professional illustrations and illuminating accounts of experiments and breakthroughs, offering a solid foundation for understanding and future reading.
Contents
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Professor's Diamond
The value of questioning
Chapter 2 - Some Basics of Classical Physics
Energy
Weight and mass
Matter
Measures and units
Chapter 3 - What is Reality?
The reality of our senses
Technology
The reality of the tiny and the huge
Chapter 4 - Einstein
Special relativity
General relativity
Chapter 5 - The Atom
The structure of the atom
Dalton's atomic model
Thomson's atomic model
Rutherford's atomic model
Bohr's atomic model
The neutron and proton
The forces of nature
The neutrino and electron neutrino
Antimatter
The Periodic Table of Elements
Chapter 6 - Quantum Matters
Young's double slit experiment
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
The electron cloud model
The heart of quantum mechanics
Pauli's exclusion principle
Quantum fields
Chapter 7 - Cosmology
The Big Bang
The early universe
Stars and the evolution of bigger atoms
Hubble's law and Hubble's constant
Dark energy
How inflation developed
The big crunch
The big freeze
Dark matter
The cosmic microwave background
Conclusion
Endnotes
