Wow, what a fantastic book. I could hardly put it down once I started. Being a physics graduate, I was first introduced to the world of quantum physics in the early 1970's and have always wondered at the plethora of sub-atomic particles, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the duality of matter and waves and the counter-intuitive world of modern physics.
Jim Baggott has written a wonderful book but not one that reduces physics to layman's terms. It is unashamedly scientific – but then how else can you explain the world of quantum physics. The story is told through the contributions of the key players.
Initially it was an all-European affair with the Germans and Austrians almost single handedly reinventing the quantum world view every year – talk about dominating the scientific world – nearly all of the early contributors were from that small part of Europe – Planck, Einstien, Bohr, de Broglie, Born, Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrodinger.
Alas, Hitler's quest for world domination spelt the end for this powerhouse of thought and the scientists were cast to the wind, settling around the world and causing the lead to be passed to America as it developed the atomic bomb. Now the world of quantum physics is a world wide affair with the great contributors based far and wide.
Having read Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Death by Black Hole earlier in the year, this isvery much a complimentary book, as each focuses on the world of physics and explores it in detail.
This would have to be my book of the year.
To see a basis non-scientific overview of the elementary particles of the Standard Model, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subatomic_particle.
In summary, there are
- Six "flavors" of quarks: up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm;
- Six types of leptons: electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino;
- Twelve gauge bosons (force carriers): the photon of electromagnetism, the three W and Z bosons of the weak force, and the eight gluons of the strong force;
- The Higgs boson.
Various extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of an elementary graviton particle and many other elementary particles.
Composite subatomic particles (such as protons or atomic nuclei) are bound states of two or more elementary particles. For example, a proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while the atomic nucleus of helium-4 is composed of two protons and two neutrons. Composite particles include all hadrons: these include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons (such as pions and kaons).
And of course, there are many more either theoretical particles or particles formed by combinations of the above - with esoteric names like baryons, hadrons, mesons, etc. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_particles and prepare to have your mind blown.
Here is the blurb from publishers Oxford University press.
The twentieth century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world's leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the pinnacle of wonderment and to the very depths of human despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed weapons with the capacity to destroy our reality, whilst at the same time denying us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend it.
Almost everything we think we know about the nature of our world comes from one theory of physics. This theory was discovered and refined in the first thirty years of the twentieth century and went on to become quite simply the most successful theory of physics ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the twenty-first century technology that we have learned to take for granted. But its success has come at a price, for it has at the same time completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at the level of its most fundamental constituents.
Rejecting the fundamental elements of uncertainty and chance implied by quantum theory, Albert Einstein once famously declared that 'God does not play dice'. Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it. The charismatic American physicist Richard Feynman went further: he claimed that nobody understands it.
This is quantum theory, and this book tells its story.
Jim Baggott presents a celebration of this wonderful yet wholly disconcerting theory, with a history told in forty episodes — significant moments of truth or turning points in the theory's development. From its birth in the porcelain furnaces used to study black body radiation in 1900, to the promise of stimulating new quantum phenomena to be revealed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider over a hundred years later, this is the extraordinary story of the quantum world.
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