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History Of Particle Theory: Between Darwin And Shakespeare (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,353
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History Of Particle Theory: Between Darwin And Shakespeare (Hardcover)
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History of Particle Theory fills an important gap existing in the
literature by discussing the impressive progress in understanding
the elementary particles out of which all everyday objects are
made. Most of this progress has happened in the last seventy years
after the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) was perfected as
an extremely accurate description of electromagnetic interactions.
This astonishing sequence of discoveries was made hand in hand
between theory and experiment. This book concentrates only on
theory where giant steps were made by a series of exceptionally
creative physicists, and this is portrayed as an essential part of
the broader spectrum of human knowledge and culture, which is
constantly being similarly extended by the creative individuals
such as the two mentioned in the subtitle, Between Darwin and
Shakespeare, who both significantly changed Western Civilization by
ideas in Biology and in English Literature respectively.In the last
forty years, the standard model has been confirmed again and again
as the correct description of elementary particles up to energies
of a thousand times the proton mass. In the discussion of particle
theory and theoretical physics in general, the book starts from
well over two thousand years ago, going back to the ancient Greeks
such as Democritus and Archimedes, until the 17th century, when the
extraordinary intellect of Newton changed everything by
demonstrating that not only objects in the laboratory but also
heavenly bodies are governed by mathematical equations. There
followed what can be called Darwinian evolution in theoretical
physics, survival of the fittest theories, by loose analogy with
the origin of biological species.The present standard model of
particle theory surely cannot be the final word because it contains
far too many free parameters. The book contains a penultimate
chapter discussing a number of such open problems which exist in
particle theory. There is then a closing chapter, not related to
the rest of the book, providing a series of quotations written in
the 16th and 17th centuries by Shakespeare and here applied to
particle theory. The inclusion of this is based on our premise that
particle theory is just one out of several opportunities for
exceptional human creativity.
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