Philip Ball

Beyond Weird

Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it's not really telling us that "weird" things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don't seem obvious or right at all -- or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means -- and what it doesn't. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge--about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn't a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called "weird," it's us.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Seitenzahl: 384
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Oktober 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 214mm x 138mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 460g
• ISBN-13: 9780226755106
• ISBN-10: 022675510X
• Artikelnr.: 60009210

Autorenporträt

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water and The Music Instinct. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society's Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy, or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol, and he was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He lives in London.

Rezensionen

This is the book I wish I could have written, but am very glad I've read. It's an accessible, persuasive and thorough appraisal of what the most important theory in all of science actually means. Jim Al-Khalili