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The main aim of this book is to shine a spotlight on key experiments and their crucial importance for advancing our understanding of physics. Physics is an empirical science, and experiments have always been a driving force in the development of our understanding of nature. Facts matter. In that sense, the book attempts to be complementary to the many popularizations of theoretical physics, and to counterbalance the frequent emphasis there on more speculative ideas.
Experimental physics is also an essential pillar in physics teaching, as well as helping broader audiences to better understand important concepts, particularly in challenging fields such as relativity or quantum physics, where our common sense intuition often fails.
Readers are taken on an historical journey, starting with “Free Fall” and culminating in “Spooky Action at a Distance”. En route they will encounter many important branches of physics, whose main ideas and theoretical description will be given a more empirical meaning. At the end, the reader is invited to reflect on what could be exciting and important directions for fundamental physics. All readers with an undergraduate degree in physical sciences or engineering will enjoy and learn much from this stimulating and original text.
Author(s): Christian Maes
Edition: 1
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: Publisher PDF
Pages: 188
City: Cham
Tags: Physics Foundations; Important Physics Experiments; Physics History; Physics Worldview; Modern Physics; Theory Empirical Testing
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 The Winners Are …
2 Free Fall
2.1 Equality of Gravitational and Inertial Mass
2.2 Galileo's Experiments on Free Fall
2.3 Newton's Gravity
2.3.1 Looking up at the Sky
2.3.2 Newton's Program
2.4 Gravity
3 Electromagnetic and Optical Unification
3.1 Electromagnetic Phenomena
3.2 Induction
3.3 The Field Concept
3.4 Electromagnetic Waves
3.5 Unification
4 Looking at Fluctuations
4.1 Natural Philosophy
4.2 Atoms
4.3 Limit Theorems
4.4 Brownian Motion
4.4.1 The Random Walk as a Diffusion Model
4.4.2 Sutherland–Einstein Relation
4.5 Perrin's Experiment
4.6 Fluctuation–Dissipation Relation
5 Quantization
5.1 Standard Hydrogen Lines
5.2 Black Body Radiation
5.3 Photoelectric Effect
5.4 Compton Effect
5.5 Specific Heat
5.6 Spin
6 Wave-like Nature
6.1 Early Light
6.1.1 Young's Experiment
6.1.2 On the French Side
6.1.3 Interacting Newton Bullets?
6.2 X-rays and Bragg Scattering
6.3 Davisson–Germer Experiment
6.4 Wavy Electrons
7 Finding Structure: Scattering and Fission
7.1 Light Scattering
7.2 Particle Scattering
7.2.1 Geiger–Marsden–Rutherford Scattering
7.2.2 Standard Model Experiments
7.3 Nuclear Chain Reactions
8 Light in the Universe and the Invariance of Proper Time
8.1 Michelson–Morley Experiment
8.2 Special Relativity
8.2.1 Popular Relativity
8.2.2 Minkowski Spacetime
8.2.3 Twin Paradox
8.2.4 NonEuclidean Geometry
8.3 And More Generally
9 Dynamical Activity of the Vacuum
9.1 Beginnings
9.2 Lamb Shift
9.2.1 Lamb–Retherford Experiment
9.2.2 Calculation
9.3 Fluctuation Force
9.4 Casimir Effect
9.5 Frenesy
10 Phase Transitions
10.1 The Dream of Anaximenes
10.2 Percolation
10.3 Criticality and Universality
10.4 Superconductivity
10.5 Superfluidity
10.6 Bose–Einstein Condensation
11 Nonlocality: Spooky Action at a Distance
11.1 About Alice, Living Far Away from Bob
11.2 Einstein's Boxes
11.3 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Argument
11.4 Bell's Inequality
11.5 Bell Test Experiments
12 Future Experiments
12.1 Around 2000
12.1.1 The Statistical Mechanics of Geometry
12.1.2 Relativity Versus Quantum Mechanics
12.1.3 Quantum Statistical Mechanics
12.2 Into the Next Hundred Years
12.2.1 Computational and Neuro(nal) Physics
12.2.2 Physics of Life
12.2.3 Many-Body Nonequilibrium Physics
12.2.4 Climate and Planetary Sciences
Appendix References
Subject Index
Author Index
