Physics is written in the language of mathematics, and its findings are based on thousands of experiments. But what kind of picture does physics paint of the world? What do theories like relativity or quantum mechanics contribute to it? How complete is this picture? This book sheds light on how the "things" these theories are about relate to our everyday things, and points out what questions remain unanswered and what problems are involved.
In this book, the author presents how physics works, what it can and cannot do. In doing so, he describes the surprising answers that physics provides to many of our questions about the nature of "things" and the world; answers that challenge our intuition in many ways.
This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Universum ohne Dinge by Jan-Markus Schwindt, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.
Author(s): Jan-Markus Schwindt
Series: Astronomers' Universe
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 300
City: Berlin
Contents
List of Figures
1: Introduction
2: Philosophy
2.1 Philosophy and Language
2.2 World and Mind: Schrödinger’s Dilemma
2.3 Devaluation of Philosophy
2.4 Wittgenstein vs. Jaspers
3: Mathematics
3.1 Sets and Structures
3.2 Proofs
3.3 Mathematics: Man-Made or Man-Independent?
3.4 Numbers and Spaces
3.5 Differential Calculus
4: Natural Science
4.1 Our Common World
5: Reductionism
5.1 Reduction by Decomposition
5.2 Reduction by Generalization or Unification
5.3 Reduction by Replacement
5.4 Reduction of Effective Theories
5.5 The Special Role of Physics
6: Physics
6.1 History and Overview
6.2 Physical Theories and Experiments
The Approximate Nature of the Theories
Physics and Metaphysics
Beauty and Abstraction
6.3 Physics and Mathematics
7: The Pillars of Physics
7.1 Classical Mechanics
Forces
Energy
Degrees of Freedom
7.2 Classical Field Theory
Waves
Force Fields
7.3 Special Theory of Relativity
The Two Postulates of the SR
Time Dilation
Lorentz Transformation
Mass and Energy
7.4 General Theory of Relativity
The Curvature of Space-Time
Einstein’s Field Equations
Cosmological Solutions
7.5 Statistical Mechanics
Entropy
The Second Law and the Direction of Time
7.6 Quantum Mechanics
Wave-Particle Duality
Chance
Measurement Problem and Uncertainty Principle
State Space and Schrödinger’s Cat
Entanglement
Copenhagen Interpretation
Many-Worlds Interpretation
7.7 Quantum Field Theory
The Mathematical Problems of QFT
QFT and GR
7.8 The Standard Model of Particle Physics
The Particle Zoo
Connection Between Standard Model and QFT
7.9 Cosmology
The Universe Is Very Big
The Universe Is Even Getting Bigger
The Universe Is Even Getting Bigger Faster and Faster
8: The Unknown
8.1 The Hunt for the Theory of Everything
8.2 Open Questions
Smolin’s List
Further Open Questions
8.3 The Crisis of Physics
Side Effects
Books on the Crisis
8.4 The Multiverse
9: Things and Facts
9.1 Facts
First Complication
Second Complication
Third Complication
Fourth Complication
The Work of the Physicist
9.2 Things
9.3 World and Reality
9.4 Time
10: The Practical Limits of Physics
10.1 Once Again: Scales
11: The Fundamental Limits of Physics
11.1 The Hard Problem of Consciousness
11.2 The Flow of Time
11.3 Qualia and Physicalism
Elimination
Functionalism
12: Conclusion
12.1 Physics and Reality
12.2 The Richness of Physics
12.3 Practical Limits and Crisis of Physics
Literature
Index
