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- Paperback 2019, ISBN: 9780671776404
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ISBN: "9781101986103Dutton 11 June 2019Paperback 304 pagesThe intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our… More...
ISBN: "9781101986103Dutton 11 June 2019Paperback 304 pagesThe intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself--and continues to almost two hundred years later. Many of science's greatest minds have grappled with the simple yet elusive "double-slit" experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newton. Nearly a century later, Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles, and the experiment became key to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality. Richard Feynman held that the double slit embodies the central mystery of the quantum world. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this ingenious experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe. How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle exist before we look at it, or does the very act of looking create reality? Are there hidden aspects to reality missing from the orthodox view of quantum physics? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there's no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double slit? With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world and through history, down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. Through Two Doors at Once is the most fantastic voyage you can take. Editorial Reviews Review Praise for Through Two Doors at Once "Through Two Doors at Once is a challenging and rewarding survey of how scientists...are grappling with nature's deepest, strangest secrets." --Wall Street Journal "A fascinating tour through the cutting-edge physics the experiment keeps on spawning." --Scientific American ""In this book, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy gives an absolutely mind-boggling tour of how quantum physicists try to explain this "reality" that one of the most powerful scientific models of our era." --Smithsonian "Through Two Doors at Once offers beginners the tools they need to seriously engage with the philosophical questions that likely drew them to quantum mechanics." --Science "At a time when popular physics writing so valorizes theory, a quietly welcome strength of Ananthaswamy's book is how much human construction comes into focus here. This is not "nature" showing us, but us pressing "nature" for answers to our increasingly obsessional questions." --Margaret Wertheim, The Washington Post "Ananthaswamy's book is simply an outstanding exploration of the double slit experiment and what makes it so weird." --Forbes "A thrilling survey of the most famous, enduring, and enigmatic experiment in the history of science." --Kirkus, starred review "Ananthaswamy deftly describes the science and history of a simple experiment that perplexes physicists to this day." --Symmetry, Physics Books of 2018 "Following up 2015's acclaimed The Man Who Wasn't There, Ananthaswamy treats a 19th-century light experiment as a sprawling intellectual adventure story....This accessible, illuminating book shows that no matter how sophisticated the lab setup, the double-slit experiment still challenges physicists." --Publisher's Weekly, Top 10 Science Books for Fall 2018 "An excellent and comprehensive exploration of notable double-slit-like experiments.... A fascinating and readable exploration of quantum mechanics that is a particularly wonderful book for nonspecialists, hobbyists and students of science -- you may not be able to put this captivating book down until you've finished it." --Forbes "An engaging and accessible history of a fascinating and baffling experiment that remains inconclusive to this day. Recommended for those interested in the subject or anyone wishing to delve further into the double-slit experiment." --Library Journal "Through Two Doors at Once is a fascinating read and a must for anyone who would like to find out the latest experimental advances made in this most fundamental of quantum experiments." --Physics World "Ananthaswamy cleverly comes at quantum physics from a different direction...An excellent addition to the 'Quantum physics for the rest of us' shelf." --Brian Clegg, author of Are Numbers Real? and The Quantum Age "Wondrous book. If I were boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway in Moscow, Anil Ananthaswamy is the companion I'd want in the Lounge car. I would buy him a very good Scotch, say 'Tell me about quantum physics and the scientists who created it,' and then I'd sit back contentedly for the seven days to Vladivostok, and listen." --David Quammen, award-winning author of The Song of the Dodoand (forthcoming) The Tangled Tree "Upon opening his two quantum doors, Anil Ananthaswamy invites us into the bizarre and wacky world of nature on the smallest of scales. An engaging raconteur, he tells us a story that is confounding, disturbing, and yet eminently fascinating. Ananthaswamy serves as the perfect tour guide to physics' wild side by closely examining one of its most famous experiments." --Marcia Bartusiak, award-winning author of Einstein's Unfinished Symphony and Dispatches from Planet 3 "Quantum mechanics asks us to believe a number of bizarre things about the nature of reality. But these demands don't arise out of thin air; they are forced on us by experiments. Anil Ananthaswamy has provided a lively introduction to the most paradigmatic of these: the (in)famous double-slit experiment." --Sean Carroll, author of The Big Picture "The double-slit experiment is among the most important experiments ever conducted, both scientifically and historically. In this brisk and enjoyable book, Anil Ananthaswamy gives the double-slit the biography it has long deserved. Anyone interested in the true nature of our quantum world should read this book." --Adam Becker, Ph.D., author of What Is Real? "All the strangeness of the quantum world is revealed as Ananthaswamy skillfully weaves an almost magical tale out of who, what, when, where and the elusive why surrounding modern versions of an experiment first performed over two hundred years ago. A must read for all those interested in the nature of reality." --Manjit Kumar, author of Quantum "Like quantum particles encountering the fabled double slit, physicists have traveled many different paths in trying to parse the beguiling implications of quantum theory. Through Two Doors at Once is a marvelous guide to the leading ideas - and the stakes - in that century-long quest." --David Kaiser, author of How the Hippies Saved Physics "The first time I saw the double-slit experiment, I thought it was a trick. Even now that I know it's real, it still seems like magic. In his new book, Anil Ananthaswamy brings alive the magic of quantum mechanics." --Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist and author of Lost in Math "For a lover of physics and mathematics, there could not have been a better book to explain the complexities of quantum mechanics." --The Hindustan Times About the Author Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning journalist and former staff writer and deputy news editor for the London-based New Scientist magazine. He has been a guest editor for the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and organizes and teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. He is a freelance feature editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science's Front Matter. He contributes regularly to the New Scientist, and has also written for Nature, National Geographic News, Discover, Nautilus, Matter, The Wall Street Journal and the UK's Literary Review. His first book, The Edge of Physics, was voted book of the year in 2010 by Physics World, and his second book, The Man Who Wasn't There, won a Nautilus Book Award in 2015 and was long-listed for the 2016 Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 THE CASE OF THE EXPERIMENT WITH TWO HOLES Richard Feynman Explains the Central Mystery There is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality. -Giorgio Morandi Richard Feynman was still a year away from winning his Nobel Prize. And two decades away from publishing an endearing autobiographical book that introduced him to non-physicists as a straight-talking scientist interested in everything from cracking safes to playing drums. But in November 1964, to students at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, he was already a star and they received him as such. Feynman came to deliver a series of lectures. Strains of "Far above Cayuga's Waters" rang out from the Cornell Chimes. The provost introduced Feynman as an instructor and physicist par excellence, but also, of course, as an accomplished bongo drummer. Feynman strode onto the stage to the kind of applause reserved for performing artists, and opened his lecture with this observation: "It's odd, but in the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics." By his sixth lecture, Feynman dispensed with any preamble, even a token "Hello" to the clapping students, and jumped straight into how our intuition, which is suited to dealing with everyday things that we can see and hear and touch, fails when it comes to understanding nature at very small scales. And often, he said, it's experiments that challenge our intuitive view of the world. "Then we see unexpected things," said Feynman. "We see things that are very far from what we could have imagined. And so our imagination is stretched to the utmost-not, as in fiction, to imagine things which aren't really there. But our imagination is stretched to the utmost just to comprehend those things which are there. And it's this kind of a situation that I want to talk about." The lecture was about quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small things; in particular, it was about the nature of light and subatomic bits of matter such as electrons. In other words, it was about the nature of reality. Do light and electrons show wavelike behavior (like water does)? Or do they act like particles (like grains of sand do)? Turns out that saying yes or no would be both correct and incorrect. Any attempt to visualize the behavior of the microscopic, subatomic entities makes a mockery of our intuition. "They behave in their own inimitable way," said Feynman. "Which, technically, could be called the 'quantum-mechanical' way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have ever seen before. Your experience with things that you have seen before is inadequate-is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. They do not behave just like particles. They do not behave just like waves." But at least light and electrons behave in "exactly the same" way, said Feynman. "That is, they're both screwy." Feynman cautioned the audience that the lecture was going to be difficult because it would challenge their widely held views about how nature works: "But the difficulty, really, is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself 'But how can it be like that?' Which really is a reflection of an uncontrolled, but I say utterly vain, desire to see it in terms of some analogy with something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar. I'll simply describe it." And so, to make his point over the course of an hour of spellbinding oratory, Feynman focused on the "one experiment which has been designed to contain all of the mystery of quantum mechanics, to put you up against the paradoxes and mysteries and peculiarities of nature." It was the double-slit experiment. It's difficult to imagine a simpler experiment-or, as we'll discover over the course of this book, one more confounding. We start with a source of light. Place in front of the source a sheet of opaque material with two narrow, closely spaced slits or openings. This creates two paths for the light to go through. On the other side of the opaque sheet is a screen. What would you expect to see on the screen? The answer, at least in the context of the world we are familiar with, depends on what one thinks is the nature of light. In the late seventeenth century and all of the eighteenth century, Isaac Newton's ideas dominated our view of light. He argued that light was made of tiny particles, or "corpuscles," as he called them. Newton's "corpuscular theory of light" was partly formulated to explain why light, unlike sound, cannot bend around corners. Light must be made of particles, Newton argued, since particles don't curve or bend in the absence of external forces. In his lecture, when Feynman analyzed the double-slit experiment, he first considered the case of a source firing particles at the two slits. To accentuate the particle nature of the source, he urged the audience to imagine that instead of subatomic particles (of which electrons and particles of light would be examples), we were to fire bullets from a gun-which "come in lumps." To avoid too much violent imagery (what with bombs in the prologue, and a thought experiment with gunpowder to come), let's imagine a source that spews particles of sand rather than bullets; we know that sand comes in lumps, though the lumps are much, much smaller than bullets. First, let's do the experiment with either the left slit or the right slit closed. Let's take it that the source is firing grains of sand at high enough speeds that they have straight trajectories. When we do this, the grains of sand that get through the slits mostly hit the region of the screen directly behind the open slit, with the numbers tapering off on either side. The higher the height of the graph, the more the number of grains of sand reaching that location on the screen. Now, what should we see if both slits are open? As expected, each grain of sand passes through one or the other opening and reaches the other side. The distribution of the grains of sand on the far screen is simply the sum of what goes through each slit. It's a demonstration of the intuitive and sensible behavior of the non-quantum world of everyday experience, the classical world described so well by Newton's laws of motion. To be convinced that this is indeed what happens with particles of sand, let's orient the device such that the sand is now falling down onto the barrier with two slits. Our intuition clearly tells us that two mounds should form beneath the two openings. Turning the experiment back to its or, 0, Melville Balsillie, 1960. 1960 First Edition. hardcover. 131pp, owner's signature, VG in VG- .dw. . Glacier Books are experienced and professional booksellers. We take pride in offering carefully described books and excellent customer service., Melville Balsillie, 1960, 3, London England: New European Publications Ltd. Hardback. First Edition. Europe of Many Circles. Slight mark to inside front cover. Green cloth with gilt lettering. Lucidlt written and with irrefutable logic, this book shows rhe European Community is both too big and too small. So long as it limits its membership to 12 of the 35 countries of Europe that now uphold democracy and individual liberty, it is too small to claim to be 'Europe'; and it is manifestly too small to cope with the growing list of environmental and other issues that way no heed to any national frontier. Yet if the sovereign powers of taxation and legislation are to be taken away from so many national parliaments and handed over to the supranational authorities in Brussels in some form of federal union, it will be too big for democracy or individual liberty. Democracy is as much government by the people as it is fo them or for them. So how can 320 million, let alone 450 million, Europeans have any sense of being democratically governed if such sovereign powers are concentrated in the hands of a few in a faraway city. And how can liberty breathe beneath the wieght of usch massive concentration of power over the individual? This book sets out how the European Community can be reshaped into something big enough in power to allow her people to enjoy both democracy and individual liberty. Its publication could not be more timely, nor its message more convincing. How 450 million people are to be governed is no minor question. Here is one answer. Is there another to serve the people of Europe so well? 182 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions, Reference books ,and all types of Academic Literature.) . Very Good. Cloth. First Edition. 1990., New European Publications Ltd, 1990, 3, Pimsleur, 2001. AUDIO CD. Good. Includes the book let's. Number four AUDIO CDs withdrawn from the library collection. Some library marking. We will polish each Audio CD for reliable sound. You will receive a good set. Enjoy this presentable AUDIO CD performance., Pimsleur, 2001, 2.5<
