seeking ultimates an intuitive guide to physics

[...]... (Berkeley), Manuel ˜ Velarde (Madrid), James Vickers (Southampton) and notably Garry McEwen (Southampton), whose construction of, and help with, table 3.2 was particularly helpful For comments on Chapter 6 I want to thank Avshalom Elitzur (Jerusalem), Asher Peres (Haifa), Abner Shimony (Boston) and Andrew Whitaker (Belfast) For comments on Chapter 7 I want to thank Tony Dean (Southampton), Jeremy Goodman (Princeton)... have to be faced, leading eventually to a discussion of God and human happiness in the light of what has been found Acknowledgments I want to thank my family for their help and support and the University of Southampton for facilities made available to me In particular, I wish to thank my ‘IT consultants’ Jeff Dewynne, Alistair Fitt and Colin Please xi Various colleagues read parts of the manuscript and... of this point can and should be an aid or solace in our personal lives Physics will continue to change in the third millennium But the topics discussed here will stay relevant and remain as a crucial ingredient of whatever the new physics will bring To keep abreast the reader is referred to the excellent science journals Nature, Physics World and the American journal Science 1.7 Arrangement of the... Inspector General of Artillery of the Bavarian army Heat, which was widely believed to be a material fluid at the time, could be produced to an unlimited extent in the boring experiments This conversion of mechanical work into heat energy led Rumford to the prophetic remark (1798) ‘ anything which any insulated body can continually be furnished without limitation cannot possibly be a material substance, and... the British, found it prudent to leave Thompson was to become a great scientist and a practical one He designed kitchens and lamps, studied chimneys and how to keep houses warm Thus he used his many ingenious ideas for the scientific improvement of life; and he then used them further to gain an entry to the great establishments of England, Bavaria and, as we shall see, France For his work in Bavaria... the use of many of the engines by which we seek to influence our environment and to extract useful energy from it This energy can be of various forms: mechanical, electrical, electrochemical (as in batteries), photobiological (as in growing plants), photovoltaic (as in solar cells), etc Thermodynamics tells us the maximum work we can extract, and it can be used to optimize the efficiencies of any specific... severe But we still want to attain an appreciation of the results and arguments of science in order to obtain an intuitive grasp of the connections between various phenomena; say, between light and gravity This can be done, as shown here, but it requires some work on the part of the reader: at the very least he or she will have to turn pages forward and backward in order to understand the concepts, even... this book Why should anyone want to read this book? A good reason is to get some feeling for modern scientific arguments and ideas in a reasonably compact form Remember: ‘ one great use of a review, indeed, is to make men wise in ten pages, who have no appetite for a hundred pages; to condense nourishment, to work with essence, and to guard the stomach from idle burden and unmeaning bulk.’ Sydney Smith... the manuscript and I thank them for their comments They are: Dr V Badescu (Bucharest), Dennis Blumenfeld (Chicago), Sir Hermann Bondi (Cambridge), Dmitry Bosky (London), Lajos Diosi (Budapest), Freeman Dyson (Princeton), Brian Griffiths (Southampton), Gareth Jones (Southampton), Andrew Kinghorn (Southampton), Max and Olivia Landsberg (London), John Liakos (Northampton), Robert Mann (Waterloo), George... get? Human life requires a body temperature confined to quite a narrow range, normally about 36 to 41 ЊC or 97 to 106 ЊF Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736) of Dantzig lived most of his life in Holland and made the first reliable thermometer Another thermometric scale is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701– 1744), and it enables us to introduce here the idea of a ‘graph’, giving the . have been, and if you have not read it yet, you should.’ American Journal of Physics October 2000 Seeking Ultimates An Intuitive Guide to Physics Peter T Landsberg University of Southampton Institute. 6 I want to thank Avshalom Elitzur (Jeru- salem), Asher Peres (Haifa), Abner Shimony (Boston) and Andrew Whitaker (Belfast). For comments on Chapter 7 I want to thank Tony Dean (Southamp- ton),. optics–mechanics analogy 127 6.4 A brief history of the new mechanics 133 6.5 Wavefunctions and probabilities 136 6.6 Attempts to understand quantum mechanics 140 6.7 Comments on quantum mechanics