As I am sure everyone will know, a hot dog is a popular snack consisting of a cooked sausage in a soft bun. The name of this sandwich originates from the fact that in the 18th century some people suspected that sausages were made of dog meat. This may sound strange, but as I have learned, the true nature of the humble hot dog may be stranger still.
As I am sure everyone will know, a hot dog is a popular snack consisting of a cooked sausage in a soft bun. The name of this sandwich originates from the fact that in the 18th century some people suspected that sausages were made of dog meat. This may sound strange, but as I have learned, the true nature of the humble hot dog may be stranger still.
This book attempts to explain the core of physics, the origin of everything and anything. It explains why physics at the most fundamental level, and especially quantum mechanics, has moved away from naïve realism towards abstraction, and how this means that we can begin to answer some of the most fundamental questions which trouble us all, about space, time, matter, etc. It provides an original approach based on symmetry which will be of interest to professionals as well as lay people. In the book, virtually no prior knowledge is assumed, but the readers are allowed to participate in a discussion of very deep ideas. Throughout the book, the readers are guided through some important ideas which need to be explained mathematically. The key fact is that the mathematics is not about calculation but about concepts. Much of it can be simplified using coloured text and diagrams. This means that ideas which are important to everyone who wants to know how the universe is structured are not glossed over as being too difficult for anybody but the experts. This book is written for a wide audience. Experts will gain a great deal, but so will lay readers. This would be an ideal book for students to read before progressing to another book by the author, The Foundations of Physical Law.
Schrödinger’s equation and the “wave function” that satisfies it are the first bold brushstrokes of a new portrait of Nature that physicists gradually filled in during the middle half of the twentieth century. The emerging pattern was strange, but not entirely alien to science. It was drawn, to paraphrase Galileo, in a mathematical idiom “without some knowledge of which it is humanly impossible to understand.” While nonmathematical accounts are conceivable, I would rather at this point say more about the mathematics because it will deepen our view of the whole enterprise of modern physics. Most people never get beyond the “math is numbers and numbers are boring” barrier that hides behind it a limitless universe of beautiful things. So let us delve briefly into the nonboring side of mathematics.
Richard Feynman, in his famous Lectures on Physics, toyed with the idea of all scientific knowledge being wiped out and facing the choice of passing one single idea down to future generations (Feynman et al. 1989). He believed it should be the hypothesis that all things are made of atoms. The idea that matter is built up from discrete fundamental units can be traced back to several ancient cultures (the word atom deriving from the Greek word atomos ‘cannot be divided’). It is only within the last century or so, however, that theories for atomic structure were developed to explain a series of phenomena observed throughout the 18th–19th Centuries. Many of these phenomena were optical, such as Melvill’s observation in 1752 that a mixture of sea salt and alcohol would burn with a yellow flame (see Figure 1) or Wollaston’s observation in 1802 that sunlight contains black lines in its spectrum (Cajori 1962). Further refinement and characterisation from people like Fraunhofer, Kirchoff, Bun-sen, Balmer, and Zeeman followed, but it was not until 1913, with the introduction of the Rutherford-Bohr atomic model, that a cornerstone was laid for what would become a quantum mechanical description of the atom.
The most discussed of ``live'' metaphors in physical sciences is that of the Schrödinger cat. Introduced in the early, but mature days of the new quantum theory, in 1935, the parable of the cat has provoked and enlivened debates on the meaning of the quantum theory, on the ontology of the quantum wavefunction, on the puzzle of the collapse of the wavefunction, on the meaning of quantum measurement, and on the boundary between the quantum world and the classical world. In this article, I will discuss these issues of the quantum theory focussing on various aspects of the metaphor of the Schrödinger cat.
When physics professor Chad Orzel went to the pound to adopt a dog, he never imagined Emmy. She wasn't just a friendly mutt who needed a home; she was a talking dog with an active interest in what her new owner did for a living and how it could work for her. Soon Emmy was trying to use the strange ideas of mechanics for the really important things in her life: chasing critters, getting treats, and going for walks. She peppered Chad with questions: Could she use tunneling to get through the neighbor's fence and chase bunnies? What about teleportation to catch squirrels before they climb out of reach? Where are all the universes in which Chad drops steak on the floor? And what about the bunnies made of cheese that ought to be appearing out of nothing in the backyard? With great humor and clarity, Chad Orzel explains to Emmy, and to human readers, just what mechanics is and how it works -- and why, although you can't use it to catch squirrels or eat steak, it's still bizarre, amazing, and important to every dog and human. Follow along as Chad and Emmy discuss the central elements of theory, from particles that behave like waves and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to entanglement (spooky action at a distance) and virtual particles. Along the way, they discuss the history of the theory, such as the experiments that discovered that electrons are waves and particles at the same time, and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr's decades-long debate over what theory really meant (Einstein may have been smarter, but Bohr was right more often). Don't get caught looking less informed than Emmy. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog will show you the universe that lies beneath everyday reality, in all its randomness, uncertainty, and wonder. Forget Schrodinger's Cat, says Emmy, quantum physics is all about dogs. And once you see physics explained to a dog, you'll never see the world the same way again.