5 comments about The Matter Myth: Dramatic Discoveries That Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality.

1. This is an excellent book that clearly presents the current theories of physics. This is so interesting (and not hard to understand at this high-level presentation), it should be on the reading list of anyone who has the slightest curiousity about our universe; about the reality he or she perceives. What I find most interesting, between this book and a couple others, is how bizarre the theories are getting. It seems to me that physics has edged up against philosophy and is approaching the point where science will no longer be able to provide answers to the remaining big questions. Maybe the answers to those questions will forever remain philosophical or religious because science can't get there.



2. The first chapter of this book is entitled "The Death of Materialism," and the final line of the book concludes that Gilbert Ryle was right to dismiss Descartes' "ghost in the machine," "not because there is no ghost, but because there is no machine." The matter myth has maintained that reality consists of material particles flying around in a void as they are affected by forces. With the advent of chaos theory, physicists now maintain that the stuff of the universe possesses an innate tendency to self-organize, which at least hints at the possibility of a teleological universe. It is interesting that it is the physicists who are positing the notion that consciousness might be an innate property of existence, and the prominent life scientists are we are nothing but gene and meme machines.
   
   I realized upon reading this book that old notions never die, they just spiral upward. Had Planck called the particles of energy emitted by a hot body "phlogistons" instead of "quanta," then we might very well study "phlogiston mechanics." A phlogiston has at least as much in common with a quantum as the modern atom has with the atom of Dalton. And Aristotle's rejection of the existence of vacuum in favor of the notion that dense matter was vortices in the plenum is essentially correct. "Vacuum" is replete with energy, and virtual particles, and matter is thought to be warped space. Now perhaps entelechy will be revived in a modern form.
   
   As a teacher of IB Theory of Knowledge, I have found THE MATTER MYTH an excellent book for high school students with an interest in science but still at a rudimentary level of knowledge. The first chapter gives a clear explanation of just exactly what is meant by Kuhn's paradigm shift, and the book as whole provides a lively, readable account of cutting-edge of science and its relation to philosophical ideas.
   (Peter Payne, author of CAPTAIN CALIFORNIA BATTLES THE BEELZEBUBIAN BEASTS OF THE BIBLE)



3. Just before his death, Albert Einstein attempted to console a grieving widow by reminding her that only in the illusory now did her spouse fail to continue to exist.
   
   And its from this jumping off point that really deep discussions of physics ultimately become really deep discussions as to the nature of reality and our true place in it.
   
   While a more concise and current treatment of these topics can be found in Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, it's impressive how Davies and Gribbon have produced a book that largely stands up to the test of time perhaps not so much in its cutting edge science as in its orientation to that science.
   
   The seeming rock hard quality of the now and the artifacts that inhabit merely reflects the way in which we've been created. As has been teased out in both good science and good science fiction, were we to alter our ability to experience time the nature of our lives would vary dramatically.
   
   And so the chicken-egg question of matter and energy finds it solution in the discovery that the universe is comprised of processes and not things. In this way the stars and the planets and our beings are so many ripples in the sea sometimes cresting but all ultimately following back into the surf from which they sprang.
   
   Mind blowing book...read it even though it is a little old.



4. Very easy to understand and almost always interesting. If you like physics at all, this is a great overview of everything you want to know.



5. I agree with the majority of reviewers that this is an excellent book, making some very difficult concepts understandable to the layman. The book was published in 1992, and I bought the October 2007 edition. It is a pity that so much data in the book are outdated: Dark matter is hardly mentioned, and there is no reference to dark energy; the age of the universe is given as 'about 15 billion years', and I quote from page 174: 'The expansion rate (of the universe) is inexorably slowing.' Unfortunately, outdated concepts like these undermine the credibility of the book on the whole. I hope the authors review the book soon.

No comments about Special Relativity (Lecture Notes in Physics).

No comments about E = Einstein: His Life, His Thought, and His Influence on Our Culture.

2 comments about Relativity in Illustrations.

1. Jacob T. Schwartz is a hottie and this book is exactly what it claims to be!



2. Quick Review
   
   This first-look-at-relativity book relies heavily on diagrams to make its points, but I had a very difficult time following the textual explanations of some of these diagrams. By the end of the book, I had learned nothing new about relativity, and very little new about space-time diagrams. I think your time is better spent elsewhere.
   
   
   
   Longer Review
   
   A quick search on Amazon reveals that hundreds of books claim to be clear, accessible explanations of relativity. Finding the one best suited to your needs is difficult, but I chose "Relativity Illustrated" from the library shelf because I was looking for a book that would do an especially good job demonstrating the use of space-time diagrams in special relativity. (Space-time diagrams, or Minkowski diagrams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_diagram), are useful tools which show the relationship between "events" - the core of special relativity.)
   
   
   
   "Relativity Illustrated" teaches special relativity using almost exclusively space-time diagrams (as opposed to algebra and thought experiments, the methods most books use). Having already taken a course in relativity, I was able to see where the book was going before it got there. Schwartz works up to special relativity by deducing, step by step, what the correct form of a Minkowski diagram should must look like. He starts by explaining that we're making graphs of one-dimensional space versus time, then introduces the problem relativity tries to solve: what would the world look like if, instead of seeing it the way I do, I saw it through the eyes of a friend who was zooming past me at very high speed?
   
   
   
   The answer is that things would look quite different - things that I think happen at the same time happen at different times according to my friend. Distances look shorter to him, and time runs slower. Schwartz introduces all these ideas and shows them to be true through his use of diagrams, but while the effects are demonstrated to be true, they aren't made believable. One problem is that his writing is not very clear. Following the explanation of the addition of velocities formula on page 97 is a nightmare. A few very long paragraphs of text describe in detail a long list of comparisons and geometrical results on a graph (black and white) with eight lines and 26 labels. That example is too long to cite, but here is another, from the section on page 107 where Schwartz find the algebraic expression for the dilation factor gamma:
   
   "The amount of time which Mr. A considers to have elapsed between the instant he passes Mr. B. and the instant when he reaches that point in his path which, according to Mr. B's notion of time, he reaches after x seconds bears the same proportion to x as x does to one, that is, x times x, or x^2 seconds."
   
   Because of these convoluted, poorly-organized sentences, I needed to read many passages three times before I got the point. A further confounding difficulty was that the entire book is one long piece - not broken into chapters or even clear break points.
   
   
   
   Another reason I think the book fails is that it fails to impress the reader's gut. A clever enough reader will follow through all the geometrical arguments and be unable to refute the results. But when the result is something like time dilation, where it's claimed that a moving clock runs slowly, a list of individual steps carried out on a diagram and eventually leading to a mathematical result is not convincing. On the other hand, the "light clock" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_clock#Simple_inference_of_time_dilation) thought experiment is far more immediate and convincing.
   
   
   
   The book also failed to cover the bases of a standard introduction to relativity. Never once did it mention the invariant interval - an extremely important result which instigated Minkowski's interest in special relativity to begin with. Another egregious omission is a full statement of the Lorentz transformations (we never leave one dimension). The light cone was described, but the key aspect of the light cone is that it doesn't change when moving from observer to observer, and this was not in the book. There are many other interesting topics which the book rightly describes as being beyond its scope, but these few basic results should have been in there.
   
   
   
   I don't think the book is useless. Its idea - to show all of relativity through the use of Minkowski diagrams, is a good one, but the execution was poor, and the complete lack of problems or exercises will only make it harder for the reader to learn.
   
   If you want an introductory text on special relativity, my advice is to choose Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler. This book's style is slightly annoying, but its exercises are brilliant, it has a lot of great supplementary material, and the presentation is both accurate and clear.
   
   Another good choice would be to work your way though the introductory relativity course on MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-20January--IAP--2005/CourseHome/index.htm) which requires Introduction to Special Relativity by Resnick and Special Relativity by French and Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Illustrated Edition) from Einstein himself.
   
   I haven't read Resnick, but French is a fine book with more explanation of the experimental and historical context than other books, and Einstein's book is challenging for a beginner but also rewarding in its deeply physical understanding, and includes a bit about General Relativity as well.
   
   
   
   If you're not interested in going through all the math of it, try the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_special_relativity) or the popular book by Einstein and Infeld, Evolution of Physics

1 comments about Albert Einstein: The Persist Illusion of Transience.

1. The books on Einstein continue to appear at ever accelerating since the one- hundredth anniversary of the annus mirabilis( 1905) when Einstein published the four papers that changed our perception of the physical world. Now Hebrew University the archivist of Einstein's personal papers has in conjunction with its university press, Magnes produced a truly stunning volume on Einstein's life and work. I'll admit what really knocked me out here are the quality photos many of which I have not seen before. The sad strangeness in the eyes of Einstein's first wife in a photo with her sons, the bearlike strength of the young Einstein so at odds with our image of the scattered - hair dreamy genius. I was too pleasantly surprised by the quality of the text, even that providing brief descriptions of Einstein's major scientific accomplishments.
   The work also has many captions which contains quotations from Einstein. And the truth is Einstein seems a very wise and humane person i.e. not simply some kind of remarkable-super-brained genius.
   This is a very special book and one I loved looking through and reading.
   I believe all those who take interest in Einstein and his work will take pleasure from this work.

5 comments about Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Field Theory.

1. Unusually clear and practical, with alot of examples. Includes topics not available elsewhere, including relativistic three body problems, and bound state wavefunctions derived from field theory.



2. Certainly suitable as an introduction (independent, even!) to QFT. The choice of topics is extensive and the presentation is logical, concise, and clear. The most pleasantly surprising aspect is the amount of physical insight accompanying the calculations. Problems are well-chosen and helpful.



3. Excellent as an introduction (independent, even!) to QFT. The choice of topics is extensive and the presentation is logical, concise, and clear. Pleasantly surprising is the amount of physical insight accompanying calculations. The problems are well-chosen and helpful.



4. This book is a fine one, and it emphasizes the practical aspects of quantum field theory rather than the abstract formalism. The author has written a book that would be of use to the graduate student in physics who is intending to specialize in quantum field theory or experimental particle physics.

   The book is divided into four parts. The author begins in part one with an overview of the quantization of the vibrating string via canonical quantization. This method involves finding the normal modes of the string, and then replacing the canonical variables with operators that satisfy particular non-commutation relations. The resulting structure is interpreted as a phonon field (in the particle picture). The author gives an interesting and detailed discussion of field-particle duality by taking the classical limit, and one can see clearly the origin of the famous coherent states.

   Part one is also an introduction to quantum electrodynamics. The author discusses the quantization of the electromagnetic field as a quantization problem with constraints, the latter being gauge and Lorentz invariance. The conflict between these two requirements is illustrated by the choice of different gauges, such as the Coulomb gauge (which is not manifestly covariant). The interaction picture also makes its appearance, wherein the S-matrix is derived, and the Lamb shift is calculated and compared with experiment. The famous mass renormalization problem is discussed, and the cross section for deuteron photodisintegration is calculated. This calculation is interesting in that detailed knowledge of the strong interaction is not necessary to obtain the correct answer.

   Part two of the book is an overview, with historical emphasis, of the Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations. The reader can see the origin here of the concept of a quantum field, but a full understanding of these fields is not yet available in modern physics, particularly in the utility of these fields in predicting bound states. The Klein-Gordon equation is interpreted as a description of a charged particle, with its norm the charge density, and a solution of the Klein-Gordon equation equation is given, involving pair creation from a high Coulomb barrier. This example is interesting in that it predicts negative energy states in the context of the Klein-Gordon equation, and is not done in any other textbooks in quantum field theory. The non-relativistic limits of both of these equations is discussed, and applications given, such as the Zeeman effect. The author also shows that the homogeneous Lorentz group is not simply-connected, and proves the covariance of the Dirac equation by constructing a representation of the Lorentz group on (four-dimensional) Dirac space, i.e. the space of spinors. The author also gives an introduction to hadron physics, via the MIT bag model. All of these discussions are interesting but they leave the reader wanting for an explanation of how bound states can form in a fully relativistic quantum field theory.

   In part three, the author delves more deeply into the theoretical aspects of quantum field theory, and proves the famous PCT theorem. Such a discussion will prepare the reader for an understanding of the current theories regarding mirror matter. Interactions in quantum field theory are introduced via the phi-3 field theory, and the reader gets a first taste of the famous Feynman rules. One topic noticeably missing in this part is that of effective field theories. This is a topic of enormous importance in current formulations of quantum field theories and their connection with other theories of fundamental interactions, such as string theories. Such a discussion would be appropriate in this part, particularly in the sections on pion-nucleon interactions. An entire chapter is spent on renormalization, wherein Wick's theorem is proved. A mathematically-astute reader will find the idea of renormalization troubling from a mathematical point of view, but a more rigorous foundation for renormalization does currently exist in the literature. The problem of bound states in quantum field theory is dealt with in this part by the partial summing of particular Feynman diagrams, the so-called ladder and crossed ladder sums of Feynman diagrams. This leads to the famous Bethe-Salpeter equation and the author's "spectator" equation. The author shows the equivalence of these approaches in dealing with the (two-body) bound state problem. In addition, he also introduces briefly the Blackenbecler-Sugar equation as another relativistic two-body equation, but does not compare this equation to the other approaches at all. The Schwinger-Dyson equations would be the natural thing to discuss in this part, and how one might derive the relativistic two-body equations from them, but the author does not do so, unfortunately.

   The last part is on overview of quantum gauge theories. Gauge symmetry is introduced as a "dynamical" symmetry, which, the author argues is strong enough to be able to determine the structure of the Lagrangian of the theory. This strategy is one of the most pervasive in all modern attempts at building unified theories of particle interactions. He also does give an introduction to chiral symmetry, in the context of the strong interaction. The discussion of chirality is unfortunately the only example of an effective field theory in the book. The method of functional integration is introduced to deal with the quantization of gauge theories, and the reader can see the origin of the famous Faddeev-Popov ghosts. The electroweak model, the most successful of the Non-abelian gauge theories to this date, is also discussed in fair detail. Examples of the calculation of cross sections for the intermediate vector bosons are not included though, surprisingly. The book ends with a fairly detailed discussion of the renormalization group and asymptotic freedom. The later property of the gauge theory of the strong interaction is definitely a confidence builder in one's belief that gauge theories contain a hint of the correct physics for the strong interaction.




5. Things I liked about the book:
   - The first half of the book was very readable, and provides a lot of physical insight
   - Very good coverage of 2nd Quantization, provides a lot of intuition for the subject: the idea of Fock spaces and particles as excitations of fields really clicked for me after reading the first couple of sections
   - The book is fairly accessible for a first book in QFT (at least the first half), it makes a good connection between QFT and non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
   
   Things I didn't like about the book:
   - The more advanced topics (basically the entire second half of the book, but especially the sections on renormalization and spontaneous symmetry breaking) were very unsystematically presented. For example, renormalization was presented merely as a way to remove infinities from loop diagrams, the dimensional regularization methods were not justified or motivated.
   
   Overall - I would recommend the first half of this book as an introduction to QFT, but there are much better introductory books out there (see Srednicki, or Zee, or Ryder).

No comments about Aspects of Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime (London Mathematical Society Student Texts).

No comments about Relativistic and QED Effects in Heavy Atoms (AIP Conference Proceedings).

5 comments about Introduction to the Theory of Relativity.

1. This book describes the foundations of relativity in a clear and concise way. The development of tensor analysis is especially clear. It is great for anyone who has studied calculus, differential equations, and classical physics. I highly recommend it.



2. Peter was able to give examples which made the complex easier to understand. The edges of the first sections in a copy in the Caltech library were black from use. I was privileged to be a guinea pig for the first edition.



3. Don't know of a superior first exposure to relativity. It starts with elementary situations and examines the conflicts with pre-relativistic kinematical viewpoints. This motivates the requirements for special relativities' postulates and their immediate consequences.

   From here, the more complex issues of special relativity are dealt with in an orderly fashion; e.g. rigid body dynamics, relativistic hydrodynamics and electromagnetic theory from a relatavistic point of view.

   General tensor analysis is covered in a separate chapter for pursuing the general relativity chapters of the book. Incidentally, this chapter is among the most clear expositions on tensors out there.

   Finally, general relativity is covered in the same stepwise fashion as was done in the special relativity chapters. The natural introduction of more complex ideas which start from basics is perhaps, the single reason why this book is a hard to beat introduction to relativity.

   After a thorough digestion of Bergmann, one is ready to spring up to the next level, the masterful Weinberg.




4. This book is one of the first introductions to the theory of relativity that has the endorsement of the discoverer of the theory. Albert Einstein was alive when the book was first published, and writes the foreward to the book. Individuals who want to learn relativity should still take a look at this book, in spite of the somewhat outdated mathematical notation. In more contemporary textbooks and monographs the physical intuition is usually sacrificed and replaced with mathematical formalism. But here the author puts the main emphasis on the physics behind the subject. It is one of the few books still in print that discusses the relativistic mechanics of mass points and continuous matter.

   The reader will also get an overview of early approaches to unified field theories. Historians of science will be interested in particular with this discussion. It is amazing how much has changed in this area since this book was published in 1942. The advent of superstring and M-theory has given physicists a view of reality that is set on a mathematical structure that is quite formidable. It now takes years for a student to obtain the necessary mathematical background to reach the frontiers of unified theories. In this book, it only takes the reading of the first two parts to be able to understand the author's overview of unified field theories. Particular attention should be paid to the treatment of the gauge-invariant geometry of Hermann Weyl, because of its relevance to the construction of gauge theories in elementary particle physics. The geometry of Weyl is constructed using a symmetric tensor representing the gravitational field and a pseudovector that represents the vector potential. When a gauge transformation is applied to this vector potential, it changes by a gradient, which, as the author remarks, is the historical reason for calling the addition of a gradient to the electromagnetic vector potential a gauge transformation. In addition, variational principles play a role in this discussion, and these principles have wide applicability to the quantization of gauge theories in modern developments. The role played by adding extra dimensions to formulate a field theory is summarized here by the author in his discussion of five-dimensional field theories and Kaluza-Klein theories. Ten- and eleven-dimensional theories now dominate modern unified theories. It would be very interesting to know what the author and Einstein would have thought about the theories of today, entrenched as they are in the most complex mathematical constructions ever applied to physical theory.




5. on telling you that the author was on of the two to three collaborators of Einstein (The others being Valentine Bargmann and Leopold Infeld) on Unified field theories.
   
   It is a beautifully written account of the gravitational theory. The monster mind himself has written the foreword.

No comments about Some Strangeness in the Proportion.