Download The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty AudioBook Free
The fascinating story of how quantum mechanics gone mainstream. The breakthrough of the quantum - the idea, born in the first 1900s in a remote control nook of physics, that energy comes in finite packets instead of infinitely divisible amounts - planted a wealthy group of metaphors in the favorite creativity. Quantum imagery and words now bombard us like an endless blast of photons. Phrases such as multiverse, quantum jump, alternate universe, the uncertainty basic principle, and Schrödinger's feline get reinvented continually in cartoons and films, espresso mugs and T-shirts, and fiction and school of thought - phrases reinterpreted by each new generation of performers and writers. Is a quantum jump big or small? How uncertain is the doubt basic principle? Is this barrage of quantum vocabulary pretentious and wacky or a fundamental shift in the manner we think? All the above, say Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber in this groundbreaking booklet. The writers - one a philosopher, the other a physicist - attract on their training and six years of co-teaching to dramatize the quantum's rocky path from technological theory to public understanding. Along, they and their students explored missteps, mistranslations, jokes, and gibberish in public discussions of the quantum. Their publication explores the quantum's manifestations in everything from fine art and sculpture to the prose of John Updike and David Foster Wallace. The writers show the quantum's implications for knowledge, metaphor, intellectual exchange, and the modern-day world. Understanding and appreciating quantum words and imagery, and recognizing its misuse, is part of what it means to be an educated person today. The result is acelebration of words at the program of physics and culture, perfect for anyone drawn to the infinite variety of ideas.
