| Contents |
If you're not shocked, you haven't understood. An advance peek at quantum physics ; Why is quantum theory psychologically disturbing? ; Spooky actions at a distance ; Schrödinger's tabby ; No math, but perhaps a few numbers ; Why do we care about a "theory"? ; Intuition? fire up your counterintuition -- Before the quantum. Complicating factors ; The parabola and the pendulum ; The cannon and the cosmos -- Light and its various curiosities. How fast does light travel? ; But what is light made of? particles or waves? ; Thomas Young ; Diffraction ; The ecstasy and the agony of Young's double-slit diffraction experiment ; Young's conclusion : light is a wave ; Unanswered questions ; Fingerprints of the atom ; Maxwell and Faraday : the laird and the bookbinder -- Rebels storm the office. What is a blackbody and why should we care? ; Ich bin ein Berliner ; Catastrophe! (in ultraviolet) ; Max Planck ; Enter Einstein ; The photoelectric effect ; Arthur Compton ; The double-slit experiment returns with a vengeance ; Booby-trapping the slits ; Through a glass, brightly ; The walrus and the plum pudding ; The melancholy Dane ; The character of the atom -- Heisenberg's uncertainty. Nature is lumpy ; The Franck-Hertz experiment ; The terrible twenties ; A strange mathematics ; The inception of the uncertainty principle ; The loveliest equation ever written ; Fourier soup (or, I think we're back in Kansas) ; Waves of probability ; The triumph of uncertainty ; Born, Fourier, and Schrödinger ; The Copenhagen interpretation ; Still crazy after all these years -- Quantum science at work. But Isaac Newton never sent us e-mail! ; Playing cards with Dmitry Mendeleyev ; Police lineup of the elements ; How to build an atom? ; The atomic orbitals ; Enter Mr. Pauli, stage left ; Molecules ; Summing it all up ; Pauli's new force -- Controversy : Einstein vs. Bohr-- and Bell. Four shocking things ; How can it possibly be so weird? ; Geneaology [sic] of mixed states ; Hidden things ; The EPR gauntlet : entanglement ; What Bohr said to EPR ; A deeper theory? ; John Bell ; Bell's theorem unveiled ; Bell's thought experiment in English (almost) ; Nonlocality and hidden variables ; What kind of world is this, anyway? -- Modern quantum physics. Marrying quantum physics to special relativity ; E = mc2 ; The century of the square root ; Paul Dirac ; Fishing the Dirac Sea ; The trouble with the energy of the Dirac Sea ; Supersymmetry ; Holography ; Feynman's sum over paths ; Condensed matter physics ; The conduction band ; Diodes and transistors ; Profitable applications -- Gravity and quantum theory : strings. General relativity ; Black holes ; Quantum gravity? ; String theory ; Superstring theory ; Strings today ; The landscape -- Quantum physics for Millennium III. So many worlds...so little time ; To be and not to be ; Quantum wealth ; Quantum cryptography ; Quantum computers ; Future wonder computers ; Finale -- Appendix. Spin. What is spin? ; Exchange symmetry. |
