Four characters debate the Transactional Quantum Microphysics. They throw twenty-one implicit, surreptitious postulates taught everywhere, and explicit ten transactional postulates as the new contract. They detail the geometry of the Fermat spindles of the individual waves, and carefully study the properties of the absorbers. With them you review many branches of the physics and the technology, now reunified in many experimental results. Innovations: individual waves, absorbers, transactions, de-Broglie-Dirac ground noise, thorough use of the de Broglie and Dirac-Schrödinger intrinsic frequencies, analysis of the conditions of the spectral absorptions. A thorough study of the optics of the eye is among the definitive proofs of the soundness of the Transactional Quantum Microphysics: an astigmatic eye sees the same illumination and the same colors, though the absorbing molecule is just 18 Å long. It proves that the old Newtonian causality is false: for a photon the emitter and the absorber are equally causal.
Four characters debate the Transactional Quantum Microphysics. They throw twenty-one implicit, surreptitious postulates taught everywhere, and explicit ten transactional postulates as the new contract. They detail the geometry of the Fermat spindles of the individual waves, and carefully study the properties of the absorbers. With them you review many branches of the physics and the technology, now reunified in many experimental results. Innovations: individual waves, absorbers, transactions, de-Broglie-Dirac ground noise, thorough use of the de Broglie and Dirac-Schr?dinger intrinsic frequencies, analysis of the conditions of the spectral absorptions. A thorough study of the optics of the eye is among the definitive proofs of the soundness of the Transactional Quantum Microphysics: an astigmatic eye sees the same illumination and the same colors, though the absorbing molecule is just 18 ? long. It proves that the old Newtonian causality is false: for a photon the emitter and the absorber are equally causal
Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom gives a comprehensive account of the birth, development, and decline of Bohr's atomic theory. It presents the theory in a broad context which includes not only its technical aspects, but also its reception, dissemination, and applications in both physics and chemistry.
The Physics of Information Technology explores the familiar devices that we use to collect, transform, transmit, and interact with electronic information. Many such devices operate surprisingly close to very many fundamental physical limits. Understanding how such devices work, and how they can (and cannot) be improved, requires deep insight into the character of physical law as well as engineering practice. The book starts with an introduction to units, forces, and the probabilistic foundations of noise and signalling, then progresses through the electromagnetics of wired and wireless communications, and the quantum mechanics of electronic, optical, and magnetic materials, to discussions of mechanisms for computation, storage, sensing, and display. This self-contained volume will help both physical scientists and computer scientists see beyond the conventional division between hardware and software to understand the implications of physical theory for information manipulation.
Character and Identity: Philosophical Foundations of Political and Sociological Perspectives is designed by editor Morton A. Kaplan to show-despite the fundamental flaws in the classical Greek accounts of truth and knowledge--why its quest for rational knowledge remains legitimate and vital to the "concepts of character and identity." To set the stage, Part One includes a statement of the classical Greek position by Dean Jude Dougherty, an account of the contemporary anticlassical "stories" position by John Simpson, and an initial attempt to restore the Greek concept of rational inquiry by Lloyd Eby. In subsequent chapters, Kaplan restates the Greek position and shows why developments in science and philosophy are incompatible with the Greek concepts of truth and knowledge. A brief excursis through the history of philosophy is intended to show how the Greek quest can be pursued in a manner consonant with the contemporary realm of knowledge. In the course of this argument, it will be shown why Leo Strauss, who regarded contemporary philosophy as the prisoner of a mistaken seventeenth-century paradigm, fatally misconceived the role of seventeenth-century philosophy and its relationship to contemporary thought. Kaplan argues that contemporary philosophy is in large part a response to the breakdown of Hegel, a great attempt to provide a modem alternative to Aristotle's synoptic philosophy--an attempt that brings history and historicity into the center of the picture. Kaplan shows why postmodernism is based on an incomplete and ultimately incoherent understanding of the consequences of the collapse of the Hegelian system and of the character of language. In a version of pragmatism that restores the concept of objective truth, Kaplan then explores the political and sociological aspects of this philosophical position and shows how it relates to character and identity. He then shows how a weakly-ordered but relevant position with respect to ethics and morals is consistent with a sustainable contemporary understanding of the quest for rational, objective knowledge.
Why is the future so different from the past? Why does the past affect the future and not the other way around? What does quantum mechanics really tell us about the world? In this important and accessible book, Huw Price throws fascinating new light on some of the great mysteries of modern physics, and connects them in a wholly original way. Price begins with the mystery of the arrow of time. Why, for example, does disorder always increase, as required by the second law of thermodynamics? Price shows that, for over a century, most physicists have thought about these problems the wrong way. Misled by the human perspective from within time, which distorts and exaggerates the differences between past and future, they have fallen victim to what Price calls the "double standard fallacy": proposed explanations of the difference between the past and the future turn out to rely on a difference which has been slipped in at the beginning, when the physicists themselves treat the past and future in different ways. To avoid this fallacy, Price argues, we need to overcome our natural tendency to think about the past and the future differently. We need to imagine a point outside time -- an Archimedean "view from nowhen" -- from which to observe time in an unbiased way. Offering a lively criticism of many major modern physicists, including Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, Price shows that this fallacy remains common in physics today -- for example, when contemporary cosmologists theorize about the eventual fate of the universe. The "big bang" theory normally assumes that the beginning and end of the universe will be very different. But if we are to avoid the double standard fallacy, we need to consider time symmetrically, and take seriously the possibility that the arrow of time may reverse when the universe recollapses into a "big crunch." Price then turns to the greatest mystery of modern physics, the meaning of quantum theory. He argues that in missing the Archimedean viewpoint, modern physics has missed a radical and attractive solution to many of the apparent paradoxes of quantum physics. Many consequences of quantum theory appear counterintuitive, such as Schrodinger's Cat, whose condition seems undetermined until observed, and Bell's Theorem, which suggests a spooky "nonlocality," where events happening simultaneously in different places seem to affect each other directly. Price shows that these paradoxes can be avoided by allowing that at the quantum level the future does, indeed, affect the past. This demystifies nonlocality, and supports Einstein's unpopular intuition that quantum theory describes an objective world, existing independently of human observers: the Cat is alive or dead, even when nobody looks. So interpreted, Price argues, quantum mechanics is simply the kind of theory we ought to have expected in microphysics -- from the symmetric standpoint. Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point presents an innovative and controversial view of time and contemporary physics. In this exciting book, Price urges physicists, philosophers, and anyone who has ever pondered the mysteries of time to look at the world from the fresh perspective of Archimedes' Point and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, the universe around us, and our own place in time.
Modern physics was born from two great revolutions: relativity and the quantum theory. Relativity imposed a locality constraint on physical theories: since nothing can go faster than light, very distant events cannot influence one another. Only in the last few decades has it become clear that the quantum theory violates this constraint. The work of J.S. Bell has demonstrated that no local theory can return the predictions of quantum theory. Thus it would seem that the central pillars of modern physics are contradictory.
