Jim Baggott Pack: Higgs, Quantum Space, The Quantum Story, and Farewell to Reality - Jim Baggott

Written by Jim Baggott
Read by Mike Pollock, Philip Rose, Julian Elfer, Nigel Patterson
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Mixed

The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments

Utterly beautiful. Profoundly disconcerting. Quantum theory is quite simply the most successful account of the physical universe ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the 21st-century technology that we now take for granted. But at the same time it has completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at its most fundamental level. Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it. The American physicist Richard Feynman went further: he claimed that nobody understands it.

The Quantum Story begins in 1900, tracing a century of game-changing science. Popular science writer Jim Baggott first shows how, over the space of three decades, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and others formulated and refined the theory–and opened the floodgates. Indeed, since then, a torrent of ideas has flowed from the world’s leading physicists, as they explore and apply the theory’s bizarre implications. To take us from the story’s beginning to the present day, Baggott organizes his narrative around 40 turning-point moments of discovery. Many of these are inextricably bound up with the characters involved–their rivalries and their collaborations, their arguments and, not least, their excitement as they sense that they are redefining what reality means. Through the mix of story and science, we experience their breathtaking leaps of theory and experiment, as they uncover such undreamed of and mind-boggling phenomenon as black holes, multiple universes, quantum entanglement, the Higgs boson, and much more.

Brisk, clear, and compelling, The Quantum Story is science writing at its best. A compelling look at the 100-year history of quantum theory, it illuminates the idea as it reveals how generations of physicists have grappled with this monster ever since.

-

Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth

From acclaimed science author Jim Baggot, a pointed critique of modern theoretical physics.

In this stunning new volume, Jim Baggott argues that there is no observational or experimental evidence for many of the ideas of modern theoretical physics: Super-symmetric particles, super strings, the multiverse, the holographic principle, or the anthropic cosmological principle. These theories are not only untrue; they are not even science. They are fairy-tale physics: Fantastical, bizarre and often outrageous, perhaps even confidence-trickery. This book provides a much-needed antidote. Informed, comprehensive, and balanced, it offers lay readers the latest ideas about the nature of physical reality while clearly distinguishing between fact and fantasy. With its engaging portraits of many central figures of modern physics, including Paul Davies, John Barrow, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, and Leonard Susskind, it promises to be essential reading for all readers interested in what we know and don’t know about the nature of the universe and reality itself.

-

Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’

The hunt for the Higgs particle has involved the biggest, most expensive experiment ever. So exactly what is this particle? Why does it matter so much? What does it tell us about the universe? Did the discovery announced on July 4, 2012 finish the search? And was finding it really worth all the effort? The short answer is yes.

The Higgs field is proposed as the way in which particles gain mass - a fundamental property of matter. It’s the strongest indicator yet that the Standard Model of physics really does reflect the basic building blocks of our universe. Little wonder the hunt and discovery of this new particle produced such intense media interest.

Here, Jim Baggott explains the science behind the discovery, looking at how the concept of a Higgs field was invented, how the vast experiment was carried out, and its implications on our understanding of all mass in the universe.

-

Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe

Today we are blessed with two extraordinarily successful theories of physics. The first is Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes the large-scale behavior of matter in a curved spacetime. The second is quantum mechanics. This theory describes the properties and behavior of matter and radiation at their smallest scales.

But, while they are both highly successful, these two structures leave a lot of important questions unanswered. They are also based on two different interpretations of space and time, and are, therefore, fundamentally incompatible. We have two descriptions, but as far as we know, we’ve only ever had one universe. What we need is a quantum theory of gravity.

Approaches to formulating such a theory have primarily followed two paths. One leads to String Theory, which has for long been fashionable, and about which much has been written. But String Theory has become mired in problems. Combining clear discussions of both quantum theory and general relativity, this book offers one of the first efforts to explain the new quantum theory of space and time.