Baggott, Jim (Author)
Oxford University Press
Physical Details: 320 pages
Language: English
Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly? We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents.Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass.How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin of mass, and its implications for our understanding of the material world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the nature of matter, and the fundamental related concept of mass.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Martins, Roberto A.;
Boido, Guillermo;
Rodríguez, Victor;
(2006)
Física: Estudos Filosóficos e Históricos
Book
Anastopoulos, Charis;
(2008)
Particle or Wave: The Evolution of the Concept of Matter in Modern Physics
Article
Oana Matei;
(2018)
Appetitive Matter and Perception in Ralph Austen’s Projects of Natural History of Plants
Book
Fors, Hjalmar;
(2015)
The Limits of Matter: Chemistry, Mining, and Enlightenment
Article
Evelyn Fox Keller;
(2016)
Active Matter, Then and Now
Article
Doina-Cristina Rusu;
(2018)
Same Spirit, Different Structure: Francis Bacon on Inanimate and Animate Matter
Article
Alfonso-Goldfarb, Ana Maria;
Ferraz, Marcia H. M.;
(2013)
Gur, Ghur, Guhr or Bur? The Quest for a Metalliferous Prime Matter in Early Modern Times
Chapter
Downing, Lisa;
(2012)
Maupertuis on Attraction as an Inherent Property of Matter
Chapter
Biener, Zvi;
Smeenk, Chris;
(2012)
Cotes' Queries: Newton's Empiricism and Conceptions of Matter
Article
Caleb Hazelwood;
(2023)
Newton's “law-first” epistemology and “matter-first” metaphysics
Thesis
Carlos Zorrilla Piña;
(2021)
Back to the Darkest of All Things: Philosophical Lessons on the Dynamics of Matter and Ground, from Leibniz to Schelling
Article
Alexander S. Blum;
Martin Jähnert;
(2022)
The birth of quantum mechanics from the spirit of radiation theory
Book
Lipkin, Harry J.;
(2012)
Andrei Sakharov: Quarks and the Structure of Matter
Chapter
Delft, Dirk van;
(2014)
The Cryogenic Laboratory of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: An Early Case of Big Science
Article
Kelsey, Sean;
(2010)
Hylomorphism in Aristotle's Physics
Book
Berkel, Klaas van;
(2013)
Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion: Mechanical Philosophy in the Making
Article
Rowlinson, J. S.;
(2010)
James Joule, William Thomson and the Concept of a Perfect Gas
Thesis
Grove, Stanley F.;
(2008)
Quantum Theory and Aquinas's Doctrine on Matter
Article
Daniele Morrone;
(2020)
La mirabile fusione fredda del piombo da Teofrasto a Plutarco. Un riesame critico della questione
Article
Paola Rumore;
(2020)
Priestley in Germany
Be the first to comment!