The World According to Physics

Product Information

CF: I approach every project first by reading in some form or another. Often, the manuscript may not be ready at the time when I have to begin designing the cover, so a descriptive summary of the book prepared by the editor is helpful for figuring out what it’s about, who the target audience is, etc., and this informs the design direction. I always try to come up with cover designs that are conceptually strong, that capture the essence of the author’s ideas in unique—and, ideally, clever—visual form. There’s no “one size fits all” way to navigate the design process; no two covers are the same because no two books are the same! I suppose that I am not the target audience for this book: I'm a physics professor and spend my days thinking about the physical theories that govern the Univerise, and while I would have eagerly sought out this book as a teenager, now I tend not to feel I have the time to read such popular accounts of what is my day job. I read The Emperor’s New Mind when I was either finishing or had just finished my PhD. There was huge excitement when it came out in 1989. It was a book that was so rich in lots of different areas. I just remember the excitement of reading it and feeling, ‘Yes! And this is the subject that I’ve chosen to work on for my career!’ He really got across the passion across lots of different areas. Again, it’s a book that I think could be enjoyed by anyone who wants to know a little bit more about the subject. And it really hasn’t dated much.

Al-Khalili will outline the major differences between inflation and bubble universes as well as loop quantum gravity, string theory, and M -theory. But you will have to read pop sci books by Brian Greene or Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems) to understand more. Al-Khalili aims to empower readers to use critical thinking to evaluate the news, as well as their own knowledge and beliefs. He succeeds easily, with each chapter dedicated to a lesson readers can apply to their lives. . . . Readers overwhelmed by information overload will find this a balm."— Publishers WeeklyBefore we get to the books about physics that inspired you, I wanted to ask about the book you’ve written to inspire others. You’ve been on a valiant quest to make physics accessible to the rest of us for a while, but am I right to say that The World According to Physics is the first book where you’ve tried to give an overview of the entire field?

Shining a light on the most profound insights revealed by modern physics, The World According to Physics invites us all to understand what this crucially important science tells us about the universe and the nature of reality itself. Physics is revealed as an intrepid human quest for ever more foundational principles that accurately explain the natural world we see around us, guided by core values such as honesty and doubt in the search for truth. The knowledge discovered by physics both empowers and humbles us, and still physics continues to delve valiantly into the unknown.If I knew that then the King of Sweden would be calling me up with the Nobel. It’s counterintuitive and weird but we’ve learned to accept it. Quantum mechanics is hugely accurate – most of modern scientific development is based on it and on what it tells us about the subatomic world, but at its heart it says that an atom can be in two places at once. We’ve learned to live with that. The book was originally written in French and it goes further than all that undergraduate stuff about atoms being in two places at once and it throws a lot of the laws of physics out of the window and says…

in the end the book describes the different application of physics such as quantum computing and navigation and the connection to other science fields. Well, there is so much going on that I cannot include it all in the book, let alone in this brief answer to your question. But for me it’s all about the big picture – that we no longer think we are nearing the end of physics. At the beginning of the 21st century there was this feeling that we were getting close to that holy grail of physics: a theory of everything. The leading candidate was (well, it still is I suppose) called superstring theory, or M-theory, and it was regarded as the leading candidate theory that would give us a unified picture of quantum mechanics and general relativity (Einstein’s theory of gravity). Now, we’re not so sure. Many physicists, including me, feel that a new approach is needed, and it is one that brings together lots of ideas in modern physics from different fields. It’s these ideas that I explore with a light touch in the book. For example, it is looking increasingly likely that to reach a final theory we will have to combine not just quantum mechanics and relativity, but thermodynamics and information theory too. In fact, making progress might even require us to find the ‘correct’ interpretation of quantum mechanics – something we have been arguing about for almost a century. Some concepts may sound esoteric and abstract, such as entropy, entanglement or inflation, and some may have reached popular culture even though we physicists don’t yet fully understand them, like dark matter or dark energy. What is most exciting for me is that there is still so much to explore along the shoreline between the known and unknown. I'm glad I read it, though. It reminded me of the excitement of the whole human intellectual endeavour, and the particular excitement of the whole of physics which I can sometimes forget when I am deep down some hole studying just a tiny part of a tiny part of it. To be reminded of the beauty of the Universe and of the methods we have developed to think about it, all written with passion and eloquence, is affirming and exciting.Quantum physicist, New York Times bestselling author, and BBC host Jim Al-Khalili offers a fascinating and illuminating look at what physics reveals about the world It’s not my area of specialism, so I just give my own perspective. I don’t know how successful I am, but I try as much as possible to be neutral or agnostic on the idea, while at the same time saying, ‘This is why this particular view is criticized. This is where the weaknesses are.’

Al-Khalili’s timely and inspirational writing allows us all to experience a touch of the ‘joy’ of science.”—Helen Pearson, Chief Magazine Editor of Nature some of the most important breakthroughs in physics have been the results of the logical conclusions drawn not from real experiments or observations, but from ‘thought experiments’, whereby the physicist considers some hypothesis and devises an imaginary experiment that can test its consequences. Some of the most famous thought experiments were conducted by Einstein and helped him develop his theories of relativity. Once his theories were fully developed of course they could be tested in real laboratory experiments. CF: Well, the challenge was to create minimal design with maximum impact. It was a challenge I was eager to accept! Along with lots of jabber about what Theory means in science (and "we will cover that in a later chapter"), Al-Khalili does go reasonably deeply into 3 key elements of modern physics: relativity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. I did truly try to keep up, but I found it hard to follow. I still couldn't really say what a Higgs Boson particle is (and Al-K spent a lot of time on it), nor do I know why the Hadron collider was able to prove its existence. For only a single example. and the journey and search for combining them all together in an absolute theory that can be our "Theory of everything".

In chapter seven, the author tries to explain the roads to unification. And basically why physicists have this urge to unify different concepts in physics. Al-Khalili begins by introducing the fundamental concepts of space, time, energy, and matter, and then describes the three pillars of modern physics-quantum theory, relativity, and thermodynamics-showing how all three must come together if we are ever to have a full understanding of reality. Using wonderful examples and thought-provoking analogies, Al-Khalili illuminates the physics of the extreme cosmic and quantum scales, the speculative frontiers of the field, and the physics that underpins our everyday experiences and technologies, bringing the reader up to speed with the biggest ideas in physics in just a few sittings. Physics is revealed as an intrepid human quest for ever more foundational principles that accurately explain the natural world we see around us, an undertaking guided by core values such as honesty and doubt. The knowledge discovered by physics both empowers and humbles us, and still, physics continues to delve valiantly into the unknown. The second chapter is about scales. The world of physics only really came of age in the seventeenth century, thanks to a large extent to the invention of the two most important instruments in all of science: the telescope and the microscope. If we were only able to understand the world we can see with our naked eyes, then physics would not have got very far. once the microscope and the telescope were invented, they opened up windows on the world that dramatically increased our understanding, magnifying the very small and bringing closer the very far away. It’s a mixture of two old friends and colleagues keeping in touch, but also highlights the ongoing debate, in particular about some of the ideas of quantum theory, in the first half of the 20th century. Quantum mechanics’ revolutionary way of looking at the structure of the subatomic world changed our view and overthrew a lot of old notions. But Einstein—probably the greatest physicist who ever lived (bar maybe Newton)—had issues with it. He was unhappy with some of its implications and famously had debates with many of the founders of quantum mechanics. He was almost like an outsider on this. The Born-Einstein Letters is a correspondence over many years highlighting the toing and froing in these arguments about the nature of reality between two of the giants of the field. The book gives us a window into what their problems were and how they tried to persuade each other their view was right. The letters map out the whole of the theory of 20th century physics but include all the conflict and personal life, the head-scratching.