front cover of Quantum Mechanics and Experience
Quantum Mechanics and Experience
David Z Albert
Harvard University Press, 1992

The more science tells us about the world, the stranger it looks. Ever since physics first penetrated the atom, early in this century, what it found there has stood as a radical and unanswered challenge to many of our most cherished conceptions of nature. It has literally been called into question since then whether or not there are always objective matters of fact about the whereabouts of subatomic particles, or about the locations of tables and chairs, or even about the very contents of our thoughts. A new kind of uncertainty has become a principle of science.

This book is an original and provocative investigation of that challenge, as well as a novel attempt at writing about science in a style that is simultaneously elementary and deep. It is a lucid and self-contained introduction to the foundations of quantum mechanics, accessible to anyone with a high school mathematics education, and at the same time a rigorous discussion of the most important recent advances in our understanding of that subject, some of which are due to the author himself.

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front cover of Systems with Small Dissipation
Systems with Small Dissipation
V. B. Braginsky, V. P. Mitrofanov, and V. I. Panov
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Electromagnetic and mechanical oscillators are crucial in such diverse fields as electrical engineering, microwave technology, optical technology, and experimental physics. For example, such oscillators are the key elements in instruments for detecting extremely weak mechanical forces and electromagnetic signals are essential to highly stable standards of time and frequency. The central problem in developing such instruments is to construct oscillators that are as perfectly simple harmonic as possible; the largest obstacle is the oscillator's dissipation and the fluctuating forces associated with it.

This book, first published in Russian in 1981 and updated with new data for this English edition, is a treatise on the sources of dissipation and other defects in mechanical and electromagnetic oscillators and on practical techniques for minimizing such defects. Written by a team of researchers from Moscow State University who are leading experts in the field, the book is a virtual encyclopedia of theoretical formulas, experimental techniques, and practical lore derived from twenty-five years of experience. Intended for the experimenter who wishes to construct near-perfect instrumentation, the book provides information on everything from the role of phonon-phonon scattering as a fundamental source of dissipation to the effectiveness of a thin film of pork fat in reducing the friction between a support wire and a mechanically oscillating sapphire crystal.

The researchers that V. B. Braginsky has led since the mid-1960s are best known in the West for their contributions to the technology of gravitational-wave detection, their experimental search for quarks, their test of the equivalency principle, and their invention of new experimental techniques for high-precision measurement, including "quantum nondemolition movements." Here, for the first time, they provide a thorough overview of the practical knowledge and experimental methods that have earned them a worldwide reputation for ingenuity, talent, and successful technique.
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