Results by title
230 books match the query 'Physics' and 7 start with q
Quantum 2.0
The Weird Physics Driving a New Revolution in TechnologyPaul Davies
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Quantum computers, quantum cryptography, and even quantum AI—a century after the discovery of an unexpected physical world, researchers are putting this puzzling science to work in dazzling new ways.
In this exhilarating and mind-bending book, renowned scientist and author Paul Davies offers readers a glimpse of how quantum physics has led to a quantum technology revolution. Quantum 2.0 reveals how today’s brightest minds are harnessing exotic states of matter that have no counterpart in everyday life. Specifically, all eyes are on entanglement, called “spooky” by Einstein, which links the activities of separated particles even across vast distances.
By manipulating these weird properties of atoms, electrons, and photons, scientists are driving the burgeoning field of “quantum information science,” featuring new tools such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography, and the quantum internet. In turn, their efforts have attracted billions of dollars in investments and triggered a frantic quantum arms race between nations. At the same time, theorists are taking a closer look at quantum systems themselves, which possess properties that defy intuition and shred everyday notions of reality. Davies explains how researchers, including himself, are wrestling with quantum theory to make sense of this realm, where ghostly quantum particles produce tiny forces in nanotechnology, cause black holes to evaporate, and may even contribute to the universe’s accelerating expansion. A trusted guide, Davies takes readers from the basic concepts to today’s cutting edge, inviting us all to glimpse the wonderland of quantum physics and its stunning implications.
Quantum 2.0
The Weird Physics Driving a New Revolution in TechnologyPaul Davies
University of Chicago Press, 2025
In this exhilarating and mind-bending book, renowned scientist and author Paul Davies offers readers a glimpse of how quantum physics has led to a quantum technology revolution. Quantum 2.0 reveals how today’s brightest minds are harnessing exotic states of matter that have no counterpart in everyday life. Specifically, all eyes are on entanglement, called “spooky” by Einstein, which links the activities of separated particles even across vast distances.
By manipulating these weird properties of atoms, electrons, and photons, scientists are driving the burgeoning field of “quantum information science,” featuring new tools such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography, and the quantum internet. In turn, their efforts have attracted billions of dollars in investments and triggered a frantic quantum arms race between nations. At the same time, theorists are taking a closer look at quantum systems themselves, which possess properties that defy intuition and shred everyday notions of reality. Davies explains how researchers, including himself, are wrestling with quantum theory to make sense of this realm, where ghostly quantum particles produce tiny forces in nanotechnology, cause black holes to evaporate, and may even contribute to the universe’s accelerating expansion. A trusted guide, Davies takes readers from the basic concepts to today’s cutting edge, inviting us all to glimpse the wonderland of quantum physics and its stunning implications.
Quantum Dialogue
The Making of a RevolutionMara Beller
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Beller draws her argument from her radical new reading of the history of the quantum revolution, especially the development of the Copenhagen interpretation. One of several competing approaches, this version succeeded largely due to the rhetorical skills of Niels Bohr and his colleagues. Using extensive archival research, Beller shows how Bohr and others marketed their views, misrepresenting and dismissing their opponents as "unreasonable" and championing their own not always coherent or well-supported position as "inevitable."
Quantum Dialogue, winner of the 1999 Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the Journal of the History of Ideas, will fascinate everyone interested in how stories of "scientific revolutions" are constructed and "scientific consensus" achieved.
"[A]n intellectually stimulating piece of work, energised by a distinct point of view."—Dipankar Home, Times Higher Education Supplement
"[R]emarkable and original. . . . [Beller's] arguments are thoroughly supported and her conclusions are meticulously argued. . . . This is an important book that all who are interested in the emergence of quantum mechanics will want to read."—William Evenson, History of Physics Newsletter
Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics
Robert M. Wald
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In this book, Robert Wald provides a coherent, pedagogical introduction to the formulation of quantum field theory in curved spacetime. He begins with a treatment of the ordinary one-dimensional quantum harmonic oscillator, progresses through the construction of quantum field theory in flat spacetime to possible constructions of quantum field theory in curved spacetime, and, ultimately, to an algebraic formulation of the theory. In his presentation, Wald disentangles essential features of the theory from inessential ones (such as a particle interpretation) and clarifies relationships between various approaches to the formulation of the theory. He also provides a comprehensive, up-to-date account of the Unruh effect, the Hawking effect, and some of its ramifications. In particular, the subject of black hole thermodynamics, which remains an active area of research, is treated in depth.
This book will be accessible to students and researchers who have had introductory courses in general relativity and quantum field theory, and will be of interest to scientists in general relativity and related fields.
Quantum Legacies
Dispatches from an Uncertain WorldDavid Kaiser
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The ideas at the root of quantum theory remain stubbornly, famously bizarre: a solid world reduced to puffs of probability; particles that tunnel through walls; cats suspended in zombielike states, neither alive nor dead; and twinned particles that share entangled fates. For more than a century, physicists have grappled with these conceptual uncertainties while enmeshed in the larger uncertainties of the social and political worlds around them, a time pocked by the rise of fascism, cataclysmic world wars, and a new nuclear age.
In Quantum Legacies, David Kaiser introduces readers to iconic episodes in physicists’ still-unfolding quest to understand space, time, and matter at their most fundamental. In a series of vibrant essays, Kaiser takes us inside moments of discovery and debate among the great minds of the era—Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking, and many more who have indelibly shaped our understanding of nature—as they have tried to make sense of a messy world.
Ranging across space and time, the episodes span the heady 1920s, the dark days of the 1930s, the turbulence of the Cold War, and the peculiar political realities that followed. In those eras as in our own, researchers’ ambition has often been to transcend the vagaries of here and now, to contribute lasting insights into how the world works that might reach beyond a given researcher’s limited view. In Quantum Legacies, Kaiser unveils the difficult and unsteady work required to forge some shared understanding between individuals and across generations, and in doing so, he illuminates the deep ties between scientific exploration and the human condition.
Quantum Mechanics
Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen HegemonyJames T. Cushing
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Since the late 1920s, the theory formulated by Niels Bohr and his colleagues at Copenhagen has been the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet an alternative interpretation, rooted in the work of Louis de Broglie in the early 1920s and reformulated and extended by David Bohm in the 1950s, equally well explains the observational data. Through a detailed historical and sociological study of the physicists who developed different theories of quantum mechanics, the debates within and between opposing camps, and the receptions given to each theory, Cushing shows that despite the preeminence of the Copenhagen view, the Bohm interpretation cannot be ignored. Cushing contends that the Copenhagen interpretation became widely accepted not because it is a better explanation of subatomic phenomena than is Bohm's, but because it happened to appear first.
Focusing on the philosophical, social, and cultural forces that shaped one of the most important developments in modern physics, this provocative book examines the role that timing can play in the establishment of theory and explanation.
Quantum Statistical Physics of Molecular Systems
František Šanda
Karolinum Press, 2026
A text designed for courses in quantum statistical physics, which explains the concept of the density matrix and links it with the quantum theory of relaxation and decoherence and with the most common spectroscopic probes.
This book covers the material for a one-semester introductory course in quantum statistical physics, designed for Master’s students in chemical physics and biophysics preparing to work in the fields of NMR, vibrational spectroscopy, or electronic spectroscopy. The course introduces the density matrix formalism and connects it to students’ existing knowledge of classical statistical physics. It then presents the main results of quantum relaxation theory in terms of population transfer and decoherence, and relates quantum relaxation to its most widely used experimental probes in spectroscopy.