This book started from a chapter in a book I once intended to write, called “Can Robots Have Orgasms?” Here is how that title came about. In my earlier years if I thought about consciousness at all, I probably believed that the mind operates according...
Of course the idea that there is an ultimate speed limit seems absurd. While the speed of light is very high by earthly standards, the magnitude is not the point; any kind of speed limit in nature doesn’t make sense. Suppose, for example, that a spaceship...
[caption id="attachment_764" align="alignright" width="264"] Albert Michelson[/caption] The story of relativity did not begin in 1905. It started in 1881 with an experiment that yielded very surprising results - results that helped lead Einstein to his theory. The experiment was inspired by a proposal made by James...
Despite the many successes of Quantum Field Theory, there are five unexplained mysteries or “gaps” that may someday be filled: Renormalization is necessary because Quantum Field Theory does not describe how an electron (or other charged quantum) is affected by its self-generated EM field. Field collapse is...
Quantum Field Theory is an axiomatic theory that rests on a few basic assumptions. Everything you have learned so far, from the force of gravity to the spectrum of hydrogen, follows almost inevitably from these three basic principles. (To my knowledge, Julian Schwinger is the...
Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna in the same year that Max Planck introduced quantization. He was five when Einstein published his theory of relativity. At the age of 19, while a student at the University of Munich, he was asked to write an encyclopedia article on...
Since the [weak] field must have spin 1, you will not be surprised to learn that it wound up in the same family as the EM field, the only other field with spin 1. But once again, working out the details wasn’t easy, and once again...
Parity conservation is the physicist’s way of saying that nature’s laws are left-right symmetric – that there is no preference for left or right. This statement is usually illustrated by the mirror test. Imagine that you are looking at some process in a mirror. If...
It didn’t take long after Pauli postulated his particle before someone came up with a theory, or at least an equation, to describe the process in which it was emitted. That someone was Enrico Fermi, the same man who gave the neutrino its name, and he...
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