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The Beautiful Invisible Giovanni Vignale (Curator's Professor of Physics, University of Missouri-Columbia)

The Beautiful Invisible By Giovanni Vignale (Curator's Professor of Physics, University of Missouri-Columbia)

Summary

Theoretical physics, argues Giovanni Vignale, is an endeavour of deep imagination and creativity. And the quest to explain profoundly abstract ideas in concrete images makes it strangely akin to poetry and literature. Vignale leads us through beautiful and bizarre worlds, explaining them in his own unique way.

The Beautiful Invisible Summary

The Beautiful Invisible: Creativity, imagination, and theoretical physics by Giovanni Vignale (Curator's Professor of Physics, University of Missouri-Columbia)

The realm of theoretical physics is teeming with abstract and beautiful concepts. And the task of imagining them is one that demands profound creativity, argues Giovanni Vignale. Explaining them is curiously akin to the craft of poets, or magical realist novelists such as Borges, and Musil, or Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. In this unusual and sometimes poetic book, Vignale presents his own unorthodox accounts of fundamental theoretical concepts such as Newtonian mechanics, superconductivity, and Einstein's theory of relativity, showing that what may seem at first quite simple in fact turns out to be much more profound. As we delve behind now-familiar metaphors such as 'electron spin' and 'black hole', the world that we take for granted melts away, leaving a glimpse of something much stranger.

The Beautiful Invisible Reviews

this book is the best Christmas reading for physicists this year * CERN Courier *
For anyone thinking of starting a physics degree, or wishing they had done one, this is an excellent book...by someone who is eveidently a first-rate teacher. * Andrew Crumey, The Scotsman *

About Giovanni Vignale (Curator's Professor of Physics, University of Missouri-Columbia)

Giovanni Vignale is Curator's Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is the co-author of an academic text, Quantum Theory of the Electron Liquid (CUP, 2005).

Table of Contents

Prologue ; 1. The way of the abstract ; 2. Limits ; 3. Laws are made to be broken ; 4. Of first and last things ; 5. Representations ; 6. The invisible light ; 7. The double helix ; 8. Quantum mechanics: the triumph of the abstract ; 9. Tales of quantum reality ; 10. The spinning electron and other metaphors ; 11. Margarita

Additional information

GOR008141976
9780199574841
0199574847
The Beautiful Invisible: Creativity, imagination, and theoretical physics by Giovanni Vignale (Curator's Professor of Physics, University of Missouri-Columbia)
Used - Like New
Hardback
Oxford University Press
20110310
320
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
The book has been read, but looks new. The book cover has no visible wear, and the dust jacket is included if applicable. No missing or damaged pages, no tears, possible very minimal creasing, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins

Customer Reviews - The Beautiful Invisible