The Wizard of Quarks

Robert Gilmore

202 pages, parution le 01/11/2000

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Résumé

Dorothy's first day of her visit to the city starts uneventfully enough, on a subway ride with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. But then there is a lurch-and not just your ordinary everyday sort of lurch. The train suddenly shoots forward, the track and tunnel walls seem to smooth out, then fall away, and before she knows it, Dorothy feels as if she is plummeting, faster and faster . . . until she is deposited, quite nicely thank you, in a marvelous landscape of flowers, meadows, lawns, and trees.

So begins Robert Gilmore's latest physics fantasy. In the tradition of his best-selling Alice in Quantumland, a recasting of Lewis Carroll's Alice in the service of teaching quantum mechanics, The Wizard of Quarks takes L. Frank Baum's classic tale of a little girl from Kansas and transforms it into a description of the practically indescribable world of subatomic particles. Dorothy's encounters with the Witch of Mass, the Witch of Charge, the Witch of Color, and the Weak Witch will help readers grasp the maddeningly elusive concepts that support the foundations of modern physics.

Whether he is describing Planck's Constant, superposition, tunneling, or quarks and leptons, Gilmore is a master at making the difficult concepts of subatomic particles comprehensible and entertaining.

Contents

Preface: The Wonder World
Chapter 1: The Witch of Mass
Chapter 2: The Observant Scarecrow
Chapter 3: The Tin Geek
Chapter 4: The Confident Lion
Chapter 5: The Atomic Garden
Chapter 6: The Seed at the Heart of the World
Chapter 7: The Kingdom of Cern
Chapter 8: The Field of the Weave of Light
Chapter 9: The Wizard of Quarks
Chapter 10: The Plaza of the Immortals
Chapter 11: A Weak Old Woman
Chapter 12: The Higgs of the Masskervilles
Chapter 13: Through the Great experimental Desert
Index

L'auteur - Robert Gilmore

Robert Gilmore enseigne la physique à l'Université de Bristol, en Grande-Bretagne. Au cours de sa longue carrière, il a travaillé au laboratoire National de Brookhaven, au Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire de Stanford, aux Etats-Unis, et au Centre Européen de Recherches Nucléaires (CERN) à Genève. Il est l'auteur de plusieurs livres de vulgarisation à grand succès comme Alice au pays des quanta (Le Pommier, 2000)

Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Copernicus Books
Auteur(s)	Robert Gilmore
Parution	01/11/2000
Nb. de pages	202
Format	16 x 24,3
Couverture	Relié
Poids	525g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780387950716
ISBN13	978-0-387-95071-6