Forces of Nature

Forces of Nature
Автор книги: id книги: 1215547     Оценка: 0.0     Голосов: 0     Отзывы, комментарии: 0 1453,38 руб.     (14,2$) Читать книгу Купить и скачать книгу Купить бумажную книгу Электронная книга Жанр: Физика Правообладатель и/или издательство: HarperCollins Дата добавления в каталог КнигаЛит: ISBN: 9780008249335 Скачать фрагмент в формате   fb2   fb2.zip Возрастное ограничение: 0+ Оглавление Отрывок из книги

Реклама. ООО «ЛитРес», ИНН: 7719571260.

Описание книги

A breathtaking and beautiful exploration of our planet, this groundbreaking book accompanies the BBC One TV series, providing the deepest answers to the simplest questions.‘What is motion?’‘Why is every snowflake different?’‘Why is life symmetrical?’To answer these and many other questions, Professor Brian Cox uncovers some of the most extraordinary natural events on Earth and in the Universe and beyond.From the immensity of the Universe and the roundness of Earth to the form of every single snowflake, the forces of nature shape everything we see. Pushed to extremes, the results are astonishing. In seeking to understand the everyday world, the colours, structure, behaviour and history of our home, we develop the knowledge and techniques necessary to step beyond the everyday and approach the Universe beyond.Forces of Nature takes you to the great plains of the Serengeti, the volcanoes of Indonesia and the precipitous cliffs in Nepal, to the humpback whales of the Caribbean and the northern lights of the Arctic. Brian will answer questions on Earth that will illuminate our understanding of the Universe.Think you know our planet?Think again.

Оглавление

Andrew Cohen. Forces of Nature

Copyright

Contents

Taking a different perspective

The Universe in a snowflake

Why do bees build hexagons?

Knocking on the doors of chemistry

The fundamental building blocks and the forces of Nature

Why is the Earth a sphere?

Why does life come in so many shapes and sizes?

Symmetry and symmetry breaking in biology

The Universe in a snowflake

Somewhere in spacetime

Life on an orbiting planet The Seasons

The formation of the Earth and Moon

Life on an orbiting planet Storms

Life on an orbiting, spinning planet The Tides

Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity

Somewhere in spacetime

Spacetime calculations

The moth and the flame

Chemistry is all about the movement of electrons

Frankenstein’s monsters

On the Origin of Species A framework to make sense of life on Earth

The oldest life on Earth

A warm little pond?

Life, thermodynamics and entropy

The moth and the flame

A very different Eden

Life beyond Earth

Pale Blue Dot

The rainbow connection

Why does the Sun shine?

The nuclear physics of the Sun

Why do hot things shine? Part 1: James Clerk Maxwell and the Golden Age of Wireless

Why do hot things shine? Part 2: Max Planck and the Quantum Revolution

A serendipitous aside; the solar neutrino problem

Pale blue green planet Part 1: The Oceans

Pale blue green planet Part 2: The Sky

Pale blue green planet Part 3: The Land

Pale coloured dots

Plate section

Picture credits

Index

By the Same Author

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Отрывок из книги

Praise for Professor Brian Cox:

‘Engaging, ambitious and creative.’

.....

The theoretical prediction that building blocks exist beneath the level of protons and neutrons was made by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964. It was based on a pattern in the subatomic particles known at the time. By the early 1960s, an inelegant, profligate and seemingly ever-expanding list of subatomic building blocks had been discovered. The proton and neutron are part of a whole family of particles known as baryons; there are Lambdas, Sigmas, Deltas, Cascades and a host of others. There is also a family of particles known as mesons: Pions, Kaons, Rho and so on. There are thirteen different types of Lambda particle alone, nine Sigmas and eight Kaons. Particle physics was looking increasingly like a subatomic branch of botany. Then Gell-Mann and Zweig noticed a beautiful pattern. The particles could be arranged according to their observed properties in geometrical patterns. One such pattern is shown in the illustration here. Today, these are known as ‘super-multiplets’.

As Kepler suspected when he considered the six-fold symmetry of snowflakes, patterns in Nature are often a clue that there is a deeper underlying structure. The patterns may or may not be easy to recognise – Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for noticing the pattern amongst the particles – but they are the Rosetta Stone that allows Nature’s language to be deciphered. In this case, the pattern in the particles suggested to Gell-Mann and Zweig that the baryons are all constructed out of three smaller building blocks, that Gell-Mann called quarks. When they first recognised the pattern, they included three quarks in their scheme: up, down and strange. The different baryons on the lower planes of the super-multiplets are the possible three-fold combinations of the three building blocks. Adding a fourth quark – charm – constructs the higher layers. The quark constituents of the particles are shown in the illustration opposite: for example the ∆++ contains three up quarks.

.....

Добавление нового отзыва

Комментарий Поле, отмеченное звёздочкой  — обязательно к заполнению

Отзывы и комментарии читателей

Нет рецензий. Будьте первым, кто напишет рецензию на книгу Forces of Nature
Подняться наверх