Description
Book SynopsisMakes concepts of physics easier to grasp by relating them to everyday knowledge
Trade ReviewKrieger . . . excellently tells those in our human society outside the physics world how physicists think, plan, and go about understanding nature.
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Choice *
This book is a cultural phenomenology of doing physics. It describes the ways physicists actually do their work—their motives, and their ways of making sense of the world—so that outsiders can understand it.
* good reads *
This is an important and provocative book, timely and full of insight. Fail to read it, and you may miss out on the physics of the future.
-- John Gribbin * New Scientist *
This unusual book introduces 'the moves, the rituals, the incantations' physicists invoke as they go about conceptualizing Nature. The lucid-but-loaded writing makes quite complex ideas accessible to the mathless reader. . . . The rewards are a better understanding of how physics is done.
* Whole Earth Millennial Catalog *
An excellent [and innovative] book.
* Isis *
Table of ContentsPreface
Degrees of Freedom; A Note to the Reader; A Note for the Scholars; This Second Edition; Acknowledgments
1. The Division of Labor: The Factory
Nature as a Factory; Handles and Stories. What Everyday Walls Must Do; Walls for a Factory; Walls as Providential. Particles, Objects, and Workers; What Particles Must Be Like; Intuitions of Walls and Particles. What Fields Must Be Like.
2. Taking Apart and Putting Together: The Clockworks, The Calculus, and the Computer
The Right Degrees of Freedom; The Clockworks and The Calculus. Parts Are Strategies; Independence and Randomness; Dependence, Spreadsheets, and Differential Equations; Additivity and The Calculus; Disjoint Functionality and Interpretability: Bureaucracy, Flow Processing Plants, and Object-Oriented Programming; Sequence and Procedure. Parts Are Commitments.
3. Freedom and Necessity: Family and Kinship
Recapitulation and Prospect; Kinship, Exchange, and Plenitude; Systematics in the Field; The Problem of "Quite Rarely"; Markets and Fetishes; Taking the Rules Seriously; Structure and System.
4. The Vacuum and The Creation: Setting a Stage
So Far, an Epitome; Sweeping Up the Vacuum; Symmetry and Order. The Empty Stage; Of Nothing, Something, and the Vacuum. Setting Up the Stage; Ideologies for a Vacuum; The Dialectic of Finding a Good Vacuum; The Analogy of Substance, Once More. Fluctuations in a Vacuum. Annealing the World.
5. Handles, Probes, and Tools: A Rhetoric of Nature
A Craft of Science; Some Handles onto the World (Particles, Crystals, Gasses; Analogy; Phase Transitions; Knowledge Is Handling). Probes; Objectivity and Inelasticity; Probes and Handles. Tools and Toolkits; A Physicist's Toolkit; So Far.
6. Production Machinery: Mathematics for Analysis and Description
Philosophical Analysis and Phenomenological Description; Machinery and Production Processes; Naming and Modeling the World; Demonstrations and Proofs as Strategies of Explanation; Understanding "The Physics"; Analogy and Syzygy; The Mathematics and The Physics
7. An Epitome
Notes
Index
