Ian Duck – författare

This book makes broadly accessible an understandable proof of the infamous spin-statistics theorem. This widely known but little-understood theorem is intended to explain the fact that electrons obey the Pauli exclusion principle. This fact, in turn, explains the periodic table of the elements and their chemical properties. Therefore, this one simply stated fact is responsible for many of the principal features of our universe, from chemistry to solid state physics to nuclear physics to the life cycle of stars.In spite of its fundamental importance, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that “everyone knows the spin-statistics theorem, but no one understands it”. This book simplifies and clarifies the formal statements of the theorem, and also corrects the invariably flawed intuitive explanations which are frequently put forward.The book will be of interest to many practising physicists in all fields who have long been frustrated by the impenetrable discussions on the subject which have been available until now. It will also be accessible to students at an advanced undergraduate level as an introduction to modern physics based directly on the classical writings of the founders, including Pauli, Dirac, Heisenberg, Einstein and many others.

This invaluable book takes the reader from Planck's discovery of the quantum in 1900 to the most recent interpretations and applications of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics.The introduction of the quantum idea leads off the prehistory of quantum mechanics, featuring Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Compton, and de Broglie's immortal contributions. Their original discovery papers are featured with explanatory notes and developments in Part 1.The invention of matrix mechanics and quantum mechanics by Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Dirac, and Schrödinger is presented next, in Part 2.Following that, in Part 3, are the Einstein-Bohr debates on the interpretation of quantum mechanics culminating in Bell's inequality and Aspect's experiment demonstrating the actuality of the long range quantum correlations to which Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen took great exception. Resolutions of quantum paradoxes and the current state of such debates are summarized.Part 4 presents a selection of the most dramatic modern developments, both theoretical and experimental. These include Feynman path integrals, the modern interpretation based on decoherence, quantum optics experiments leading to teleportation, DeWitt's wave function of the universe, and a brief introduction to the end-of-the-millennium prospects of quantum computation. A concluding chapter presents the authors' conjectures for the next 100 years of the quantum.This book is ideally suited to anyone with a junior level background in modern physics and quantum mechanics, and a cultural interest in the original sources of the greatest ideas of the greatest founders of this subject as derived from their first discovery papers. These papers have led, in giant strides across the whole of the twentieth century, to the revolutionary experimental advances of the last decade. The book makes accessible — physically and intellectually — both the deepest roots and the highest branches of nonrelativistic quantum physics.