Mass - The Quest to Understand Matter From Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields

Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly? We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents.

Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass.

How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin of mass, and its implications for our understanding of the material world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the nature of matter, and the fundamental related concept of mass.

List of contents

• Preface


• Part I: Atom and Void


• 1: The quiet citadel


• 2: Things-in-themselves


• 3: An impression of force


• 4: The sceptical chymists


• Part II: Mass and Energy


• 5: A very interesting conclusion


• 6: Incommensurable


• 7: The fabric


• 8: In the heart of darkness


• Part III: Wave and Particle


• 9: An act of desperation


• 10: The wave equation


• 11: The only mystery


• 12: Mass bare and dressed


• Part IV: Field and Force


• 13: The symmetries of nature


• 14: The goddamn particle


• 15: The standard model


• 16: Mass without mass


• Epilogue


• Endnotes


• Glossary


• Bibliography


• Index

About the author

Jim Baggott is a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to work with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation (OUP, 2015), Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle' (OUP, 2012), A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2011) and A Beginner's Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), Quantum Reality: The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics DL A Game of Theories (OUP, 2020), and The Quantum Cookbook: Mathematical Recipes for the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (OUP, 2020).

Summary

Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly? We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents.

Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass.

How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin of mass, and its implications for our understanding of the material world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the nature of matter, and the fundamental related concept of mass.

Additional text

An imaginative book that seeks the answer to the question, what is matter? ... Baggott provides a wild but expert and comprehensive ride.

Report

The book is very clearly structured and has a glossary, so 'dipping' is facilitated. The author condenses and combines sources as listed in his bibliography. Michael Jewess, Royal Society of Chemistry Historical Group newsletter

Product details

• Authors: Jim Baggott, Jim (Freelance science writer) Baggott, Baggott Jim
• Publisher: Oxford University Press Trade
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 10.05.2017
• EAN: 9780198759713
• ISBN: 978-0-19-875971-3
• Dimensions: 163 mm x 241 mm x 32 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Natural sciences (general); popular science, SCIENCE / Mechanics / General, Classical mechanics