Quantised Detector Networks (QDN) theory was invented to reduce the level of metaphysics in the application of quantum mechanics (QM), moving the focus from the system under observation to the observer and the measurement apparatuses. This approach is based on the consideration that “labstates”, i.e. the states of the system we use for observing, are the only things we can actually deal with, while we have no means to prove that the objects under study “exist” independently of observers or observations.
In this view, QM is not a theory describing objects per se, but a theory of entitlement, which means that it provides physicists with a set of rules defining what an observer is entitled to say in any particular context.
The book is organized in four parts: Basics, Applications, Prospects, and Appendices. The author provides, first of all, the formalism of QDN and then applies it to a number of experiments that show how it differs from standard quantum formalism. In the third part, the prospects for future applications of QDN are discussed, as well as the possibility of constructing a generalised theory of observation. Finally, the appendices collect collateral material referred to at various places in the book.
The aim of the author is to push the readers to look in a different way at the world they live in, to show them the cognitive traps caused by realism – i.e. the assumption that what we observe has an existence independent of our observation – and alerting them that various speculative concepts and theories discussed by some scientists do not actually have empirical basis. In other words, they cannot be experimentally tested.
Enrico Fermi formulated his eponymous paradox during a casual lunchtime chat with colleagues in Los Alamos: the great physicist argued that, probabilistically, intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms had time to develop countless times in the Milky Way, and even to travel across our galaxy multiple times; but if so, where are they?
The author of this book, Milan Cirkovic, claims that, with the wealth of scientific knowledge accumulated in the many decades since then, the paradox is now even more severe. Space travel is not speculative anymore, and we know that planetary systems are common – including Earth-like planets – suggesting that life on our planet started very early and that our solar system is a relative late-comer on the cosmic scene; hence, we should expect many civilisations to have evolved way beyond our current stage. Given the huge numbers involved, Cirkovic remarks, the paradox would not even be completely solved by the discovery of another civilisation: we would still have to figure out where all others are!
The Great Silence aims at an exhaustive review of the solutions proposed to this paradox in the literature (where “literature” is to be understood in the broadest sense, ranging from scholarly astrobiology papers to popular-science essays to science-fiction novels), following a rigorous taxonomic approach. Cirkovic’s taxonomy is built from the analysis of which philosophical assumptions create the paradox in the first place. Relaxing the assumptions of realism, Copernicanism, and gradualism leads, respectively, to the families of solutions that Cirkovic labels “solipsist”, “rare Earth”, and “neocatastrophic”. His fourth and most heterogeneous category of solutions, labelled “logistic”, arises from considering possible universal limitations of physical, economic or metabolic nature.
The book starts by setting a rigorous foundation for discussion, summarising the scientific knowledge and dissecting the philosophical assumptions. Cirkovic does not seem interested in captivating the reader from the start: the preface and the first three chapters are definitely scholarly in their intentions, and assume that the reader already knows a great deal about Fermi’s paradox. As a particularly egregious example, Kardashev’s speculative classification of civilisations, based on the scale of their energy consumption, plays a very important role in this book; one would have therefore expected a discussion about that, somewhere at the beginning. Instead, the interested reader has to resort to a footnote for a succinct definition of the three types of civilisation (Type I: exploiting planetary resources; Type II: using stellar system resources; Type III: using galactic resources).
However, after these introductory chapters, Cirkovic’s writing becomes very pleasant and engaging, and his reasoning unfolds clearly. Chapters four to seven are the core of the book, each of them devoted to the solutions allowed by negating one assumption. Every chapter starts with an analogy with a masterpiece in cinema or literature, followed by a rigorous philosophical definition. Then, the consequent solutions to Fermi’s paradox are reviewed and, finally, a résumé of take-home messages is provided.
This parade of solutions gives a strange feeling: each of them sounds either crazy, or incredibly unlikely, or insufficient to solve the paradox (at least in isolation). Still, once we accept Cirkovic’s premise that Fermi’s paradox means that some deeply rooted assumption cannot be valid, we are compelled to take seriously some outlandish hypothesis. The reader is invited to ponder, for example, how the solution to the paradox might depend on the politics of the Milky Way in the last few billion years: extraterrestrial civilisations may have all converged to a Paranoid Style in Galactic Politics, or we might unknowingly be under the jurisdiction of an Introvert Big Brother (Cirkovic has a talent for catchy titles). Some Great Old Ones might be temporarily asleep, or we (and any conceivable biological intelligence) might be limited in our evolution by some Galactic Stomach-Ache. A large class of very gloomy hypotheses assumes that all our predecessors were wiped out before reaching very high Kardashev’s scores, and Cirkovic seems particularly fond of the idea of swarms of Deadly Probes that may still be roaming around, ready to point at us as soon as they notice our loudness. Unless we reach the aforementioned state of galactic paranoia, which makes for a very nice synergy between two distinct solutions of the paradox.
The author not only classifies the proposed solutions, but also rates them by how fully they would solve this paradox. The concluding chapter elaborates on several philosophical challenges posed by Fermi’s paradox, in particular to Copernicanism, and on the link between it and the future of humanity.
Cirkovic is a vocal (and almost aggressive) critic of most of the SETI-related literature, claiming that it relies on excessive assumptions which strongly limits SETI searches. In his words, the failure of SETI so far has mostly occurred on philosophical and methodological levels. He quotes Kardashev in saying that extraterrestrial civilisations have not been found because they have not really been searched for. Hence Cirkovic’s insistence on a generalisation of targets and search methods.
An underlying theme in this book is the relevance of philosophy for the advancement of science, in particular when a science is in its infancy, as he argues to be the case for astrobiology. Cirkovic draws an analogy with early 20th century cosmology, including a similitude between Fermi’s and Olmert’s paradoxes (the latter being: how can the night sky be dark, if we are reachable by the light of an infinite number of stars in an infinitely old universe?).
I warmly recommend The Great Silence to any curious reader, in spite of its apparent disinterest for a broad readership. In it, Cirkovic makes a convincing case that Fermi’s paradox is a fabulously complex and rich intellectual problem.
In this book, Timothy Jorgensen, a professor of radiation medicine at Georgetown University in the US, recounts the story of the discovery of radioactivity and how mankind has been transformed by it, with the aim of sweeping away some of the mystery and misunderstanding that surrounds radiation.
The book is structured in three parts. The first is devoted to the discovery of ionising radiation in the late 19th century and its rapid application, notably in the field of medical imaging. The author establishes a vivid parallel with the discovery and exploitation of radio waves, a non-ionising counterpart of higher energy X rays. A dynamic narrative, peppered with personal anecdotes by key actors, succeeds in transmitting the decisive scientific and societal impact of radiation and related discoveries. The interleaving of the history of the discovery with aspects of the lives of inspirational figures such as Ernest Rutherford and Enrico Fermi is certainly very relevant, attractive and illustrative.
In the second part, the author focuses on the impact of ionising radiation on human health, mostly through occupational exposure in different working sectors. A strong focus is on the case of the “radium girls” – female factory workers who were poisoned by radiation from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint. This section also depicts the progress in radiation-protection techniques and the challenges related to quantifying the effects of radiation and establishing limits for the exposure to it. The text succeeds in outlining the difficulties of linking physical quantities of radiation with its impact on human health.
The risk assessment related to radiation exposure and its impact on human health is further covered in the third part of the book. Here, Jorgensen aims to provide quantitative tools for the public to be able to evaluate the benefits and risks associated with radiation exposure. Despite his effort to offer a combination of complementary statistical approaches, readers are left with an impression that many aspects of the impact of radiation on human health are not fully understood. On the contrary, the large number of radiation-exposure cases in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings, after which it was possible to correlate the absorbed dose with the location of the various victims at the time of the explosion, provides a scientifically valuable sample to study both deterministic and stochastic effects of radiation on human health.
In part three, the book also digresses at length about the role of nuclear weapons in the US defence and geopolitical strategy. This topic seems somewhat misplaced with respect to the more technical and scientific content of the rest of the text. Moreover, it is highly US-centric, often neglecting the analogous role of such weapons in other countries.
It is noteworthy that the book does not cover radiation in space and its crucial impact on human spaceflight. Likewise, the discovery of cosmic radiation through Hess’ balloon experiment in 1911–1912, while constituting an essential finding in addition to the already discovered radioactivity from elements on the Earth’s surface, is completely overlooked.
Despite the lack of space-radiation coverage and the somewhat uncorrelated US defence considerations, this book is definitely a very good read that will satisfy the reader’s curiosity and interest with respect to radiation and its impact on humans. In addition, it provides insight into the more general progress of physics, especially in the first half of the 19th century, in a highly dynamic and entertaining manner.
This book aims to provide an overview of both present and emerging nanoelectronics devices, focusing on their numerous applications such as memories, logic circuits, power devices and sensors. It is one unit (in two volumes) of a complete series of books that are dedicated to nanoscience and nanotechnology, and their penetration in many different fields, ranging from human health, agriculture and food science, to energy production, environmental protection and metrology.
After an introduction about the semiconductor industry and its development, different kinds of devices are discussed. Specific chapters are also dedicated to new materials, device-characterisation techniques, smart manufacturing and advanced circuit design. Then, the many applications are covered, which also shows the emerging trends and economic factors influencing the progress of the nanoelectronics industry.
Since nanoelectronics is nowadays fundamental for any science and technology that requires communication and information processing, this book can be of interest to electronic engineers and applied physicists working with sensors and data-processing systems.
“This book is about telling the story of quantum theory entirely in terms of pictures,” declare the authors of this unusual book, in which quantum processes are explained using diagrams and an innovative method for presenting complex theories is set up. The book employs a unique formalism developed by the authors, which allows a more intuitive understanding of quantum features and eliminates complex calculations. As a result, knowledge of advanced mathematics is not required.
The entirely diagrammatic presentation of quantum theory proposed in this (bulky) volume is the result of 10 years of work and research carried out by the authors and their collaborators, uniting classical techniques in linear algebra and Hilbert spaces with cutting-edge developments in quantum computation and foundational QM.
An informal and entertaining style is adopted, which makes this book easily approachable by students at their first encounter with quantum theory. That said, it will probably appeal more to PhD students and researchers who are already familiar with the subject and are interested in looking at a different treatment of this matter. The text is also accompanied by a rich set of exercises.
The most recent and upcoming developments of electronic devices for information technology are increasingly being based on physical phenomena that cannot be understood without some knowledge of quantum mechanics (QM). In the new hardware, switching happens at the level of single electrons and tunnelling effects are frequently used; in addition, the superposition of electron states is the foundation of quantum information processing. As a consequence, the study of QM, as well as informatics, is now being introduced in undergraduate electric and electronic engineering courses. However, there is still a lack of textbooks on this subject written specifically for such courses.
The aim of the author was to fill this gap and provide a concise book in which both the basic concepts of QM and its most relevant applications to electronics and information technologies are covered, making use of only the very essential mathematics.
The book starts off with classical electromagnetism and shows its limitations when it comes to describing the phenomena involved in modern electronics. More advanced concepts are then gradually introduced, from wave–particle duality to the mathematical construction used to describe the state of a particle and to predict its properties. The quantum well and tunnelling through a potential barrier are explained, followed by a few applications, including light-emitting diodes, infrared detectors, quantum cascade lasers, Zener diodes, flash memories and the scanning tunnelling microscope. Finally, the author discusses some of the consequences of QM for the chemical properties of atoms and other many-electron systems, such as semiconductors, as well as the potential hardware for quantum information processing.
Even though the mathematical formulation of basic concepts is introduced when required, the author’s approach is oriented at limiting calculations and abstraction in favour of practical applications. Applets, accessible on the internet, are also used as a support, to ease the computational work and quickly visualise the results.
When Nobel laureates offer their point of view, people generally are curious to listen. Self-described rationalist, realist, reductionist and devoutly secular, Steven Weinberg has published a new book reflecting on current affairs in science and beyond. In Third Thoughts, he addresses themes that are of interest for both laypeople and researchers, such as the public funding of science.
Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for unifying the weak interaction and electromagnetism into the electroweak theory, the core of the Standard Model, and has made many other significant contributions to physics. At the same time, Weinberg has been and remains a keen science populariser. Probably his most famous work is the popular-science book The First Three Minutes, where he recounts the evolution of the universe immediately following the Big Bang.
Third Thoughts is his third collection of essays for non-specialist readers, following Lake Views (2009) and Facing Up (2001). In it are 25 essays divided into four themes: science history, physics and cosmology, public matters, and personal matters. Some are the texts of speeches, some were published previously in The New York Review of Books, and others are released for the first time.
The essays span subjects from quantum mechanics to climate change, from broken symmetry to cemeteries in Texas, and are pleasantly interspersed with his personal life stories. Like his previous collections, Weinberg deals with topics that are dear to him: the history of science, science spending, and the big questions about the future of science and humanity.
The author defines himself as an enthusiastic amateur in the history of science, albeit a “Whig interpreter” (meaning that he evaluates past scientific discoveries by comparing them to the current advancements – a method that irks some historians). Beyond that, his taste for controversy encourages him to cogitate over Einstein’s lapses, Hawking’s views, the weaknesses of quantum mechanics and the US government’s financing choices, among others.
Readers who are interested in US politics will find the section “Public matters” very thought-provoking. In particular, the essay “The crisis of big science” is based on a talk he gave at the World Science Festival in 2011 and later published in the New York Review of Books. He explains the need for big scientific projects, and describes how both cosmology and particle physics are struggling for governmental support. Though still disappointed by the cut of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in the early 1990s, he is excited by the new endeavours at CERN. He reiterates his frank opinions against manned space flight, and emphasises how some scientific obstacles are intertwined in the historical panorama. In this way, Weinberg sets the cancellation of the SSC in a wider problematic context, where education, healthcare, transportation and law enforcement are under threat.
The author condenses the essence of what physicists have learnt so far about the laws of nature and why science is important. This is a book about asking the right questions, when time is ripened to look for the answers. He explains that the question “What is the world made of?” needed to wait for chemistry advances at the end of the 18th century. “What is the structure of the electron?” needed to wait for quantum mechanics. While “What is an elementary particle?” is still waiting for an answer.
The essays vary in difficulty, and some concepts and views are repeated in several essays, thus each of them can be read independently. While most are digestible for readers without any background knowledge in particle physics, a general understanding of the Standard Model would help with grasping the content of some of the paragraphs. Having said that, the general reader can still follow the big picture and logically-argued thoughts.
Several essays talk about CERN. More specifically, the “The Higgs, and beyond” article was written before the announcement of the Higgs boson discovery in 2011, and briefly presents the possibility of technicolour forces. The following essay, “Why the Higgs?”, was commissioned just after the announcement in 2012 to explain “what all the fuss is about”.
One of the most curious essays to explore is number 24. Citing Weinberg: “Essay 24 has not been published until now because everyone who read it disagreed with it, but I am fond of it so bring it out here.” There, he draws parallels between his job as a theoretical physicist and the one of creative artists.
Not all scientists are able to write in such an unconstrained and accessible way. Despair, sorrow, frustration, doubt, uneasiness and wishes all emerge page after page, offering the reader the privilege of coming closer to one of the sharpest scientific minds of our era.
This book is a curiosity, but like many curiosities, well worth stumbling across. It is the product of a curious, roving mind with a long and illustrious career dedicated to the exploration of nature and the betterment of society. Pieced together with cool scientific logic, it takes the reader from a whistle-stop tour of modern astronomy through the poetry collection of Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, to a science-inspired manifesto for the future of our planet. After an opening chapter tracing the development of astronomy from the 1950s to now, subsequent chapters show how gazing at the stars, and learning from doing so, has brought benefit to people from antiquity to modern times across a wide range of disciplines.
Astronomy helped our ancestors to master time, plant crops at the right moment, and navigate their way across wide oceans. There’s humour in the form of speculation about the powers of persuasion of those who convinced the authorities of the day to build the great stone circles that dot the ancient world, allowing people to take time down from the heavens. These were perhaps the Large Hadron Colliders of their time, and, in Courvoisier’s view, probably took up a considerably larger fraction of ancient GDP (gross domestic product) than modern scientific instruments. John Harrison’s remarkable clocks are given pride of place in the author’s discussion of time, though the perhaps even more remarkable Antikythera mechanism is strangely absent.
By the time we reach chapter three, the beginnings of a virtuous circle linking basic science to technology and society are beginning to appear, and we can start to guess where Courvoisier is taking us. The author is not only an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Geneva, but also a former president of the Swiss Academy of Sciences and current president of EASAC, the European Academies Science Advisory Council. For good measure, he is also president of the H Dudley Wright Foundation, a charitable organisation that supports science communication activities, mainly in French-speaking Switzerland. He is, in short, a living, breathing link between science and society.
In chapter four, we enjoy the cultural benefits of science and the pleasure of knowledge for its own sake. We have a glimpse of what in Swiss German is delightfully referred to as Aha Erlebnis – that eureka moment when ideas just fall into place. It reminded me of the passage in another curious book, Kary Mullis’s Dancing Naked in the Mindfield, in which Mullis describes the Aha Erlebnis that led to him receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. It apparently came to him so strongly out of the blue on a night drive along a California freeway that he had to pull off the road and write it down. Einstein’s famous 1% inspiration may be rare, but what a wonderful thing it is when it happens.
Chapter five begins the call to action for scientists to take up the role that their field demands of them in society. “We still need to generate the culture required to […] bring existing knowledge to places where it can and must contribute to actions fashioning the world.” Courvoisier examines the gulf between the rational world of science and the rather different world of policy – a gulf once memorably described by Lew Korwarski in his description of the alliance between scientists and diplomats that led to the creation of CERN. “It was a pleasure to watch the diplomats grapple with the difference between a cyclotron and a plutonium atom,” he said. “We had to compensate by learning how to tell a subcommittee from a working party, and how – in the heat of a discussion – to address people by their titles rather than their names. Each side began to understand the other’s problems and techniques; a mutual respect grew in place of the traditional mistrust between egg-headed pedants and pettifogging hair-splitters.” CERN is the resulting evidence for the good that comes when science and policy come together.
As we reach the business end of the book, we find a rallying call for strengthening our global institutions, and here another of Courvoisier’s influences comes to the fore. He’s Swiss, and a scientist. Scientists have long understood the benefits of collaboration, and if there is one country in the world that has managed to reconcile the nationalism of its regions with the greater need of the supra-cantonal entity of the country as a whole, it is Switzerland. It would be a gross oversimplification to say that Courvoisier’s manifesto is to apply the Swiss model to global governance, but you get the idea.
Originally published in French by the Geneva publisher Georg, if there’s one criticism I have of the book, it’s the translation. It made Catherine Bréchignac, who speaks with fluidity in French, come across as rather clunky in her introduction, and on more than one occasion I found myself wondering if the words I was reading were really expressing what the author wanted to say. Springer and the Swiss Academy of Sciences are to be lauded for bringing this manifesto to an Anglophone audience, but for those who read French, I’d recommend the original.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to classic field theory, which concerns the generation and interaction of fields and is the logical precursor of quantum field theory. But, while in most university physics programmes students are taught classical mechanics first and then quantum mechanics, quantum field theory is normally not preceded by dedicated classic field theory classes. The author, though, claims that it would be worth giving more room to classical field theory, since it can offer a good way to think about modern physical model building.
The focus is on the relativistic structural elements of field theories, which enable a deeper understanding of Maxwell’s equations and of the electromagnetic field theory. The same also stands for other areas of physics, such as gravity.
The book comprises four chapters and is completed by three appendices. The first chapter provides a review of special relativity, with some in-depth discussion of transformations and invariants. Chapter two focuses on Green’s functions and their role as integral building blocks, offering as examples static problems in electricity and the full wave equation of electromagnetism. In chapter three, Lagrangian mechanics is introduced, together with the notions of a field Lagrangian and of action. The last chapter is dedicated to gravity, another classic field theory. The appendices include mathematical and numerical methods useful for field theories and a short essay on how one can take a compact action and from it develop all the physics known from EM.
Written for advanced-undergraduate and graduate students, this book is meant for dedicated courses on classical field theory, but could also be used in combination with other texts for advanced classes on EM or a course on quantum field theory. It could also be used as a reference text for self-study.
This book is as elegant as it is deep. A masterful tour of the science of light and vision. It goes beyond artificial boundaries between disciplines and presents all aspects of light as it appears in physics, chemistry, biology and the neural sciences.
The text is addressed to undergraduate students, an added challenge to the author, which is met brilliantly. Since many of the biological phenomena involved in our perception of light (in photosynthesis, image formation and image interpretation) happen ultimately at the molecular level, one is introduced rather early to the quantum treatment of the particles that form light: photons. And when they are complemented with the particle-wave duality characteristic of quantum mechanics, it is much easier to understand a large palette of natural phenomena without relying on the classical theory of light, embodied by Maxwell’s equations, whose mathematical structure is far more advanced than what is required. This classical approach has the problem that eventually one needs the quantisation of the electromagnetic field to bring photons into the picture. This would make the text rather unwieldly, and not accessible to a majority of undergraduates or biologists working in the field.
In the same way that the author instructs non-physics students in some basic physics concepts and tools, he also provides physicists with accessible and very clear presentations of many biological phenomena involving light. This is a textbook, not an encyclopaedia, hence a selection of such phenomena is necessary to illustrate the concepts and methods needed to develop the material. There are sections at the end of most chapters containing more advanced topics, and also suggestions for further reading to gain additional insight, or to follow some of the threads left open in the main text of the chapter.
A cursory perusal of the table of contents at the beginning will give the reader an idea of the breadth and depth of material covered. There is a very accessible presentation of the theory of colour, from a physical and biological point of view, and its psychophysical effects. The evolution of the eye and of vision at different stages of animal complexity, imaging, the mechanism of visual transduction and many more topics are elegantly covered in this remarkable book.
The final chapters contain some advanced topics in physics, namely, the treatment of light in the theory of quantum electrodynamics. This is our bread and butter in particle physics, but the presentation is more demanding on the reader than any of the previous chapters.
Unlike chapter zero, which explains the rudiments of probability theory in the standard frequentist and Bayesian approaches that can be understood basically by anyone familiar with high-school mathematics, chapters 12 and 13 require a more substantial background in advanced physics and mathematics.
The gestalt approach advocated by this book provides one of the most insightful, cross-disciplinary texts I have read in many years. It is mesmerising and highly recommendable, and will become a landmark in rigorous, but highly accessible interdisciplinary literature.
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