Facts of Matter and Light : Ten Physics Experiments That Shaped Our Understanding of Nature

. The main aim of this book is to shine a spotlight on key experiments and their crucial importance for advancing our understanding of physics. Physics is an empirical science, and experiments have always been a driving force in the development of our understanding of nature. Facts matter. In that sense, the book attempts to be complementary to the many popularizations of theoretical physics, and to counterbalance the frequent emphasis there on more speculative ideas. Experimental physics is also an essential pillar in physics teaching, as well as helping broader audiences to better understand important concepts, particularly in challenging fields such as relativity or quantum physics, where our common sense intuition often fails. Readers are taken on an historical journey, starting with “Free Fall” and culminating in “Spooky Action at a Distance”. En route they will encounter many important branches of physics, whose main ideas and theoretical description will be given a more empirical meaning. At the end, the reader is invited to reflect on what could be exciting and important directions for fundamental physics. All readers with an undergraduate degree in physical sciences or engineering will enjoy and learn much from this stimulating and original text. Preface Acknowledgments Contents 1 The Winners Are ... 2 Free Fall 2.1 Equality of Gravitational and Inertial Mass 2.2 Galileo's Experiments on Free Fall 2.3 Newton's Gravity 2.3.1 Looking up at the Sky 2.3.2 Newton's Program 2.4 Gravity 3 Electromagnetic and Optical Unification 3.1 Electromagnetic Phenomena 3.2 Induction 3.3 The Field Concept 3.4 Electromagnetic Waves 3.5 Unification 4 Looking at Fluctuations 4.1 Natural Philosophy 4.2 Atoms 4.3 Limit Theorems 4.4 Brownian Motion 4.4.1 The Random Walk as a Diffusion Model 4.4.2 Sutherland–Einstein Relation 4.5 Perrin's Experiment 4.6 Fluctuation–Dissipation Relation 5 Quantization 5.1 Standard Hydrogen Lines 5.2 Black Body Radiation 5.3 Photoelectric Effect 5.4 Compton Effect 5.5 Specific Heat 5.6 Spin 6 Wave-like Nature 6.1 Early Light 6.1.1 Young's Experiment 6.1.2 On the French Side 6.1.3 Interacting Newton Bullets? 6.2 X-rays and Bragg Scattering 6.3 Davisson–Germer Experiment 6.4 Wavy Electrons 7 Finding Structure: Scattering and Fission 7.1 Light Scattering 7.2 Particle Scattering 7.2.1 Geiger–Marsden–Rutherford Scattering 7.2.2 Standard Model Experiments 7.3 Nuclear Chain Reactions 8 Light in the Universe and the Invariance of Proper Time 8.1 Michelson–Morley Experiment 8.2 Special Relativity 8.2.1 Popular Relativity 8.2.2 Minkowski Spacetime 8.2.3 Twin Paradox 8.2.4 NonEuclidean Geometry 8.3 And More Generally 9 Dynamical Activity of the Vacuum 9.1 Beginnings 9.2 Lamb Shift 9.2.1 Lamb–Retherford Experiment 9.2.2 Calculation 9.3 Fluctuation Force 9.4 Casimir Effect 9.5 Frenesy 10 Phase Transitions 10.1 The Dream of Anaximenes 10.2 Percolation 10.3 Criticality and Universality 10.4 Superconductivity 10.5 Superfluidity 10.6 Bose–Einstein Condensation 11 Nonlocality: Spooky Action at a Distance 11.1 About Alice, Living Far Away from Bob 11.2 Einstein's Boxes 11.3 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Argument 11.4 Bell's Inequality 11.5 Bell Test Experiments 12 Future Experiments 12.1 Around 2000 12.1.1 The Statistical Mechanics of Geometry 12.1.2 Relativity Versus Quantum Mechanics 12.1.3 Quantum Statistical Mechanics 12.2 Into the Next Hundred Years 12.2.1 Computational and Neuro(nal) Physics 12.2.2 Physics of Life 12.2.3 Many-Body Nonequilibrium Physics 12.2.4 Climate and Planetary Sciences Appendix References Subject Index Author Index