Physics and Our World : Reissue of the Proceedings of a Symposium in Honor of Victor F Weisskopf, MIT, 1974

As the proceedings of a symposium in honor of Victor Weisskopf at MIT, this volume contains papers by leaders of physics at the time, including M Delbrück, M Gell-Mann, H Bethe, T D Lee, B R Mottelson, W K H Panofsky, E Purcell, J Schwinger, S M Ulam, and others. Some papers address problems in the philosophy of physics, and physics and society, that are timeless in nature. But the symposium had a historical significance, in that it took place at a historic juncture of particle physics -- the emergence of the Standard Model owing to experiments that point to the existence of quarks. Some of the papers reflect both the pre-quark and post-quark points of view. For these reasons, these proceedings merit reissue and reexamination. Contents 6 Foreword 8 Acknowledgments 12 Preface 14 1 Introductory Remarks 16 2 The Energy Problem 22 3 Model-Free Views of Deep Inelastic Scattering 38 4 Life at Low Reynolds Number 62 5 A Possible New Form of Matter at High Density 84 1. Vacuum 84 1.1. Missing symmetry 86 1.2. Physics at small distances vs. physics at large distances 87 2. Vacuum Excitation 89 2.1. Constant source 90 2.2. Matter source 91 3. Abnormal Nuclear States 92 4. Production and Detection 95 5. Remarks 99 6 The World As Quarks, Leptons and Bosons 100 7 What Angular Momentum Can Do to the Nucleus 120 8 Physics for Mathematicians 134 9 How Aristotle Discovered DNA 144 10 Is Negotiated Arms Control Possible? 154 11 The Third Culture 170 1. Introduction 170 2. Evolution 172 3. The Evolution of Knowledge 174 4. Unevenness—Esotericism 176 5. A New Direction for Science 179