Matter: The Magnificent Illusion

Tonelli, Guido, Williams, Edward

  • 出版商: Polity
  • 出版日期: 2024-12-23
  • 售價: $1,090
  • 貴賓價: 9.5$1,036
  • 語言: 英文
  • 頁數: 220
  • 裝訂: Hardcover - also called cloth, retail trade, or trade
  • ISBN: 1509564144
  • ISBN-13: 9781509564149
  • 尚未上市,無法訂購

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商品描述

What are we made up of? What holds material bodies together? Is there a difference between terrestrial matter and celestial matter - the matter that makes up the Earth and the matter that makes up the Sun and other stars? When Democritus stated, between the 5th and 4th centuries BC, that we were made up of atoms, few people believed him. Not until Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century did people take the idea seriously, and it was another four hundred years before we could reconstruct the elementary components of matter.

Everything around us - the matter that forms rocks and planets, flowers and stars, even us - has very particular properties. These properties, which seem quite normal to us, are in fact very special, because the universe, whose evolution began almost fourteen billion years ago, is today a very cold environment. In this book, Guido Tonelli explains how elementary particles, which make up matter, combine into bizarre shapes to form correlated quantum states, primordial soups of quarks and gluons, or massive neutron stars. New questions that have emerged from the most recent research are answered: in what sense is the vacuum a material state? Why can space-time also vibrate and oscillate? Can elementary grains of space and time exist? What forms does matter assume inside large black holes?

In lucid and lively prose, Tonelli takes readers on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and see themselves, in a new light.

商品描述(中文翻譯)

我們由什麼組成?什麼使物質身體保持在一起?地球物質和天體物質之間有什麼區別——構成地球的物質和構成太陽及其他恆星的物質?當德莫克利特在公元前五世紀和四世紀之間聲稱我們是由原子組成時,鮮有人相信他。直到十七世紀的伽利略和牛頓,人們才開始認真對待這個想法,而在我們能夠重建物質的基本組成部分之前,又過了四百年。

我們周圍的一切——形成岩石和行星、花朵和恆星,甚至我們自己——都有非常特定的性質。這些對我們來說似乎很正常的性質,實際上是非常特殊的,因為宇宙的演化始於將近十四億年前,今天的環境非常寒冷。在這本書中,圭多·托內利解釋了構成物質的基本粒子如何結合成奇特的形狀,形成相關的量子態、原始的夸克和膠子湯,或是巨大的中子星。最近研究中出現的新問題得到了回答:真空在什麼意義上是一種物質狀態?為什麼時空也能振動和擺動?基本的時空粒子能存在嗎?物質在大型黑洞內會呈現什麼形態?

托內利以清晰而生動的文筆,帶領讀者踏上探索當代科學最新發現的刺激旅程,使他們能以全新的視角看待宇宙,並重新認識自己。

作者簡介

Guido Tonelli is a prize-winning physicist and one of the leaders in the discovery of the Higgs boson. He is Professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa and a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. His many publications include the bestselling book Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began.

作者簡介(中文翻譯)

Guido Tonelli 是一位獲獎的物理學家,也是希格斯玻色子發現的領導者之一。他是比薩大學的普通物理學教授,同時也是位於日內瓦的歐洲核子研究組織 (CERN) 的物理學家。他的多部出版物中包括暢銷書《Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began》。