World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. | Engilsh | PDF | Size : 1.71 MB

PREFACE

Beyond its intrinsic beauty, the pursuit of physics, now into its fifth century, comes with a thrilling and compelling human story. From its earliest beginnings — think Galileo — this story has fascinated physicists and non-physicists alike. Over the years, I both heard and got to witness many such stories. They put a human face on the grand story, the evolution of our science. As a rule these stories are handed down by word of mouth. After finishing the proof of Emmy Noether’s seminal theorem in my field theory course, I would let the students catch their breath, while telling them the moving story of this great mathematician. Invariably they were riveted; you could hear a pin drop. The idea of putting such stories down on paper for a change, was born, with the hope of conveying the excitement and flavor of the physicist’s life, as well as the way physicists’ lives are affected by the sometimes benign, at other times malignant, forces of history. Though what follows is built out of many, many anecdotes,
vignettes, and stories, they naturally cluster around certain clearly visible main themes, which give a degree of continuity to the whole. What all these scientists try to achieve, their deeper motivation, is obviously of essence, and, rigorously foreswearing the use of any technical means, I have tried to give at least a general idea of the beautiful goal of the physicist’s work. Above all, this book is about what happens at the human level when some extremely gifted individuals, living in the unavoidable historic reality, devote themselves to what can be called without hyperbole a transcendental goal. By now I have twice referred to the beauty of physics and I ought to explain my use of this word. One normally associates beauty with works of art. It takes little to explain why Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, on view at the Louvre, is beautiful. The shapes are superb, the color scheme rich and sensual; the varnished texture intimates perfection. It all seems so inevitable, so elegant. It is these two ingredients, inevitability and elegance, or economy of means, which we find as well in a major scientific idea. In physics, the ultimate focus is on how many ideas previously thought of as unrelated now get connected into a meaningful whole and become much easier to comprehend, and then what entirely new perspectives open up before us. Before Einstein’s theory of general relativity, for example, the shape of space (or more generally, the shape of the four-dimensional space–time continuum) had to be postulated, or, more frankly, guessed. Then, in this guessed space one could study the problem of how gravity is generated by matter, and in turn affects the movement of matter. The shape of space had neither much to do with this problem, nor was it affected by this problem. But when the theory of general relativity was formulated and then experimentally confirmed, the interaction between matter and gravity was seen to also determine the shape of space, and guesswork was no longer needed. Two independent problems turned out to reflect different aspects of a larger whole. As a consequence, the evolution of space could be studied and modern cosmology was born. How bold, how inevitable, how economic! How beautiful!

Download