By Sébastien Balibar
Where is mankind situated within the Universe? What is going on within atoms? used to be Einstein regularly correct? can we locate extraterrestrial existence within the close to destiny? And what will be performed approximately international warming? Sébastien Balibar, a number one authority in physics, makes use of illuminating tales from his personal lifestyles to reply to the main exciting questions within the actual sciences at the present time. The Atom and the Apple considers elements of our environment--the issues we see round us, yet seldom actually understand--and exhibits that technology could be an exhilarating event grounded within the phenomena of the day-by-day world.
Balibar examines twelve difficulties spanning the frontiers of physics, and he devotes a bankruptcy to every factor. He seems at chaos conception, cosmology, fluid mechanics, and climatology. He explains how we came across the age of the Earth, how we all know the Universe is increasing ever extra quickly, and why the spiral styles of pinecones and sunflowers are with regards to the Golden Ratio in arithmetic. He scrutinizes how the collective habit of atoms ends up in such awesome effects as lasers, superconductors, or superfluids. As Balibar invitations us to understand the physics hidden in the attractions and sounds of the flora and fauna, he additionally recounts the stories of his adolescence and occupation that have been pivotal to his lifelong ardour for science.
Written for normal readers, The Atom and the Apple explores attention-grabbing points of our global, and demonstrates why the pursuit of medical wisdom is definitely worthy everyone's time, despite medical background.
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Additional info for The Atom and the Apple. 12 Tales from Contemporary Physics
Sample text
We’ll have the chance to come back to that later. What interests me here is that DNA is like a string with two strands, wrapped around each other in a double helix. A corkscrew is also a helix, and it has a direction. To insert it into a cork, you usually need to rotate it to the right, unless it’s a corkscrew for lefties. Just as there are corkscrews for righties and others for lefties, there are thus right-handed and left-handed helices. In any case, DNA is a right-handed helix! That’s true not only for our human DNA, but also for that of all living beings.
In the same way, we thought that for particles, the laws were independent of the direction in which time flowed. pdf WBG Soft Proof 4/21/08 2:51:46 PM Pg 25 MY COUSIN THE LEEK certain particles called “neutral K mesons,” which violate the symmetry of time. It’s therefore possible that at the beginning of the Universe, the disintegration of certain particles gave birth to more matter than anti-matter, or that the lifetime of some particles was different from that of their anti-particles. Some physicists are actively looking for such processes, and are finding them.
We were thus approaching the truth which has today been established. One day in 1994, while reading Jean Jacques’s Confessions of an Ordinary Chemist, I came across a magnificent quote from Victor Hugo’s William Shakespeare. Hugo, comparing art and science, wrote that “Science is the asymptote of truth. It approaches it ceaselessly, and never touches it. Besides that, it possesses every greatness. ” What an homage! So, we were getting a little closer to the truth, when a new discovery took place, which raised questions about the most recent estimate of the age of the Earth: plate tectonics.