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 fifth and fourth centuries BCE, that we are 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 clear and lively prose, Tonelli takes readers on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and themselves, in a new light.
Innehållsförteckning
Thanks
Prologue
1. The mother of everything
A word which has very deep roots ; Morning rituals and due respect for corpses ; Matter in the thoughts of the great thinkers ; An assumption about the stability and persistence of the material universe
2. Atoms and the void
The birth of atomism ; Epicurus and Lucretius ; An incredible discovery made by the secretary to an anti-Pope ; Venus Zephyrus and maggots in cheese ; The birth of modern science and atomism
3. They’re just particles
The dark side of the Moon 26; Particle hunters; Particles which bond with other particles ; The irresistible force of Eros ; The realm of the shyest and most self-effacing of the particles 33; Five small phenomena
4. Clouds soft matter and the last shamans
States of matter ; The strange world of soft materials ; The almost eternal life of the great material structures ; The evanescent world of the most ephemeral forms of matter
5. The triumph and decline of a thousand-year-old assumption
Stories of fermions and bosons ; But what really is mass? ; The generation of ’64 ; Geneva the 8th of November 2011 ; A strange field that occupies the whole universe ; The strangeness of the Higgs and the many mysteries it hides
6. Shining stars and black stars
What stars are ; The turbulent side of the Sun ; The spectacular end of a tranquil star ; Supernovas and neutron stars 64; Black holes
7. The obscure forms of matter which populate the universe
Mostly gas and a pinch of dust ; Milkomeda and the Black Eye Galaxy ; The dark side of matter ; The light which sees dark matter ; The dark kingdom of shadows ; Delicate and gentle messengers
8. What is supporting the water that Bahamut swims in
The critical density of the universe ; What the vacuum is ; Where matter comes from ; What will happen to matter in the end
9. The magnificent illusion
The great euphoria of mechanistic materialism ; State materialism ; Modern materialism ; But what is matter really ; And what if particles were hiding unspeakable secrets from us
Epilogue
Index
Om författaren
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.
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