The Beautiful Invisible: Creativity, imagination, and theoretical physics - Hardcover

Vignale, Giovanni

 
9780199574841: The Beautiful Invisible: Creativity, imagination, and theoretical physics
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0199574847 ISBN 13: 9780199574841
Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2011

Synopsis

The realm of theoretical physics is teeming with abstract and beautiful concepts. And the task of imagining them is one that demands profound creativity, argues Giovanni Vignale. Explaining them is curiously akin to the craft of poets, or magical realist novelists such as Borges, and Musil, or Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

In this unusual and sometimes poetic book, Vignale presents his own unorthodox accounts of fundamental theoretical concepts such as Newtonian mechanics, superconductivity, and Einstein's theory of relativity, showing that what may seem at first quite simple in fact turns out to be much more profound. As we delve behind now-familiar metaphors such as 'electron spin' and 'black hole', the world that we take for granted melts away, leaving a glimpse of something much stranger.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Giovanni Vignale is Curator's Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is the co-author of an academic text, Quantum Theory of the Electron Liquid (CUP, 2005).

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
OUP Oxford
Publication date
2011
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0199574847
ISBN 13 
9780199574841
Binding
Hardcover
Edition number
1
Number of pages
320