Benjamin Schumacher
Author
Pub. Date
c2009
Description
"Quantum mechanics gives us a picture of the world that is so radically counterintuitive that it has changed our perspective on reality itself, raising profound questions about concepts such as cause and effect, measurement, and information. Despite its seemingly mysterious nature, quantum mechanics has a broad range of applications in fields such as chemistry, computer science, and cryptography. Quantum Mechanics gives you the logical tools to grasp...
Author
Pub. Date
c2010
Description
"Some things can happen in our universe and others cannot. The laws of physics set this boundary between the possible and the impossible."--Container. Professor Schumacher takes the viewer into territory onboth sides of the impossibility line to examine these complex realms.
Description
Quantum mechanics gives us a picture of the world so radically counterintuitive that it has changed our perspective on reality itself. In Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World, award-winning Professor Benjamin Schumacher gives you the logical tools to grasp the paradoxes and astonishing insights of this field.
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
The science of information is the most influential, yet perhaps least appreciated field in science today. Never before in history have we been able to acquire, record, communicate, and use information in so many different forms. Never before have we had access to such vast quantities of data of every kind. This revolution goes far beyond the limitless content that fills our lives, because information also underlies our understanding of ourselves,...
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
DNA, RNA, and the protein molecules they assemble are so interdependent that it’s hard to picture how life got started in the first place. Survey a selection of intriguing theories, including the view that genetic information in living cells results from eons of natural computation.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
At the beginning of the 20th century, Max Planck and Albert Einstein proposed revolutionary ideas to resolve puzzles about light and matter. You explore Planck's discovery that light energy can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete amounts called quanta, and Einstein's application of this concept to matter.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
When two particles are part of the same quantum system, they may be entangled with each other. In their famous "EPR" paper, Einstein and his collaborators Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen used entanglement to argue that quantum mechanics is incomplete. You chart their reasoning and Bohr's response.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
The interferometer from the previous lecture serves as a test case for introducing the formal math of quantum theory. By learning a few symbols and rules, you can describe the states of quantum particles, show how these states change over time, and predict the results of measurements.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
Thirty years after EPR, physicist John Bell dropped an even bigger bombshell, showing that a deterministic theory of quantum mechanics such as EPR violates the principle of locality - that particles in close interaction can't be instantaneously affected by events happening in another part of the universe.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
One of the most famous and misunderstood concepts in quantum mechanics is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You trace Werner Heisenberg's route to this revolutionary view of subatomic particle interactions, which establishes a trade-off between how precisely a particle's position and momentum can be defined.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
What are the laws governing quantum information? Charles Bennett has proposed basic rules governing the relationships between different sorts of information. You investigate his four laws, including quantum teleportation, in which entanglement can be used to send quantum information instantaneously.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
In this final lecture, you ponder John A. Wheeler's metaphor of the Great Smoky Dragon, a creature whose tail appears at the start of an experiment and whose head appears at the end. But what lies between is as uncertain as the mysterious and unknowable path of a quantum particle.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
You focus on the Einstein-Bohr debate, which pitted Einstein's belief that quantum events can, in principle, be known in every detail, against Bohr's philosophy of complementarity - the view that a measurement of one quantum variable precludes a different variable from ever being known.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
Light propagates through space as a wave, but it exchanges its energy in the form of particles. You learn how Louis de Broglie showed that this weird wave-particle duality also applies to matter, and how Max Born inferred that this relationship makes quantum mechanics inherently probabilistic.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
You investigate the age-old debate over whether the physical world is discrete or continuous. By the 19th century, physicists saw a clear demarcation: Matter is made of discrete atoms, while light is a continuous wave of electromagnetic energy. However, a few odd phenomena remained difficult to explain.
Pub. Date
2009.
Description
Macroscopic objects obey the snowflake principle. No two are exactly alike. Quantum particles do not obey this principle. For instance, every electron is perfectly identical to every other. You learn that quantum particles come in two basic types: bosons, which can occupy the same quantum state; and fermions, which cannot.