More than Nothing: A History of the Vacuum in Theoretical Physics, 1925-1980
by: Aaron Sidney Wright (Author)
Publisher: OUP USA
Publication Date: 16 Dec. 2023
Language: English
Print Length: 408 pages
ISBN-10: 0190062800
ISBN-13: 9780190062804
Book Description
The vacuum is central to physicists' best theories of subatomic particles, gravitation, and cosmology. Nothingness provides the reference point with which to compare new particle creation and annihilation. Cosmologists use empty universes to study the causal structure of spacetime. Paradoxically, our best physical theories of particles, gravity, and spacetime are theories of nothingness. Stranger still, the physicists' vacuum is a hive of activity. Quantum fluctuations fill empty space with particles, and astronomers measure gravitational waves, the vibrations of empty spacetime itself.More than Nothing uses the history of the vacuum to show how technical concepts in physics are made real through everyday practice. It provides new insight into the development of twentieth-century theoretical physics through sustained analysis of understudied figures including John Wheeler's geometrodynamics and Sidney Coleman's false vacuum. It reveals the surprising influence on physicists from the psychology of impossible objects to drawings of the black hole, and the ways in which the development of the physics of the vacuum became inseparable from the development of larger cultural movements in aesthetics, art, psychology, and fiction. Across decades and across disciplines, More than Nothing shows how physicists over and again chose to study the vacuum for insight into the world around them. Drawing on newly unearthed laboratory notes, private letters, and published material, More than Nothing offers a scoping history of the vacuum as a lens into the development of modern physics.
About the Author
Review In More than Nothing, Aaron Wright brings us to one of the great transformations of modern physics: the shift from seeing the void as pure absence to depicting the vacuum as a teeming structure of virtual particles and spacetime curvature. From the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century, physicists have developed practices, paper machinery, so to speak, to sort out why objects move, splinter, collide as they do: Feynman, Minkowski, Penrose diagrams, and other techniques fill the toolbox of abstract thought. Wright shows us how the story of the vacuum is one that captures what theoretical physicists have framed as the most fundamental entities in the universe ― a natural philosophy of what for centuries on end was just the vacuum, nothing at all. It is a great adventure in thought that will interest physicists, philosophers, and a broader, scientifically-interested public.Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, History of Science and Physics, Harvard UniversityOver the past century, physicists have wrung deep insights by thinking about 'nothing.' In this fascinating and wide-ranging study, Aaron Wright traces how physicists have sharpened a series of conceptual tools by scrutinizing the vacuum, thereby transforming fundamental ideas about space, time, and matter. ― David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyIn this impressive book, Aaron Wright brings to life the work of the brilliant minds who studied the subtle concept of nothing in the twentieth century. Even those familiar with physicists like Dirac and Feynman will find new insights from this carefully researched book. More than Nothing is a marvel to read, and a rare example of a history of science book that never ceases to surprise. ― Dan Kennefick, Professor of Physics, University of Arkansas
About the Author Aaron Sidney Wright, PhD, is Assistant Professor of History at Dalhousie University and the University of King's College in Kjipuktuk, Mi'kma'ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia). He has held postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University and in the Suppes Center for History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford University.
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