History and Present Status of Quantum Theory in Vision
Author : Maarten Anne Bouman
Publisher :
Page : 70 pages
File Size : 36,66 MB
Release : 1960
Category : Physiological optics
ISBN :
The Strange World of Quantum Mechanics
Author : Daniel F. Styer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 37,73 MB
Release : 2000-02-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 1316101878
Book Description
This is an exceptionally accessible, accurate, and non-technical introduction to quantum mechanics. After briefly summarizing the differences between classical and quantum behaviour, this engaging account considers the Stern-Gerlach experiment and its implications, treats the concepts of probability, and then discusses the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and Bell's theorem. Quantal interference and the concept of amplitudes are introduced and the link revealed between probabilities and the interference of amplitudes. Quantal amplitude is employed to describe interference effects. Final chapters explore exciting new developments in quantum computation and cryptography, discover the unexpected behaviour of a quantal bouncing-ball, and tackle the challenge of describing a particle with no position. Thought-provoking problems and suggestions for further reading are included. Suitable for use as a course text, The Strange World of Quantum Mechanics enables students to develop a genuine understanding of the domain of the very small. It will also appeal to general readers seeking intellectual adventure.
Helgoland
Author : Carlo Rovelli
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 42,54 MB
Release : 2022-05-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 0593328892
Book Description
Named a Best Book of 2021 by the Financial Times and a Best Science Book of 2021 by The Guardian “Rovelli is a genius and an amazing communicator… This is the place where science comes to life.” ―Neil Gaiman “One of the warmest, most elegant and most lucid interpreters to the laity of the dazzling enigmas of his discipline...[a] momentous book” ―John Banville, The Wall Street Journal A startling new look at quantum theory, from the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Anaximander. One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it.
Limits in Perception
Author : A.J. van Doorn
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 33,38 MB
Release : 2020-01-29
Category : Science
ISBN : 1000722961
Book Description
This book presents an analysis of limits in perception from the vantage point of the physicist, the engineer, the psychophysicist, the psychologist and the theorist. Limits in perception find their causal explanation at many logically and/or physically different levels. Some of the most fundamental bottlenecks are due to the quantum mechanical and atomistic structure of the microworld. Other simple constraints are due to the material constitution of sensory organs. For instance, the fact that the eye is predominantly composed of water limits both the optical quality and the available spectral window. The engineer uses knowledge on such limits to design equipment that optimizes human performance in daily life. Examples include room acoustics and visual displays. Psychophysicists and psychologists deal with limits on a quite different logical level. These limits constrain much of our perceptually guided behaviour. The book includes chapters on such topics as movement perception, binocular vision, illusory phenomena, language and perception, the perception of time. A few concluding chapters on fundamental limits imposed by information theoretical constraints on the coding and representation of sensed structure are included. Limits in Perception will be important reading material for scientists and/or engineers in the following fields: perception, experimental psychology, sensory biology, physics, neuroscience, human engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics, ophthalmology, audiology, psychonomics and ergonomics, remote sensing.
“The” Conceptual Completion and the Extensions of Quantum Mechanics 1932 - 1941 ; Epilogue: Aspects of the Further Development of Quantum Theory 1942 - 1999
Author : Jagdish Mehra
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 956 pages
File Size : 33,60 MB
Release : 2001-06-29
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9780387951829
Book Description
Quantum Theory, together with the principles of special and general relativity, constitute a scientific revolution that has profoundly influenced the way in which we think about the universe and the fundamental forces that govern it. The Historical Development of Quantum Theory is a definitive historical study of that scientific work and the human struggles that accompanied it from the beginning. Drawing upon such materials as the resources of the Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, the Niels Bohr Archives, and the archives and scientific correspondence of the principal quantum physicists, as well as Jagdish Mehra's personal discussions over many years with most of the architects of quantum theory, the authors have written a rigorous scientific history of quantum theory in a deeply human context. This multivolume work presents a rich account of an intellectual triumph: a unique analysis of the creative scientific process. The Historical Development of Quantum Theory is science, history, and biography, all wrapped in the story of a great human enterprise. Its lessons will be an aid to those working in the sciences and humanities alike.||Comments by distinguished physicists on "The Historical Development of Quantum Theory":||"¿the most definitive work undertaken by anyone on this vast and most important development in the history of physics. Jagdish Mehra, trained in theoretical physics under Pauli, Heisenberg, and Dirac, pursued the vision of his youth to write about the historical and conceptual development of quantum theory in the 20th century¿This series of books on the HDQT has thus become the most authentic and permanent source of our knowledge of how quantum theory, its extensions and applications developed. My heartfelt congratulations."|-Hans A. Bethe, Nobel Laureate||"A thrilling and magnificent achievement!"|-Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS, Nobel Laureate||"¿capture(s) precisely, accurately, and thoroughly the very essence and all the fundamental details of the theory, and that is a remarkable achievement¿I have greatly enjoyed reading these books and learned so many new things from them. This series of books will remain a permanent source of knowledge about the creation and development of quantum theory. Congratulations!"|-Paul A. Dirac, FRS, Nobel Laureate||"The wealth and accuracy of detail in 'The Historical Development of Quantum Theory' are breathtaking."|-Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Laureate
Visual Psychophysics
Author : Dorothea Jameson
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 822 pages
File Size : 33,99 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Medical
ISBN : 3642886582
Book Description
This volume on Visual Psychophysics documents the current status of research aimed toward understanding the intricacies of the visual mechanism and its laws of operation in intact human perceivers. As can be seen from the list of contributors, the problems of vision engage the interest and experimental ingenuity of investi gators from a variety of disciplines. Thus we find authors affiliated with depart ments of biology, medical and physiological physics, ophthalmology, physics, physiology and anatomy, psychology, laboratories of neurophysiology, medical clinics, schools of optometry, visual and othcr types of research institutes. A continuing interplay between psychophysical studies and physiological work is everywhere evident. As more information about the physiological basis of vision accumulates, and new studies and analyses of receptor photochemistry and the neurophysiology of retina and brain appear, psychophysical studies of the intact organism become more sharply focused, sometimes more complex, and often more specialized. Technological advances have increased the variety and precision of the stimulus controls, and advances in measurement techniques have reopened old problems and stimulated the investigation of new ones. In some cases, new concepts are being drawn in to help further our under standing of the laws by which the visual mechanism operates; in other cases, ideas enunciated long ago have been reevaluated, developed more fully, and reified in terms of converging evidence from both psychophysical experiments and unit recordings from visual cells.
What Is Real?
Author : Adam Becker
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 26,12 MB
Release : 2018-03-20
Category : Science
ISBN : 0465096069
Book Description
"A thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science." --New York Times Book Review An Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review Longlisted for PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Longlisted for Goodreads Choice Award Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's solipsistic and poorly reasoned Copenhagen interpretation. Indeed, questioning it has long meant professional ruin, yet some daring physicists, such as John Bell, David Bohm, and Hugh Everett, persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. What Is Real? is the gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth. "An excellent, accessible account." --Wall Street Journal "Splendid. . . . Deeply detailed research, accompanied by charming anecdotes about the scientists." --Washington Post
Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
Author : Lee Smolin
Publisher : Knopf Canada
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 30,95 MB
Release : 2019-04-09
Category : Science
ISBN : 0345809122
Book Description
A daring new vision of the quantum universe, and the scandals controversies, and questions that may illuminate our future--from Canada's leading mind on contemporary physics. Quantum physics is the golden child of modern science. It is the basis of our understanding of atoms, radiation, and so much else, from elementary particles and basic forces to the behaviour of materials. But for a century it has also been the problem child of science, plagued by intense disagreements between its intellectual giants, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking, over the strange paradoxes and implications that seem like the stuff of fantasy. Whether it's Schrödinger's cat--a creature that is simultaneously dead and alive--or a belief that the world does not exist independently of our observations of it, quantum theory is what challenges our fundamental assumptions about our reality. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, globally renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin provocatively argues that the problems which have bedeviled quantum physics since its inception are unsolved for the simple reason that the theory is incomplete. There is more, waiting to be discovered. Our task--if we are to have simple answers to our simple questions about the universe we live in--must be to go beyond it to a description of the world on an atomic scale that makes sense. In this vibrant and accessible book, Smolin takes us on a journey through the basics of quantum physics, introducing the stories of the experiments and figures that have transformed the field, before wrestling with the puzzles and conundrums that they present. Along the way, he illuminates the existing theories about the quantum world that might solve these problems, guiding us toward his own vision that embraces common sense realism. If we are to have any hope of completing the revolution that Einstein began nearly a century ago, we must go beyond quantum mechanics as we know it to find a theory that will give us a complete description of nature. In Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, Lee Smolin brings us a step closer to resolving one of the greatest scientific controversies of our age.
The Quantum Story
Author : Jim Baggott
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 490 pages
File Size : 37,6 MB
Release : 2011-02-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 0191604291
Book Description
The twentieth century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world's leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the pinnacle of wonderment and to the very depths of human despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed weapons with the capacity to destroy our reality, whilst at the same time denying us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend it. Almost everything we think we know about the nature of our world comes from one theory of physics. This theory was discovered and refined in the first thirty years of the twentieth century and went on to become quite simply the most successful theory of physics ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the twenty-first century technology that we have learned to take for granted. But its success has come at a price, for it has at the same time completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at the level of its most fundamental constituents. Rejecting the fundamental elements of uncertainty and chance implied by quantum theory, Albert Einstein once famously declared that 'God does not play dice'. Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it. The charismatic American physicist Richard Feynman went further: he claimed that nobody understands it. This is quantum theory, and this book tells its story. Jim Baggott presents a celebration of this wonderful yet wholly disconcerting theory, with a history told in forty episodes — significant moments of truth or turning points in the theory's development. From its birth in the porcelain furnaces used to study black body radiation in 1900, to the promise of stimulating new quantum phenomena to be revealed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider over a hundred years later, this is the extraordinary story of the quantum world. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.
Handbook of Perception and Action: Perception
Author : Wolfgang Prinz
Publisher : Academic Press
Page : 474 pages
File Size : 47,73 MB
Release : 1995
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0125161611
Book Description
This volume combines the classical fields of perception research with the major theoretical attitudes of today's research, distinguishing between experience- versus performance-related approaches, transformational versus interactional approaches, and approaches that rely on the processing versus discovery of information. Perception is separated into two parts. The first part deals with basic processes and mechanisms, and discusses early vision and later, yet still basic, vision. The second covers complex achievements with accounts of perceptual constancies and the perception of patterns, objects, events, and actions.
