Table of Contents

Introduction. LIGHT LESSON: Energy conservation; Planck's law; Electromagnetism; Young's fringes; Speed of light; Photoelectric effect. UNDERSTANDING ELECTRONS: Wave-particle duality; Rutherford's atom; Quantum leaps; Fraunhofer lines; Zeeman effect; Pauli exclusion principle. QUANTUM MECHANICS: Matrix mechanics; Schrodinger's wave equation; Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; The Copenhagen interpretation; Schrodinger's cat; The EPR paradox; Quantum tunnelling; Nuclear fission; Antimatter. QUANTUM FIELDS: Quantum field theory; The Lamb shift; Quantum electrodynamics; Beta decay; Weak interaction; Quarks; Deep inelastic scattering; Quantum chromodynamics; The Standard Model. QUANTUM COSMOS: Symmetry breaking; The Higgs boson; Supersymmetry; Quantum gravity; Hawking radiation; Quantum cosmology; String theory. QUANTUM UNREALITY: Many worlds; Hidden variables; Bell's inequalities; Aspect experiments; Quantum eraser. QUANTUM APPLICATIONS: Quantum decoherence; Qubits; Quantum cryptography; Quantum dots; Superconductivity; Bose-Einstein condensates; Quantum biology; Quantum consciousness. Glossary. Index.

About the Author

Joanne Baker studied Physics at Cambridge and took her PhD at the University of Sydney in 1995. She is a physical science editor at Science magazine, where her speciality is space and earth science. She is the author of 50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know and Universe: 50 Ideas You Really Need to Know.