Martin H. Krieger

Doing Physics (eBook, ePUB)

How Physicists Take Hold of the World

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The author of Doing Mathematics explores the concepts of physics by demonstrating how physicists think and approach their work. Doing Physics makes concepts of physics easier to grasp by relating them to everyday knowledge. Addressing some of the models and metaphors that physicists use to explain the physical world, Martin H. Krieger describes the conceptual world of physics by means of analogies to economics, anthropology, theater, carpentry, mechanical systems, and machine tool design. Krieger explains the interaction of elementary particles by referring to the theory of kinship: who can marry whom is similar to what can interact with what. Likewise, the description of physical situations in terms of interdependent particles and fields is analogous to the design of a factory with its division of labor among specialists. For this new edition, Krieger has revised the text and added a chapter on the role of mathematics and formal models in physics. "Krieger... excellently tells those in our human society outside the physics world how physicists think, plan, and go about understanding nature." - Choice

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Indiana University Press
• Seitenzahl: 243
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. Dezember 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780253006080
• Artikelnr.: 75595141

Autorenporträt

Martin H. Krieger, who was trained as a physicist at Columbia University, has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the National Humanities Center. He is author of Marginalism and Discontinuity: Tools for the Crafts of Knowledge and Decision (1989), Constitutions of Matter: Mathematically Modeling the Most Everyday of Physical Phenomena (1996), and Doing Mathematics: Convention, Subject, Calculation, Analogy (2003). He is on the faculty of the University of Southern California, and has taught at Berkeley, Minnesota, MIT, and Michigan.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface Degrees of Freedom
A Note to the Reader
A Note for the Scholars
This Second Edition
Acknowledgments 1. The Division of Labor: The Factory Nature as a Factory
Handles and Stories. What Everyday Walls Must Do
Walls for a Factory
Walls as Providential. Particles, Objects, and Workers
What Particles Must Be Like
Intuitions of Walls and Particles. What Fields Must Be Like. 2. Taking Apart and Putting Together: The Clockworks, The Calculus, and the Computer The Right Degrees of Freedom
The Clockworks and The Calculus. Parts Are Strategies
Independence and Randomness
Dependence, Spreadsheets, and Differential Equations
Additivity and The Calculus
Disjoint Functionality and Interpretability: Bureaucracy, Flow Processing Plants, and Object-Oriented Programming
Sequence and Procedure. Parts Are Commitments. 3. Freedom and Necessity: Family and Kinship Recapitulation and Prospect
Kinship, Exchange, and Plenitude
Systematics in the Field
The Problem of "Quite Rarely"
Markets and Fetishes
Taking the Rules Seriously
Structure and System. 4. The Vacuum and The Creation: Setting a Stage So Far, an Epitome
Sweeping Up the Vacuum
Symmetry and Order. The Empty Stage
Of Nothing, Something, and the Vacuum. Setting Up the Stage
Ideologies for a Vacuum
The Dialectic of Finding a Good Vacuum
The Analogy of Substance, Once More. Fluctuations in a Vacuum. Annealing the World. 5. Handles, Probes, and Tools: A Rhetoric of Nature A Craft of Science
Some Handles onto the World (Particles, Crystals, Gasses
Analogy
Phase Transitions
Knowledge Is Handling). Probes
Objectivity and Inelasticity
Probes and Handles. Tools and Toolkits
A Physicist's Toolkit
So Far. 6. Production Machinery: Mathematics for Analysis and Description Philosophical Analysis and Phenomenological Description
Machinery and Production Processes
Naming and Modeling the World
Demonstrations and Proofs as Strategies of Explanation
Understanding "The Physics"
Analogy and Syzygy
The Mathematics and The Physics 7. An Epitome Notes Index