My Amazon Review of Carlo Rovelli's "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution"

 

The Philosophy of Quanta

 

Physicist Carlo Rovelli has offered up his philosophical review of the quantum revolution largely through the eyes of Werner Heisenberg. We see the 23-year-old Heisenberg in 1925 on the barren North Sea Island of Helgoland where he develops probabilistic matrix equations that explains the movement of electrons. Rovelli takes it one step further where in the physics of small particles everything is relational. That harks back to Einstein’s 1905 Theory of Special Relativity.

 

Heisenberg is challenged by a wave theory authored by Erwin Schrodinger which eventually fall by the wayside. His discussion of Schrodinger’s famous cat thought experiment is, to my mind, is marred by him viewing the cat has asleep or awake, when in fact Schrodinger was discussing whether or not his cat was dead or alive.

 

In the book we meet the great physicists of that age, Plank, Bohr, Dirac and Born. Where Rovelli loses me is where veers off into a host of philosophical notion to explain the interdependence of all objects. Nevertheless, you get a sense of the importance of Heisenberg did on Helgoland in 1925 and that underpins much of modern electronics today.

For the full Amazon Review see: The Philosophy of Quanta (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Nancy Forbes' and Basil Mahon's "Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics"

The Electromagnetic Underpinning of Economic Growth

The world doesn’t need another review of Nancy Forbes’ and Basil Mahon’s wonderful book. However, after thinking about it, I believe that the explosion in economic growth from 1870-1970 discussed by Robert J. Gordon in his “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” would never have happened were it not for Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. 

http://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-amazon-review-of-robert-j-gordons.html

What Forbes and Mahon describe are the lives of Faraday and Maxwell and how through their experiments they came to discover some of the most fundamental secrets in nature. What Maxwell does in his 1873 “Treatise and Electricity and Magnetism” is to put a mathematical foundation underneath Faraday’s brilliant experiments. The rest is history. The world became electrified, radio and mass communications became of age and only 32 years later, building on their foundations, Einstein publishes his essays on relativity and the photoelectric effect.

The science is so monumental that it offers support for Gordon’s thesis that the economic growth achieved from 1870-1970 was based on a series of one-off events.

For the full Amazon URL see:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R5ZMT2LIUV3T7/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv