xvi
Contents
3.3
Is Near Enough Good Enough?
44
3.4
Faith in Physics
46
3.5
Truth and Beauty
48
3.6
A Monk with a Good Razor
52
3.7
O Heaven, Were Man but Constant, He Were
Perfect!
56
References
58
4
Gödel, Hawking and the Foundations of Physics
61
4.1
Alice in Gödel-Land
61
4.2
The Price of Cakes in Gödel-Land
63
4.3
Gödel and Completeness
66
4.4
Hawking and His Epiphany
70
References
74
Part II Today’s Frontiers
5 The Incredible Quantum Mechanics
77
5.1
The Strange Tale of the King of Neutrinia
77
5.2
Et Lux Fuit (and There Was Light)
78
5.3
One, None, and a Hundred Thousand
82
5.4
The QM Revolution
85
5.5
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
88
5.6
Collapse of the Wave Function
89
5.7
Wheeler’s Delayed Choice Experiment
92
5.8
Quantum Entanglement
95
5.9
Schrödinger, and His Long-Suffering Cat
96
References
98
6
Special Relativity
101
6.1
A Vietnamese Fairy Tale: The Land of Bliss
101
6.2
What is Time?
103
6.3
Walking on a Train
106
6.4
Harbingers of a Scientific Revolution
107
6.5
Here Comes Einstein
109
6.6
Time Dilation
110
6.7
Lorentz Contraction
113
6.8
Simultaneity
114
6.9
The Only Formula in This Book
115
References
118