Felix Alba-juez

Nighing REALITY Felix Alba-juez

This is a Printed Edition in B & W. After 'Records of the Future' and 'Aiming at REALITY', 'Nighing REALITY' is a step forward towards clutching the elusive notion of Reality. The InSight mission to Mars (book cover) is all about exploring the external world, with measurement being supreme: any instrument suspect of altering what it measures will be blamed on the incompetence of its designer -- not on Reality. Whether we make close contact with Reality or not will depend upon how cogently we process the data that the InSight explorer will transmit to us. With a philosophical introduction, followed by a conceptual presentation of Classical Physics, the evolution towards the new quantum paradigm is narrated through the discussion of spontaneous radioactivity, Ray and Wave Optics, Hamilton's mechanics, Einstein's light quanta, Bohr's atom, Quantum Entropy, and de Broglie's Wave Mechanics. The book ends with a conceptual presentation of how, motivated by persistent disagreement between theory and experiment, the first formulation of modern Quantum Physics -Matrix Mechanics- was born. In the process, the reader will understand that: 1. The relational behavior of a physical object vis à vis its environment does not diminish a bit its reality -- let alone does it imply that we are creating the Reality we observe; 2. The object's milieu is an essential part of the object's quantum state; 3. The exponential function with both real and imaginary arguments holds a privileged status in Nature's modus operandi; 4. Discreteness in physical attributes is very common in our level of common experience, e.g. the discrete frequencies of the standing waves established in a guitar string; 5. The classical wavelike interpretation of light diffraction utterly fails as light intensity is gradually reduced. Light is neither a wave nor a stream of Newton's particles; 6. Photons are not Newton's corpuscles because they do not have a rest mass and, due to energy conservation, their number is not conserved; 7. The classical relation between the motion of an electrically charged object and the electromagnetic radiation it creates completely fails in the micro-world; 8. Bosons (e.g. photons) are indistinguishable gregarious quantum objects, and Fermions (e.g. electrons) are indistinguishable separatist quantum objects; 9. With the new quantum statistics (Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac), plus Planck's quantization of Boltzmann's cell, the concept of Statistical Entropy finally becomes absolute and fully consistent with the Third Law of Thermodynamics; 10. De Broglie extended Einstein's theory of the photon to massive particles, proving that Bohr's mysterious quantization of the atom's energy levels was equivalent to identifying the discrete stable states of a continuous system; 11. Heisenberg wrote down the mechanical laws not as equations for the trajectory of the electron orbiting the nucleus but as equations for their Fourier expansions. The Hamiltonian Function became a matrix. The famous matrix commutation relation came about as the generalization of Bohr's quantizing condition; 12. The 'Principle of Uncertainty' is anticipated to have nothing to do with measurement disturbances or measurement errors. As the author likes to say: the fact that the reader may not have a scientific education does not mean that s/he does not have the intelligence to understand profound concepts -- as long as they are presented with semantic and epistemological clarity. After all, Einstein said that Science is simply the refinement of our intuition and everyday experiences.