Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks: Physics and the World Around Us

Discusses the principles of physics at work in a variety of everyday occurrences including whirlpools, lightening, waves, warmth, and motion

Science & Math

Von Baeyer, Hans Christian

Physics

McGraw=Hill

Fascinating, accessible study recounts the process of discovery, from atomism of the Greeks to quantum revolutions of the 1920s and the theories and conjectures of today. Topics include components of the atom, quantum mechanics, atomic landscape, atoms in isolation, more. "Lucid and entertaining." — The New York Times Book Review.

Taming the Atom

Dover Publications

Engrossing journey through the workings of the universe and minds of today's scientific thinkers examines an extraordinary range of topics: from the Superconducting Super Collider and the mysteries of the Big Bang, to strange crystals with impossible structures and the quest for the temperature of absolute zero.

The Fermi Solution: Essays on Science

History & Philosophy

Confronting us at every turn, flowing from every imaginable source, information defines our era--and yet what we don't know about it could--and does--fill a book. In this indispensable volume, a primer for the information age, Hans Christian von Baeyer presents a clear description of what information is, how concepts of its measurement, meaning, and transmission evolved, and what its ever-expanding presence portends for the future. 
 Information is poised to replace matter as the primary stuff of the universe, von Baeyer suggests; it will provide a new basic framework for describing and predicting reality in the twenty-first century. Despite its revolutionary premise, von Baeyer's book is written simply in a straightforward fashion, offering a wonderfully accessible introduction to classical and quantum information. Enlivened with anecdotes from the lives of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who have contributed significantly to the field, Information conducts readers from questions of subjectivity inherent in classical information to the blurring of distinctions between computers and what they measure or store in our quantum age. A great advance in our efforts to define and describe the nature of information, the book also marks an important step forward in our ability to exploit information--and, ultimately, to transform the nature of our relationship with the physical universe.

Information: The New Language of Science

Reference

Harvard University Press

Confronting us at every turn, flowing from every imaginable source, information defines our era--and yet what we don't know about it could--and does--fill a book. In this indispensable volume, a primer for the information age, Hans Christian von Baeyer presents a clear description of what information is, how concepts of its measurement, meaning, and transmission evolved, and what its ever-expanding presence portends for the future.
Information is poised to replace matter as the primary stuff of the universe, von Baeyer suggests; it will provide a new basic framework for describing and predicting reality in the twenty-first century. Despite its revolutionary premise, von Baeyer's book is written simply in a straightforward fashion, offering a wonderfully accessible introduction to classical and quantum information. Enlivened with anecdotes from the lives of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who have contributed significantly to the field, Information conducts readers from questions of subjectivity inherent in classical information to the blurring of distinctions between computers and what they measure or store in our quantum age. A great advance in our efforts to define and describe the nature of information, the book also marks an important step forward in our ability to exploit information--and, ultimately, to transform the nature of our relationship with the physical universe.

Measured by the accuracy of its predictions and the scope of its technological applications, quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science―as well as one of the most misunderstood. The deeper meaning of quantum mechanics remains controversial almost a century after its invention. Providing a way past quantum theory’s paradoxes and puzzles, QBism offers a strikingly new interpretation that opens up for the nonspecialist reader the profound implications of quantum mechanics for how we understand and interact with the world.
Short for Quantum Bayesianism, QBism adapts many of the conventional features of quantum mechanics in light of a revised understanding of probability. Bayesian probability, unlike the standard “frequentist probability,” is defined as a numerical measure of the degree of an observer’s belief that a future event will occur or that a particular proposition is true. Bayesianism’s advantages over frequentist probability are that it is applicable to singular events, its probability estimates can be updated based on acquisition of new information, and it can effortlessly include frequentist results. But perhaps most important, much of the weirdness associated with quantum theory―the idea that an atom can be in two places at once, or that signals can travel faster than the speed of light, or that Schrödinger’s cat can be simultaneously dead and alive―dissolves under the lens of QBism.
Using straightforward language without equations, Hans Christian von Baeyer clarifies the meaning of quantum mechanics in a commonsense way that suggests a new approach to physics in general.

QBism: The Future of Quantum Physics

Brilliant essays on science by the well-known physicist and winner of the National Magazine Award, now available in paperback. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Random House, Inc.

A report from the frontiers of atomic physics reveals how scientists are realizing the quantum dreams of Einstein, Schro+a5dinger, and Bohr and studying a fantastic new world of intertwining waves and particles that make up physical reality.

Taming the Atom: The Emergence of the Visible Microworld

Random House]

You arrive at your office and unpack your breakfast from the local deli. The piping-hot coffee and chilly orange juice you purchased just minutes ago are now both disappointingly lukewarm. Why can't the coffee "steal" heat from the juice to stay hot? Why does even the most state-of-the-art car operate at a mere 30 percent efficiency--and why can't Detroit ever better the odds, no matter what space age materials we invent? Why can't some genius make a perpetual motion machine? The answers lie in the field of thermodynamics, the study of heat, which turns out to be the key to an astonishing number of scientific puzzles. If you want to know what's happening in the physical world, you've got to follow the heat. In Maxwell's Demon: Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, physics professor Hans Christian von Baeyer tells the story of heat through the lives of the scientists who discovered it, most notably James Clerk Maxwell, whose demonic invention has bedeviled generations of physics students with its light-fingered attempts to flout the laws of thermodynamics. An intelligent, submicroscopic gremlin who could sort atoms as they flew at him, Maxwell's Demon would effectively make an impossible task--forcing heat to flow backward--possible. Explaining why the Demon can't have his day has been an intellectual gauntlet taken up by a century and a half of the world's most brilliant scientists, whose discoveries Professor von Baeyer vividly etches. The centuries-old discipline of thermodynamics informs today's most cutting-edge research in chaos, complexity, and the grand unified theory of everything--physics' Holy Grail. Even more amazing, the study of heat turns out to explain something seemingly unrelated--time, and why it can run in only one direction. With his trademark elegant prose, eye for lively detail, and gift for lucid explanation, Professor von Baeyer turns the contemplation of a cooling teacup into a beguiling portrait of the birth of a science with relevance to almost every aspect of our lives. Readers will find themselves rooting for Maxwell's ever-mischievous Demon even as they come to appreciate that he is doomed to failure.

Maxwell's Demon: Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes

A physicist's elegant explanations of how ordinary phenomena reveal the complex and profound beauty of the natural world.

Baeyer, Hans Christian Von

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Von Baeyer, Hans Christian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Von Baeyer, Hans Christian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Von Baeyer, Hans Christian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks: Physics and the World Around Us

Taming the Atom

The Fermi Solution: Essays on Science

Information: The New Language of Science

Information: The New Language of Science

QBism: The Future of Quantum Physics

The Fermi Solution: Essays on Science

Taming the Atom: The Emergence of the Visible Microworld

Maxwell's Demon: Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes

Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks: Physics and the World Around Us