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The Quantum Universe
The Quantum Universe is the first popular book to give a non-mathematical pictorial account of quantum physics, the foundation of our current understanding of nature. For so long the province of mathematicians and physicists alone, the beauty and significance of quantum mechanics has remained hidden to the nonspecialist. Yet its impact on technology has been enormous. The modern electronics industry with the silicon chip that has revolutionised so many aspects of modern life owes its existence to an understanding of the quantum nature of semiconductors. The text explains exactly what quantum mechanics is in a simple nonmathematical way, and is complemented throughout by many superb colour and black-and-white photographs illustrating the varied facets of quantum phenomena. The Quantum Universe will provide a fascinating and accessible introduction to one of the most important scientific disciplines of the twentieth century. Final-year students at school, general readers with an interest in science, and undergraduates in science subjects will all be able to enjoy and benefit from this novel exposition.
- GenresSciencePhysicsNonfiction
190 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
2 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 11, 2011
How to write a comprehensible, easy-to-follow book about quantum mechanics that involves no math, and is equally appealing to a layman and a physics student?
If anyone had asked me this question prior to reading "The quantum universe", I would have proclaimed the querent either mentally unstable, or severely imbibed. But, after reading this wonderful book, my answer is: Ask Hey and Walters.
I've read this book as additional literature to my quantum mechanics course, and I highly recommend it. As most courses, mine too was focused on getting a firm grip of the bra-ket formalism and doing the math. Dry as sawdust, as we say. There was not enough time devoted to the history of quantum mechanics, the development, and the various different interpretations (rather than being focused on the Copenhagen interpretation) and the concepts behind them. "The quantum universe" explores all that and much more.
For a layman, it's a delightful read - almost like reading a novel, with full-blooded characters (who happen to be scientists) and a thick plot. The student will find helpful the detailed descriptions of crucial experiments, followed by sketches, and the scientific heart of it all. A curious child will love the colorful pictures of energy spectra and black and white photos of faces (confirmed).
The writing style is breezy and flows nicely, and it contributes tremendously in making this book such an enjoyable read. In my opinion, "The quantum universe" is the best book in it's category, and beats "Beyond measure". It's an overall winner.
If anyone had asked me this question prior to reading "The quantum universe", I would have proclaimed the querent either mentally unstable, or severely imbibed. But, after reading this wonderful book, my answer is: Ask Hey and Walters.
I've read this book as additional literature to my quantum mechanics course, and I highly recommend it. As most courses, mine too was focused on getting a firm grip of the bra-ket formalism and doing the math. Dry as sawdust, as we say. There was not enough time devoted to the history of quantum mechanics, the development, and the various different interpretations (rather than being focused on the Copenhagen interpretation) and the concepts behind them. "The quantum universe" explores all that and much more.
For a layman, it's a delightful read - almost like reading a novel, with full-blooded characters (who happen to be scientists) and a thick plot. The student will find helpful the detailed descriptions of crucial experiments, followed by sketches, and the scientific heart of it all. A curious child will love the colorful pictures of energy spectra and black and white photos of faces (confirmed).
The writing style is breezy and flows nicely, and it contributes tremendously in making this book such an enjoyable read. In my opinion, "The quantum universe" is the best book in it's category, and beats "Beyond measure". It's an overall winner.
November 9, 2025
Though dated (1987), the book gives a good history of quantum physics, particularly the first half of the last century. The book lays out the essentials nicely - waves v. particles, the makeup of the atom (electrons, protons, neutrons), the makeup of the protons/neutrons in the nucleus (quarks), the fundamental particles (e.g., electrons and quarks, those that cannot be broken up into anything smaller), the forces (photons) that govern the interactions between electrons and the nucleus and the strong force (via gluons) that holds the nucleus together. The authors also discuss the mysterious neutrinos, the then yet to be discovered Higgs Boson, the weak force (hard to grasp) related to radioactive decay of some elements, and Feynman's anti-matter (even harder to grasp) diagrams. Along the way, the book notes the contributions of the key quantum giants - e.g. Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Rutherford, Pauli, Feynman.
It's quite the eye opener that the atomic world that is so familiar to us in the lay world (atoms and the nucleus) today was only developed in the last 120 years. This is the minutest of worlds, the smallest of the small, and what governs whatever it is that exists at this level. It's the endeavor of Democritus, modernized, seriously, severely.
There is a lot packed into this book with lots of diagrams and pictures. The authors believe they wrote, "to present the essential ideas of quantum physics as simply as possible." Though that was the goal of their book, I didn't think the authors were all that good about laying it all out in ways that could be easily grasped by those who are not well-versed in this area. The names-terminology in particular I found confusing - what is what, and what is on first base versus second base, etc. The only way I could keep up with the presentation was to search through the internet and, granted, three decades later, find a new "periodic table" that boils down the quantum essentials to 6 quarks for the nucleus, 6 leptons for the electrons and its "associates" outside the nucleus, the 4 guage (force) bosons that govern atomic interactions (gluon, photon, Z-W+/- bosons), and the Higgs Boson that, what, "give mass to the W and Z particles." The latter illustrates how the authors assume too much for the reader. To understand Higgs, the reader has to go to the glossary and gets this as an explanation: the W particle has a mass charge that with the neutral Z particle is associated with the weak interaction. That requires a further probing and on it goes. Though the glossary was not perfect, it was still the best part of the book. For the most part, given how complex this stuff is, it was excellent and a good reference to have around.
It's quite the eye opener that the atomic world that is so familiar to us in the lay world (atoms and the nucleus) today was only developed in the last 120 years. This is the minutest of worlds, the smallest of the small, and what governs whatever it is that exists at this level. It's the endeavor of Democritus, modernized, seriously, severely.
There is a lot packed into this book with lots of diagrams and pictures. The authors believe they wrote, "to present the essential ideas of quantum physics as simply as possible." Though that was the goal of their book, I didn't think the authors were all that good about laying it all out in ways that could be easily grasped by those who are not well-versed in this area. The names-terminology in particular I found confusing - what is what, and what is on first base versus second base, etc. The only way I could keep up with the presentation was to search through the internet and, granted, three decades later, find a new "periodic table" that boils down the quantum essentials to 6 quarks for the nucleus, 6 leptons for the electrons and its "associates" outside the nucleus, the 4 guage (force) bosons that govern atomic interactions (gluon, photon, Z-W+/- bosons), and the Higgs Boson that, what, "give mass to the W and Z particles." The latter illustrates how the authors assume too much for the reader. To understand Higgs, the reader has to go to the glossary and gets this as an explanation: the W particle has a mass charge that with the neutral Z particle is associated with the weak interaction. That requires a further probing and on it goes. Though the glossary was not perfect, it was still the best part of the book. For the most part, given how complex this stuff is, it was excellent and a good reference to have around.
August 10, 2024
The Quantum Universe, a popular book about particle physics, is dated, published in 1987, by Cambridge Press, and authored by Tony Hey, “Reader”, in the physics department of Southampton University, and Patrick Walters, lecturer, at the adult and continuing education department at University College of Swansea. I haven’t read a science book for a while; astronomy was a key interest of mine in secondary school and I had planned to pursue it in college. Science was part of my isolate and nerdy childhood. Politics was my avocation as I entered college until my autumn years.
This book does a good job of handling the still pertinent theories of the wave-particle mechanics of basic and composite parts of matter and energy. Quantum mechanics relies on mathematically derived mechanical concepts that are difficult to understand in our minds that are habituated to classic mechanics of particles, waves, rest, motion, and our perception (false) of a continuous world. Everything in our world is in “quantum”. Our world is more like the pixelated television screen. And, of course, the old cathode ray tubes were electron guns that shot electrons at a screen that formed images, and those electrons were one of the wave-particle denizens of the world smaller than an atom, but so important to the chemistry that makes our world and us, chemistry being the electromagnetic force of classical and quantum mechanical physics.
Science is really a history of emerging ideas derived from discoveries of what connects the very subatomic small to the very cosmologically large. It involves people with short lives, intense minds, and progress driven much by war and human carnage. This book excels at non-mathematical explanations, but the math is also there, in the text and appendix. The proliferation of kinds of charges (derived from insight of the math) leads to concepts like spin, up or down, strange, charm, color that are just names for things beyond our imagination, in order to bring some mental pattern to construct a knowledge and theory of the universe.
Contents: 1. Waves and particles (science and experiment, light and quantum mechanics, the double slit experiment); 2.Heisenberg and uncertainty (watching electrons, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, uncertainty and photography, Feynman’s quantum paths); 3.Schrodinger and matter waves (de Broglie’s matter waves, Schrodinger’s equation, electron and neutron optics); 4.Atoms and nuclei (Rutherford’s nuclear atom, quantized energy levels, the hydrogen atom, wavefunctions and quantum numbers); 5.Quantum tunneling (barrier penetration, wave tunnelling, applications of quantum tunneling, nuclear physics and alpha decay, nuclear fusion and nuclear fission); 6.Pauli and the elements (electron spin and Pauli’s exclusion principle, the elements, metals, insulators and semiconductors, transistors and microelectronics); 7.Death of a star (a failed star, hydrogen burning, red giants and white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes); 8.Quantum co-operation and superfluids (laser light, Bose condensation and superfluid helium, superconductivity); 9. Feynman rules (Dirac and antiparticles, Feynman diagrams and virtual particles, zero-point motion and vacuum fluctuations, Hawking radiation and black holes); 10. Weak photons and strong glue (the double-slit experiment revisited, the birth of particle physics, weak photons and the Higgs vacuum, quarks and gluons, superconductors, magnetic monopoles and quark confinement).
There is always motion. “The ‘vacuum’ of relativistic quantum mechanics—or strictly speaking, the ‘ground state’ of the relativistic quantum field theory—has other interesting effects. When we apply quantum mechanics to the vibrations of atoms in a crystal, the vibrational waves set up in the crystal turn out to have particle-like aspects, just like photons. These quantum lattice vibrations are called ‘phonons’. If the crystal lattice is cooled down so that no vibrational phonons are excited, there must still be some ‘zero-point motion’ of the atoms. It is this zero-point motion that prevents liquid helium from solidifying… What is the relevance of this crystal lattice to our discussion of the real physical vacuum? Well, in the same way that phonons are quantum objects associated with vibrations of the crystal positions, so too may we regard photons as associated with ‘vibrations’ of the electromagnetic field. Then we see that, as in the case of phonons, there must be a ‘zero-point motion’ for the electromagnetic fields…”
This book does a good job of handling the still pertinent theories of the wave-particle mechanics of basic and composite parts of matter and energy. Quantum mechanics relies on mathematically derived mechanical concepts that are difficult to understand in our minds that are habituated to classic mechanics of particles, waves, rest, motion, and our perception (false) of a continuous world. Everything in our world is in “quantum”. Our world is more like the pixelated television screen. And, of course, the old cathode ray tubes were electron guns that shot electrons at a screen that formed images, and those electrons were one of the wave-particle denizens of the world smaller than an atom, but so important to the chemistry that makes our world and us, chemistry being the electromagnetic force of classical and quantum mechanical physics.
Science is really a history of emerging ideas derived from discoveries of what connects the very subatomic small to the very cosmologically large. It involves people with short lives, intense minds, and progress driven much by war and human carnage. This book excels at non-mathematical explanations, but the math is also there, in the text and appendix. The proliferation of kinds of charges (derived from insight of the math) leads to concepts like spin, up or down, strange, charm, color that are just names for things beyond our imagination, in order to bring some mental pattern to construct a knowledge and theory of the universe.
Contents: 1. Waves and particles (science and experiment, light and quantum mechanics, the double slit experiment); 2.Heisenberg and uncertainty (watching electrons, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, uncertainty and photography, Feynman’s quantum paths); 3.Schrodinger and matter waves (de Broglie’s matter waves, Schrodinger’s equation, electron and neutron optics); 4.Atoms and nuclei (Rutherford’s nuclear atom, quantized energy levels, the hydrogen atom, wavefunctions and quantum numbers); 5.Quantum tunneling (barrier penetration, wave tunnelling, applications of quantum tunneling, nuclear physics and alpha decay, nuclear fusion and nuclear fission); 6.Pauli and the elements (electron spin and Pauli’s exclusion principle, the elements, metals, insulators and semiconductors, transistors and microelectronics); 7.Death of a star (a failed star, hydrogen burning, red giants and white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes); 8.Quantum co-operation and superfluids (laser light, Bose condensation and superfluid helium, superconductivity); 9. Feynman rules (Dirac and antiparticles, Feynman diagrams and virtual particles, zero-point motion and vacuum fluctuations, Hawking radiation and black holes); 10. Weak photons and strong glue (the double-slit experiment revisited, the birth of particle physics, weak photons and the Higgs vacuum, quarks and gluons, superconductors, magnetic monopoles and quark confinement).
There is always motion. “The ‘vacuum’ of relativistic quantum mechanics—or strictly speaking, the ‘ground state’ of the relativistic quantum field theory—has other interesting effects. When we apply quantum mechanics to the vibrations of atoms in a crystal, the vibrational waves set up in the crystal turn out to have particle-like aspects, just like photons. These quantum lattice vibrations are called ‘phonons’. If the crystal lattice is cooled down so that no vibrational phonons are excited, there must still be some ‘zero-point motion’ of the atoms. It is this zero-point motion that prevents liquid helium from solidifying… What is the relevance of this crystal lattice to our discussion of the real physical vacuum? Well, in the same way that phonons are quantum objects associated with vibrations of the crystal positions, so too may we regard photons as associated with ‘vibrations’ of the electromagnetic field. Then we see that, as in the case of phonons, there must be a ‘zero-point motion’ for the electromagnetic fields…”
May 16, 2021
The book serves as a good overview, and partially an introduction, to many topics relating to quantum physics. However, without any sort of previous knowledge, it would probably be difficult to follow. I don't think it woudl be a great first introduction, but given some previous knowledge about quantum physics or physics in general, this serves as a good historical and general introduction. It is not heavy on math and provides helpful diagrams for most explanations. Further, the actual explanations themselves are usaully clear and not shrouded with advanced language, terms, etc.
February 10, 2019
For someone who studied this exact subject as an undergraduate 10 years ago, this was a perfect and brilliant refresher into the world of particle physics. Perhaps a touch advanced for the lay person here and there, for me it was a wonderful refresher of a subject I adored.
January 27, 2019
This is the best book for readers who don't necessarily have knowledge of calculus, but want to gain deeper insight into quantum mechanics, instead of the trivial sci-fi perspective.
February 25, 2010
An excellent and highly stimulating introduction to the quantum universe, suitable for non-mathematicians but without holding back on any of the major discoveries and wonders of quantum theory. A superb book, with a wealth of fascinating photographs and illustrations.
June 27, 2010
A basic knowledge of physics is helpful. This is one of a number of books I have read on two of my favorite subjects: quantum theory and cosmology.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews