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Mass : The Quest to Understand Matter From Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields by Jim Baggott is a science book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Mass : The Quest to Understand Matter From Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields about?

Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly? We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents. Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass. How did this happen? How did the answers to

Who reads Mass : The Quest to Understand Matter From Greek Atoms to Quantum Fields?

Author

Jim Baggott

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published

2017

Language

EN

ISBN

9780191077814

Category

science

Subjects

Fiction, Physics, Science

Rating

4.71 / 5 (7 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13