The Fundamental Constants: A Mystery Of Physics Review

Hey guys, I just read this nice book and decided to write a short review. The book was written by a German theoretical physicist Harald Fritzsch, who is famous for his previous books like "The Curvature of Spacetime" and "The Equation that Changed the World".

The first thing that catches your attention when you read the book is that it is written in a dialogue style. In this book a fictional physicist Haller discusses the achievements and mysteries of modern physics with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. The biggest advantage of such a writing style is that it is easily readable and most the important questions are answered in such a dialogue. Furthermore, the author really does the job well with this dialogue style as the book feels more like a novel than a scientific book, which is really great.

As for the scientific content - it's really informative and accessible for beginners. The author covers all the basics of particle physics, standard model, particle accelerators and more. The only real drawback is that despite the title of the book only in a small section author really discusses the fundamental constants in depth. Simply speaking the book should be called "The Mysteries of the Standard Model" or something like that, as fundamental constants really play a minor role in the book.

So in conclusion, this book is really nice (despite the fact that the title is a little bit misleading) and I would recommend it for anyone who is interested in particle physics.

Thanks for reading!


You might be interested in:

Read more »

More Strange Facts of Physics

We already discussed time travel, which is a huge topic, so let's relax for a while and look at some random strange facts.

Everything is Moving

More than 2000 years ago ancient Greek philosophers used to argue, whether anything ever changes. Some thinkers were convinced that everything is constantly moving and changing, whereas other wise men believed that nothing moves. Now you might think that believing that nothing ever moves is strange, as you can clearly move as well as many other things around you. But a guy named Zeno actually had some interesting arguments to back up his beliefs. The so called Zeno paradoxes supposedly show that movement is only an illusion. The simplest form of Zeno's paradox goes as follows: suppose you have to walk from point A to point B. In order to do that you firstly have to walk half of the distance, however to do that you should firstly travel one forth of the distance and so on. Since there is infinity of such parts of the distance, you can never even start moving.

Today we know that Zeno's conclusions were wrong, as simple maths can help solving the paradox. By adding an infinite number of fractions you can get a finite answer.

So is everything moving then? The answer is probably yes. Even though many objects around us appear to be stationery, in reality, everything is constantly moving. If you had a powerful microscope, you could actually see that molecules of every object are constantly moving due to temperature (temperature is in fact kinetic energy of molecules) and since temperature cannot reach absolute 0 Kelvins, molecules always move. Furthermore, as you are sitting comfortably in your chair, Earth is flying in outer space at thousands of miles per hour. But that's not all, as even space itself is expanding every moment.

Sugar Cubes and Humans

I bet you already knew that atoms are basically 99.9999..% empty space. But here's another amazing fact - if you would take all the matter that makes up all humans on Earth, remove the empty space from atoms and squeeze the matter, you could compress it to a size of a sugar cube.

 Source

The Faster You Move The More Massive You Become

Another fun fact is from special relativity. As an object moves in high speeds it becomes more massive. Hey but don't worry all of you who are trying to lose weight, as long as you're not moving at almost the speed of light, you will be OK.

Earth and the Moon

Everybody knows that the Moon orbits Earth, but did you know that the opposite is also true? In fact, both Earth and the Moon orbit their common centre of mass, which happens to be inside of Earth (as our planet is far more massive than its satellite).

 Source


Thanks for reading! If you enjoy my post feel free to comment and subscribe.

You might be interested in:

Read more »

What is Reality ??

Hey, I found this great BBC documentary called "What is Reality?". It's about the various theories and experiments of physics which could help to answer this question. It involves a lot of great stuff about quantum mechanics (for example the famous double-slit experiment), particle physics and some cosmology.

I really like that it illustrated the whole bizarre side of quantum mechanics and the way it changes our understanding of reality. So check this out here or on YouTube. Thanks for reading!

PS. do any of you guys know how to write eqautions in Blogger? I would appreciate if you'd share this knowledge ;]

Read more »

I Introduce You The Great "Ted Talks"

So lately I've been watching a lot of Ted Talks on YouTube and boy are they good. The idea behind this is that various experts from a variety of fields discuss important issues, science, psychology, management and other important stuff.

Basically it's a series of lectures, which are presented by professionals, who really know how to catch your attention. Among them there are some great science lectures, starting with astronomy ending with particle physics. So enough of this rambling, check out their YouTube channel here:

Ted Talks

Read more »