Quantum Fields

What This Book Covers

1. Prologue
2. Chapter One - Classical Comfort
3. Chapter Two - The Quantum Break
4. Chapter Three - Particles, Probabilities, and Paradoxes
5. Chapter Four - The Shift to Fields
6. Chapter Five - Energy, Not Things
7. Chapter Six - The Quantum Field Recipe
8. Chapter Seven - The Electron Field
9. Chapter Eight - The Electromagnetic Field
10. Chapter Nine - The Strong, the Weak, and the Weird
11. Chapter Ten - The Higgs Field
12. Chapter Eleven - Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)
13. Chapter Twelve - Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)
14. Chapter Thirteen - The Vacuum Isn’t Empty
15. Chapter Fourteen - Renormalization and Rebuilding
16. Chapter Fifteen - The Collider Experiments
17. Chapter Sixteen - Beyond the Standard Model
18. Chapter Seventeen - Quantum Fields Everywhere

Excerpt

PROLOGUE THERE IS NO such thing as “nothing.” That idea is one of the biggest lies we’ve ever told ourselves. What looks empty is not empty. What seems still is not still. What feels solid isn’t even made of things. In our minds, we still picture atoms like little solar systems, little electrons orbiting nuclei like planets. But that’s wrong. There are no little balls. There is no orbit. There’s not even a clean line between “thing” and “not-thing.” What we call a particle is just a flicker. Just a ripple. A moment of energy localizing itself in a field that stretches across the entire universe. Quantum field theory is the real model underneath all the other models. It’s not the new version...