Beyond Popular Science.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Silver, David H.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (570 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK : Open Book Publishers, 2026.

Contents:

Intro

Introduction

Prologue

Relatively Yellow The yellow colour of gold requires relativistic quantum mechanics to explain, unlike silver's silvery appearance. Electrons in gold atoms reach 58% of light speed, causing changes in the 6s and 5d orbitals. This shifts absorption to blue wavelengths, resulting in the reflection of yellow-red light. Similar relativistic effects explain mercury's liquid state and platinum's white appearance. These everyday properties demonstrate how modern physics manifests in macroscopic obser

Dark Energies Are Pushing Us Apart Observations of distant supernovae in the 1990s revealed that the universe's expansion is accelerating, contradicting earlier models that predicted gravity would slow cosmic expansion. This acceleration requires dark energy, an unknown component comprising about 70% of the universe's energy density. Dark energy counteracts gravity at cosmological scales, manifesting as either a cosmological constant in Einstein's equations or a dynamical field.

An Axiom of Your Choice The Banach-Tarski paradox shows that a solid sphere can be partitioned into finitely many disjoint pieces and, using only rigid motions, reassembled into two spheres identical to the original. This construction depends on the Axiom of Choice and the existence of non-measurable sets, whose behaviour diverges from intuitions about volume. While not physically realisable, the result illustrates how certain set-theoretic assumptions allow decompositions that defy standard n.

Think Outside the Wire Electrical energy travels primarily through electromagnetic fields surrounding conductors, not through the movement of electrons in wires. While electrons drift at millimetres per second, energy transfer occurs near light speed through the Poynting vector (S = E × H), which describes energy flow perpendicular to both electric and magnetic fields. This field-based transmission explains why circuits respond almost instantly despite slow electron movement, as opposed to the

A Circle of PIE The terms 'wheel' and 'cycle' (but not circle!) derive from Proto-Indo-European *kʷékʷlos despite their phonetic dissimilarity in modern languages. Regular sound shifts transformed this root differently in Germanic and Hellenic branches through documented phonological processes. These linguistic patterns preserve evidence of Bronze Age terminology and illustrate consistent patterns of language change. Comparative methods identify these transformations through sound corresponden

The Apple Falls the Slowest from the Tree General relativity formulates gravity as spacetime curvature where time and space metrics are affected by mass and energy. Contrary to the depiction of gravity as bending space, as in the rubber sheet visualisations, in cases in which masses are small (the Earth, for example) it is the gradient in time's rate that creates gravitational attraction, guiding objects towards regions of slower time. The reason an apple is falling is not because it is affect.

A Complex (Projective) Billiard Game Poncelet's Porism describes an unexpected property of billiard trajectories between two nested ellipses: if one path returns to its starting point after a finite number of bounces, then all starting points generate periodic trajectories with the same number of bounces. This geometric result connects to elliptic curves and measure-preserving dynamical systems, exemplifying how problems in distinct fields reduce to the same equations through appropriate frame

Mind the Gap In 2013, an unaffiliated Yitang Zhang proved there exists a finite bound B (initially 70,000,000) such that infinitely many prime pairs differ by at most B. While prime gaps can grow arbitrarily large, this breakthrough showed they cannot drift apart arbitrarily far. The Polymath8 collaboration subsequently reduced this bound to a few hundred. Zhang's approach combined distribution properties of primes in arithmetic progressions with an advanced sieving technique, resolving a fund

Real Democracy Has Never Been Tried Arrow's Impossibility Theorem shows that no voting rule can convert individual rankings into a collective decision without violating at least one basic principle of fairness. What seems like a straightforward requirement for democracy turns out to be mathematically impossible, leaving every voting system to sacrifice some aspect of fairness.

The Tunnel at the Beginning of Light Solar fusion proceeds despite temperatures insufficient for classical nuclear reactions because quantum tunnelling enables protons to penetrate the Coulomb barrier with non-zero probability. At the Sun's core temperature of 15 million Kelvin, the average proton possesses only about 1/20th of the energy classically required to overcome electromagnetic repulsion between positively charged nuclei. Quantum mechanics allows particles to 'tunnel' through energy b

Edges of Tomorrow Topological insulators exhibit an unusual combination of properties: insulating in their bulk yet conducting electricity perfectly along surfaces or edges. This behaviour originates from the topology of the material's electronic energy structure in momentum space, which guarantees protected conductive states resistant to scattering and imperfections. The mathematical concept of topology, concerning properties preserved under continuous deformation, manifests physically throug

You Would Like to Order First GSM mobile communications used stream ciphers to protect call privacy, but protocol design left them vulnerable. Encryption was applied only after error correction and formatting, so fixed training sequences and redundant coding produced predictable ciphertext patterns. These leaks allowed attackers to recover session keys with modest effort, demonstrating that security depended less on theoretical cipher strength than on overall system design.

Right on Spot Poisson's spot, also called the Arago spot, demonstrates wave diffraction through the unexpected appearance of a bright point at the centre of a circular object's shadow. When Augustin-Jean Fresnel proposed light as a wave phenomenon in 1818, Siméon Poisson derived this counterintuitive prediction in an attempt to disprove the theory. The effort backfired when François Arago experimentally confirmed the spot, which corpuscular optics could not explain, providing decisive support

A Circle of Time In a cylindrical universe with compact spatial dimensions, twins can separate and reunite without acceleration, with one travelling around the circumference while the other remains stationary. Despite neither experiencing acceleration, they age differently upon reunion, creating a variant of the famous special relativistic paradox. In non-orientable topologies such as the Klein bottle universes, travellers can additionally experience reversal of chirality. Even a thoroughly no

Envelope Trade-Up The Envelope Paradox presents two envelopes where one contains twice the money of the other. After selecting one envelope, seemingly valid probabilistic reasoning suggests an expected gain by switching (averaging x/2 with 2x), regardless of which envelope was initially chosen. This symmetric conclusion creates a logical inconsistency since perpetual switching cannot be optimal. The paradox arises from improper application of expected value calculations to scenarios with unbou.

An Empty Threat Our universe may exist in a false vacuum-a metastable state that could decay through quantum tunnelling, producing a bubble of altered physics expanding at light speed. Current Higgs boson measurements suggest that while such decay is improbable for timescales far exceeding the age of the universe, the possibility remains that reality itself could undergo a phase transition that abolishes matter and forces-with the bonus side effect of no more spam.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-80511-878-1

1-80511-879-X

OCLC:

1584365528