Matter, earth, and sky

Description

The plan selected for this book is that of a trilogy dealing first with things our size, secondly with things much smaller, and finally with things much larger than ourselves. In the first part the reader will find a discussion of phenomena that are more or less familiar to him from his everyday experience: the motion of the pendulum in a grandfather's clock, the boiling of water in a teakettle, rainbows in the sky, the electric current in a telephone wire, etc. This is the field of so-called "classical physics," which is not very exciting and challenging for our imagination but is absolutely necessary for an understanding of the events that take place in the physical world to which we belong. In the second part, the reader will be taken into the wonderful world of modern physics and chemistry. Down will he go through the crowds of molecules that restlessly rush about without any order in gases and that form most unusual architectural structures in crystals. He will meet the atoms and learn how they stick together to make different chemical substances, from such simple ones as table salt to such complex, and still to a large extent mysterious, ones as proteins. He will enter the interior structure of the atom with its swarms of unruly electrons, and finally the atomic nucleus itself. He will become acquainted with newly discovered particles with such strange names as "muons," "pious." and "hvperons," some of which may well be the ultimate building blocks of matter. Leaving this microcosmic world, the reader will now be taken into the world of things that are much larger than himself. He will see the interior structure of our globe, the depths of the ocean, and the outer fringes of the atmosphere. He will get acquainted with the planets of the solar system, the sun, the stars, and the giant stellar systems known as galaxies. And at the end he will learn about the history of the universe, about the origin of the earth, stars, and galaxies, and also about the origin of the tiny atoms of the various chemical elements of which our universe is made. INTRODUCTION Our Place in the Universe 1 PART ONE MATTER AND ENERGY 9 ONE Matter at First Sight 11 TWO The Laws of Mechanics 29 THREE Elastic Vibrations and Waves 58 FOUR Heat and Temperature 82 FIVE Electromagnetism 1 05 SIX Light, Visible and Invisible 134 SEVEN Modern Views on Space, Time, and Motion 167 PART TWO MICROCOSM EIGHT Restless Molecules 193 NINE The Basic Laics of Chemistry 216 TEN Inorganic Family Album 229 ELEVEN The Chemistry of Life 240 TWELVE The Electric Nature of Matter 262 THIRTEEN Atomic Mechanisms -ss FOURTEEN Nuclear Physics 318 PART THREE MACROCOSM FIFTEEN Our Solid Earth 367 SIXTEEN The "Book of Sediments" SEVENTEEN Ocean of Water and Ocean of Air 410 EIGHTEEN The Planetary System 436 NINETEEN Our Sun 473 TWENTY Stars and Stellar Systems 498 TWENTY-ONE General Relativity and Cosmology 535 CONCLUSION Science Today and Tomorrow 559 Questions 563 Answers 574 Index 581