PhysicsAndPhilosophy

Physics And Philosophy (Werner Heisenberg)

  • Average overall. Fairly quick read. Some repetition.
  • Any piece of matter whne heated starts to glow, gets red hot then white hot at higher temperatures. For Black objects the color depends only on the temperature and therefore the radiation emitted by a black body is a good study for science. It is a simple phenomena that should find a simple explanation.
  • Asking the right question is often more than halfway to solving the problem.
  • In natural science we are not interested in the universe as a whole, including ourselves, but we restrict our attention to some subsystem for study. Classical physics is the idealization in which we can speak about parts of the world without reference to ourselves.
  • In Quantum physics we start by describing our experiments in terms of classical physics and the systems under study by quantum physics. The tension between these starting points in the root of the paradoxes.
  • The source of energy of an atomic bomb is the same as that as in the alpha-decay, mainly the electrostatic repulsion of the two parts in which the nucleus separated. The energy of an atomic explosion comes directly from this source and is not derived from transmutation of mass into energy. The number of elementary particles with finite rest mass does not decrease during the explosion. (the binding energies of the particles in the nucleus do show up in their masses and the release of this energy is indirectly connected with the changes of the masses of the nuclei.
  • The cornerstone of General relativity was the connection between inertia and gravity. Very careful measurements have shown that the mass of a body as a source of gravity is the same as the mass a measure of inertia. If generally true, gravitational forces should be put on the same level with the centrifugal forces which arise as a result of inertia. Since centrifugal forces had to be considered as due to physical properties of empty space, Einstein hypothesized that gravitional forces are also due to properties of empty space.

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