Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: What Keeps Us Going? 1
Physicists, and Other People 1
Chapter One Breakfast of Hard-Boiled Eggs with Inertia 5
How it All Began---with Rolling Balls 5
Chapter Two Breakfast of Eggs Bene-Bricked 15
What Keeps the Ball Rolling? 15
Chapter Three Breakfast of Apple-Gravity Pancakes 21
Why Does an Apple Fall From a Tree? 21
Chapter Four Breakfast of Cereal and Calories 30
But it Takes Energy to Keep Moving 30
Chapter Five Breakfast of Hot Cakes with Energy 35
How Hot is it? 35
Putting Heat to Work 37
Chapter Six Breakfast of French Toast 44
First Law You Can't Win 44
Second Law Nor Can You Break Even 46
Chapter Seven Breakfast of Cold Cuts 52
Go Fly a Kite! 52
Storing Electricity 57
Chapter Eight Breakfast of Blueberry Muffins 64
Electricity in Matter 64
a.c./d.c. 71
Chapter Nine Breakfast of Apple Fritters and Love 77
Magnetic Forces 77
Magnetic Fields 81
What Maxwell Wrought 87
Chapter Ten Breakfast of Eggs and Crisp Bacon 93
Making Waves 93
What Waves Can Do 97
Chapter Eleven Breakfast of Oat Meal with Light Cream 106
What is Light? 106
How and What We See 109
It's a Colorful World! 116
Chapter Twelve Breakfast of Lox and Bagels 121
What's the Speed of Light? 121
Is it Really Relative? 123
The Paradoxes of Relativity and Black Holes 126
Chapter Thirteen Breakfast of Farina 132
Does Anyone Believe in Quanta? 132
What About Atoms? 136
Chapter Fourteen Breakfast of Danish Pastry 145
What's a Wave Function? 145
Born and Heisenberg Have the Answer 150
Chapter Fifteen Breakfast of Waffles 155
Atoms Can Be Fun 155
What Attracts Atoms to Each Other? 164
Chapter Sixteen Breakfast of O. J., Donuts, and Coffee 170
Surrounded by Fluids 170
We Depend on Solids 173
Chapter Seventeen Breakfast of Rice Krispies 178
Who's Afraid of Radioactivity? 178
What's Inside the Nucleus? 182
For Better or For Worse --- Nuclear Energy 185
Our Nuclear Legacy 196
Chapter Eighteen Breakfast of Corn Fritters 200
A Mess of Particles 200
What, More Conservation Laws? 205
Quarks and More Quarks 210
The GUTS of Physics 216
Chapter Ninteen Dinner at Home 220
Einstein Centennial 220
A Promising Nanotechnology 223
Quantum Entanglement 226
Quantum Computers 229
Chapter Twenty Lunch at the Beach 232
Bose-Einstein Condensates 232
Chapter Twenty-One Lunch at Venetian Bay 238
Our Energy Problems 238
Energy Wastes 239
The Good News about Nukes 241
Chapter Twenty-Two Breakfast at the Beach 244
How it All Began 244
Cosmic Microwave Background 245
Big Bang 246
Inflationary Universe 249
Probing the Cosmic Microwave Background 251
Chapter Twenty-Three Dinner Under the Stars 254
The Stars in Heaven 254
Red Giants and White Dwarfs 256
Chapter Twenty-Four After Dinner at Home 260
Supernovae and Neutron Stars 260
Black Holes 263
Supernovae as Standard Candles 265
Glossary of Physics Terms 268
Acknowledgments 279
Index 281
