A Physicist's View of Matter and Mind

The following sections are included:

• PREFACE

• CONTENTS

The following sections are included:

• Duality, plurality, and reality

• The 'standard model' of matter according to physics

• Scales of energy and length

• The direct approach and its modern critics

• Evolution, and 'human' questions

The following sections are included:

• The 'fundamental' questions

• Scientific knowledge and model construction

• Description, complexity and quantifiability

• Paradigms and scientific revolutions

• The cognitive conundrum

• Leaping over energy, length and time scales

The following sections are included:

• A grand-stand view of the laws of nature

• What do we mean by symmetry?

• Coordinate transformations and Galilean symmetries

• Before Galileo and Newton

• Subatomic symmetry

• The principle of least action and the simplicity of nature

• How does a particle know the best path?

• The local texture of the world and the simplicity of nature

• The worm's eye view — The Euler-Lagrange equations

• The 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematics

The following sections are included:

• Electricity and magnetism

• The equation of continuity

• The gauge principle

• Maxwell's equations and the ether (aether)

• The four-dimensional structure of Maxwell's equations

• The Michelson-Morley experiment

• Lorentz, Fitzgerald, Poincaré and the dawn of relativity

The following sections are included:

• The historical context

• Special relativity — Einstein's two postulates

• Marrying space and time to get spacetime

• General relativity

• The metric of spacetime

• Specifying the curvature of spacetime

• Einstein's equations of general relativity

• The cosmological constant

• The Inflationary Universe

• The 'paradoxes' of relativity

• Our quotidian sense of space and time

The following sections are included:

• Innate reality and deduced reality

• Quantum reality as a 'prepared' reality

• Quantum particles and wave fields

• Schrödinger's equation for a trapped particle

• Is the wavefunction a real physical object?

• The uncertainty principle and particle trajectories

• Bohm's interpretation of the Schrödinger's equation

• Feynman-path formulation of quantum mechanics

• Quantum mechanics as a theory about information

• Relativistic quantum mechanics

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Superposition and interference

• Entangled states

• The Bell inequalities and quantum correlations

• The 'collapse of the wavefunction' and measurement

• Quantum muddles

• Quantum paradoxes

The following sections are included:

• The 'real world' of many-particle systems

• Many-electron systems

• Density functional theory

• Classical maps for quantum systems

• The quantum to classical transition and 'decoherence'

• Emergence of indeterminism in complex systems

• Conclusion

The following sections are included:

• Thermodynamics

• Statistical mechanics

• Dynamic response of a many-particle system

• Paradoxes proposed within statistical physics

The following sections are included:

• Please refer to full text.

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Chemical elements and molecules in the cosmos

• Envisioning the early Earth

• The formation of prebiotic molecules

• Conclusion

The following sections are included:

• The nature of cells

• The awareness of the primitive living cell

The following sections are included:

• Adaptation and survival

• Multicellular specialization

• Cells adapted for vision

• Neurons: Nature's telecom units

• Molecular mechanisms of memory

• Neurons and information processing

The following sections are included:

• Do we need exotic explanations?

• Fröhlich's model of long-range coherence

• Free will and attempts at 'quantum' explanations

• Conclusion

The following sections are included:

• The awareness of 'self', and of 'others'

• Why consciousness?

• Causality and free will

• Self interest

• Personality

• Behaviour and guilt

• Biology, egalitarianism and democracy

• Happiness and suffering

The following sections are included:

• Please refer to full text.

The following sections are included:

• Index