Preface
Degrees of Freedom; A Note to the Reader; A Note for the Scholars;
This Second Edition; Acknowledgments
1. The Division of Labor: The Factory
Nature as a Factory; Handles and Stories. What Everyday Walls Must
Do; Walls for a Factory; Walls as Providential. Particles, Objects,
and Workers; What Particles Must Be Like; Intuitions of Walls and
Particles. What Fields Must Be Like.
2. Taking Apart and Putting Together: The Clockworks, The Calculus,
and the Computer
The Right Degrees of Freedom; The Clockworks and The Calculus.
Parts Are Strategies; Independence and Randomness; Dependence,
Spreadsheets, and Differential Equations; Additivity and The
Calculus; Disjoint Functionality and Interpretability: Bureaucracy,
Flow Processing Plants, and Object-Oriented Programming; Sequence
and Procedure. Parts Are Commitments.
3. Freedom and Necessity: Family and Kinship
Recapitulation and Prospect; Kinship, Exchange, and Plenitude;
Systematics in the Field; The Problem of "Quite Rarely"; Markets
and Fetishes; Taking the Rules Seriously; Structure and System.
4. The Vacuum and The Creation: Setting a Stage
So Far, an Epitome; Sweeping Up the Vacuum; Symmetry and Order. The
Empty Stage; Of Nothing, Something, and the Vacuum. Setting Up the
Stage; Ideologies for a Vacuum; The Dialectic of Finding a Good
Vacuum; The Analogy of Substance, Once More. Fluctuations in a
Vacuum. Annealing the World.
5. Handles, Probes, and Tools: A Rhetoric of Nature
A Craft of Science; Some Handles onto the World (Particles,
Crystals, Gasses; Analogy; Phase Transitions; Knowledge Is
Handling). Probes; Objectivity and Inelasticity; Probes and
Handles. Tools and Toolkits; A Physicist's Toolkit; So Far.
6. Production Machinery: Mathematics for Analysis and
Description
Philosophical Analysis and Phenomenological Description; Machinery
and Production Processes; Naming and Modeling the World;
Demonstrations and Proofs as Strategies of Explanation;
Understanding "The Physics"; Analogy and Syzygy; The Mathematics
and The Physics
7. An Epitome
Notes
Index
Makes concepts of physics easier to grasp by relating them to everyday knowledge
Martin H. Krieger, who was trained as a physicist at Columbia University, has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the National Humanities Center. He is author of Marginalism and Discontinuity: Tools for the Crafts of Knowledge and Decision (1989), Constitutions of Matter: Mathematically Modeling the Most Everyday of Physical Phenomena (1996), and Doing Mathematics: Convention, Subject, Calculation, Analogy (2003). He is on the faculty of the University of Southern California, and has taught at Berkeley, Minnesota, MIT, and Michigan.
"This is an important and provocative book, timely and full of insight. Fail to read it, and you may miss out on the physics of the future."--John Gribbin, New Scientist "This unusual book introduces 'the moves, the rituals, the incantations' physicists invoke as they go about conceptualizing Nature. The lucid-but-loaded writing makes quite complex ideas accessible to the mathless reader... The rewards are a better understanding of how physics is done."--Whole Earth Millennial Catalog "An excellent [and innovative] book."--Isis "The book relates the concepts of Physics to everyday experiences through a carefully selected series of analogies. It attempts to provide a non-scientific description of the methods employed by physicists to do their work, what motivates them and how they make sense of the world" - CERN Courier
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