Contents

Preface Introduction: What Keeps Us Going? Physicists, and Other People Chapter One: Breakfast of Hard-Boiled Eggs with Inertia How It All Began with Rolling Balls Chapter Two: Breakfast of Eggs Bene-Bricked What Keeps the Ball Rolling? Chapter Three: Breakfast of Apple-Gravity Pancakes Why Does an Apple Fall From a Tree? Chapter Four: Breakfast of Cereal and Calories But It Takes Energy to Keep Moving Chapter Five: Breakfast of Hot Cakes with Energy How Hot is It? Putting Heat to Work Chapter Six: Breakfast of French Toast First Law: You Cant Win Second Law: Nor Can You Break Even

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Chapter Seven: Breakfast of Cold Cuts Go Fly a Kite! Storing Electricity Chapter Eight: Breakfast of Blueberry Muffins Electricity in Matter a.c./d.c. Chapter Nine: Breakfast of Apple Fritters and Love Magnetic Forces Magnetic Fields What Maxwell Wrought Chapter Ten: Breakfast of Eggs and Crisp Bacon Making Waves What Waves Can Do Chapter Eleven: Breakfast of Oat Meal with Light Cream What is Light? How and What We See Its a Colorful World! Chapter Twelve: Breakfast of Lox and Bagels Whats the Speed of Light? Is it Really Relative? The Paradoxes of Relativity and Black Holes Chapter Thirteen: Breakfast of Farina Does Anyone Believe in Quanta? What About Atoms? Chapter Fourteen: Breakfast of Danish Pastry Whats a Wave Function? Born and Heisenberg Have the Answer

PHYSICS OVER EASY - Breakfasts with Beth and Physics (2nd Edition) World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/7636.html

Contents
Chapter Fifteen: Breakfast of Waffles Atoms Can Be Fun What Attracts Atoms to Each Other? Chapter Sixteen: Breakfast of O. J., Donuts, and Coffee Surrounded by Fluids We Depend on Solids Chapter Seventeen: Breakfast of Rice Krispies Whos Afraid of Radioactivity? Whats Inside the Nucleus? For Better or For Worse Nuclear Energy Our Nuclear Legacy Chapter Eighteen: Breakfast of Corn Fritters A Mess of Particles What, More Conservation Laws? Quarks and More Quarks The GUTS of Physics Chapter Ninteen: Dinner at Home Einstein Centennial A Promising Nanotechnology Quantum Entanglement Quantum Computers Chapter Twenty: Lunch at the Beach Bose-Einstein Condensates Chapter Twenty-One: Lunch at Venetian Bay Our Energy Problems Energy Wastes The Good News about Nukes

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PHYSICS OVER EASY - Breakfasts with Beth and Physics (2nd Edition) World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/7636.html

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Chapter Twenty-Two: Breakfast at the Beach How It All Began Cosmic Microwave Background Big Bang Inflationary Universe Probing the Cosmic Microwave Background Chapter Twenty-Three: Dinner Under the Stars The Stars in Heaven Red Giants and White Dwarfs Chapter Twenty-Four: After Dinner at Home Supernovae and Neutron Stars Black Holes Supernovae as Standard Candles Glossary of Physics Terms Acknowledgments Index

PHYSICS OVER EASY - Breakfasts with Beth and Physics (2nd Edition) World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/7636.html

Preface to the Second Edition

It sometimes occurs to readers of the original edition of Physics Over Easy to wonder whether the reported breakfast conversations actually took place or whether they were invented by the author. Let me reassure you, they did take place as originally reported in the Introduction. So when I was invited to write an updated second edition, I wondered how I could continue maintaining that format. Since both my wife Beth and I had retired, our lifestyle changed and so did the circumstances that prompted the original discussions. Nevertheless, when she learned that I had agreed to write a second edition, Beth insisted that I brief her on the new material as I covered it. Thus we continued to conduct periodic conversations on physics, but they were no longer limited to breakfasts but also included our other meals. Slightly edited versions of these discussions are reported in Chapters 19 through 24. The earlier parts of the book are pretty much unchanged from the original, other than for some minor corrections. The new material describes more recent discoveries that matured during the past decades. Most are still ongoing and should be viewed as work in progress. The original book did not include them because our understanding was too incomplete at the time of its writing. This is an exciting time for physicists. New and more sensitive probes are being sent aloft on satellites to study the cosmos. More powerful accelerators are coming on line to look for the Higgs and solidify our understanding of the subatomic world. Experimentalists are seeking practical

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applications of nanoscale materials and probing ways to use the weirdness of quantum mechanics in useful devices and theorists are seeking ways to expand Grand Unified Theories (GUTS) to encompass all of physics. I hope that youll enjoy perusing a glimpse of these exciting developments. Leonid V. Azaroff

PHYSICS OVER EASY - Breakfasts with Beth and Physics (2nd Edition) World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/7636.html