Important New Book – Theo van Holten

Here is an excerpt from the Preface to the book: (other tidbits can be downloaded from Springer)

To begin with a warning: the contents of this book may be controversial.


 The readers the author had in mind when writing this book are interested laymen, typically the kind of reader who searches bookshops for the latest popular-scientific books on developments in cosmology, on recently found fun- damental particles, or on the ever more magical findings of quantum physics. These readers presumably have some background of classical school physics (although most of it may have been forgotten). It is the kind of reader who does not like to be bothered with formulae or is even allergic to them, but who has the interest and tenacity to read sentences twice if necessary. But complete novices in the matters of the atomic world should be warned: the stories told in this book are not the same as usually found in books about quantum phenomena. This book does not give the conventional explanations. In order to read the usual stories, it is better to start in

one of the many other popular-scientific books.
 What then is this book about? This book certainly does not pretend to contain a

new theory of quantum mechanics, nor does it have the intention. Quantum theory in its present form is an almost perfect tool to calculate the behaviour of elementary particles. But the theory is “strange”, it is not something that intuitively can be understood. What this book tries to add are visualisations or mental pictures, closer to the intuition, because they are based on classical physics. However, the mental pictures in this book are not just half-baked analogies or metaphores, they are solidly founded on a large body of mathematical theory (for the diehards: the theory can be found in the appendix). This aspect makes this book different from other popular-scientific books.