Niels Bohr: Reflections on Subject and Object

Book Description

This is a detailed study of Niels Bohr's work on an epistemological foundation for twentieth century physics. The connections he drew between physics, language, and philosophy, are traced historically and their validity is analyzed in the light of contemporary science.

Complementarity Beyond Physics (1928-1962) (Niels Bohr - Collected Works)

Average customer rating:

Complementarity Beyond Physics (1928-1962) (Niels Bohr - Collected Works)

Manufacturer: North Holland
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Science | Subjects | Books

General | History & Philosophy | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

History of Ideas | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

All Amazon Upgrade | Amazon Upgrade | Stores | Books

History | Amazon Upgrade | Stores | Books

Professional & Technical | Amazon Upgrade | Stores | Books

Science | Amazon Upgrade | Stores | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
ASIN: 0444899723

Book Description

This volume is divided into five parts. The title of the volume refers primarily to part I, which is by far the largest and comprises papers discussing the fundamental questions of biology and related psychological and philosophical problems. Following the reproduction of papers brought to publication by Bohr, there is a separate Appendix to Part I including some of Bohr's most interesting and substantive unpublished contributions in this area. The papers in Part I span the last thirty years of Bohr's life and display his great interest in biological problems and his unremitting efforts to show that biology cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry.

Part II contains articles of a more general cultural interest. Some of these show that Bohr regarded the complementary perspective to be of value also outside the scientific sphere.

Part III contains the articles Bohr wrote about the great Danish philosopher Harald Høffding. These short papers are presented in a section on their own because of the continuing discussion in the history of science about Høffding's possible influence on Bohr's work in physics and his whole scientific approach.

Part IV comprises articles illuminating the history of 20th century physics. Bohr had great veneration for his predecessors and teachers, and he prepared these articles with great care.

Book Description

Niel Bohr's life spans times of revolutionary change, in science and in its impact on society. Along with Einstein, Bohr can be considered as this century's major driving force behind the new mathematical and philosophical descriptions of the atom, the nucleus, and all that resulted from them. Abraham Pais, the acclaimed biographer of Einstein, traces Bohr's progress from his well-to-do origins in late nineteenth-century Denmark to his central position in the world political scene, particularly because of the development of nuclear weapons during the Second World War. Bohr was one of the great enabling figures in modern science, not only because of his direct involvement in the application of quantum theory to our understanding of the structure of the atom, but also because he gathered around him in Copenhagen most of the brightest young minds of the period. Figures like Pauli, Dirac, and Heisenberg, all required Bohr's imprimatur, to varying degrees, before they considered their work ready for widespread consumption. He had a complex relationship with Einstein, both in terms of their fundamental disagreements and their profound though distant mutual respect. He owed an important debt to his mentor, Rutherford - a man who came to serve, in many ways, as his role model. Pais describes the state of physics before Bohr and considers his legacy, both theoretical and practical. But more than this, he captures the essence of Bohr, the intensely private family man who, despite appalling personal tragedy, became one of the best-loved cultural figures of recent times.

Customer Reviews:

Niels .......2006-04-17

Online Review
This book is set up perfectly. It includes chapters that are not about Niels Bohr, but on other scientists of the time, which helps understand more in depth of Bohr's studies. It is a very easy book to read where each chapter is broken up into subchapters that makes it even easier to read. Although it was a fairly straight forward book, it got very boring at times. This book may get very confusing at times because it does not only talk about Bohr, but also talks in depth of many other scientists that also worked with quantum physics.
Abraham Pais did a great job of portraying Niels Bohr not only as a great scientist, but also as a great man. He goes about to explain in depth Bohr's family, how many scientists influenced his work, and the kinds of experiments and studies that he did. By reading this book, we can tell that Abraham Pais has a science background as well because of his ability to explain the experiments of Bohr and other scientists in great detail. With his background, Pais was able to write a book that glorified not on Niels Bohr, but also the entirety of physics.

INSPIRING: It's a small world after all.......2006-02-01

Abraham Pais's biography of Bohr, NIELS BOHR'S TIMES, IN PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND POLITY, isn't really about rock 'n' roll, and you can't find anything about Aimee Mann in the index, but anyone who has a sense of the multiplicity rampant in modernity ought to want to sit these people down for a good listen to the `It's Not Safe' song at the end of the `I'm with Stupid' (1995) CD by Aimee Mann. The CD liner notes has the words of the songs in alphabetical order, but Aimee Mann is loved as a songwriter well enough to have the lyrics and chords posted on the internet, with six chords for the first line, making it easy to verify that one of the three words between from and fun on the alphabetical list is used to describe the kind of "freak in this world in which everybody's willing to choose swine over pearls":

And maybe everything is all for nothing
Still you'd better keep it to yourself
'Cause God knows it's not safe with anybody else.

Those political planners who expected World War II to make the world into a safer place might not be ready to accept that `small' would be the idea most closely associated with any country which was conquered by Germany, and Denmark was occupied by the Germans in 1940. Just a few months after the war ended in 1945, "In a lecture to the Danish Engineering Society Bohr said that plutonium can be produced at the rate of 1 kilogram per day, causing allegations that he was giving away atomic secrets. This led him to send a clarification to the press stating that he did not know technical details about the production of active materials." (p. 511). Chapter 21, Bohr, pioneer of `glasnost,' shows the interaction of a scientist who wanted information to be shared openly with a political system that functioned on secret circus stunt principles. Only those with a need to know how the new stunt would be performed would ever be given enough information to use; small nations were expected to be purely spectators.

There are a few elements of philosophy in this book, most generally considered in Chapter 19, `We are suspended in language.' Small atoms hydrogen and helium played a large part in developing the old quantum theory in 1913-1916. Bohr was recognized early in his career, receiving the Nobel Prize for physics on November 9, 1922, when Albert Einstein was given the prize for 1921 a year late. (p. 211). Einstein is the heading for a column of topics in the subject index, and Chapter 11, Bohr and Einstein, reveals, "Music was a profound necessity in Einstein's life, not in Bohr's." (p. 225).

The second verse of `It's Not Safe' is a fair description of the themes of a biography:

You can take your own advice and try again
But a thousand compromises don't add up to a win
And they'd be happy if you'd only cover your tracks
But the trail of crumbs you've left won't help you find your way back

Physicists might talk about particles, but on a very small scale, things that are too tiny to see might be something else entirely, energy in the form of a wave, a matrix of mathematical values, or as ephemeral as the probability of a particle being at a particular place and time. Bohr won attention early in his career by being able to correlate the spectral lines for light given off by hydrogen (with four frequencies measured in 1859 and 1860, p. 141) with the energy levels of the single electron in the hydrogen atom. Bohr learned the Balmer formula for calculating the frequencies in February, 1913, and Bohr wrote a paper by March 6, 1913 which he sent to Rutherford for publication. There are calculations on pages 147-148 for energy states, the orbital angular momentum on page 150, magnetic moment on page 151, and "The insistence on the role of the outermost ring of electrons as the seat of most chemical properties of the elements, in particular their valencies, constitutes the first step toward quantum chemistry." (p. 152). In 1915, Bohr proved that ultraviolet light emitted by mercury vapor when the energy of an electron exceeded 4.9 eV gave "the first direct experimental proof of the Bohr relation!" (p. 184).

The idea of quantum mechanical probability was introduced by a paper by Max Born on June 25, 1926. (p. 286). Science may become more like opinion polling in the future, but Niels Bohr clung to the idea that physics still needed to be about measuring quantities which could be related to the laws of classical physics. Students attempting to confront new problems they faced in breaking atoms down into smaller particles came up with probability distributions of the electron in hydrogen like Fig. 9 on page 307, except that a footnote explains, "the size of the atom for n = 10 is actually about 100 times larger than for n = 1." All the extra space required for high energy levels only gets measured in secondary effects. "Heisenberg remembered how `Bohr emphasized the complementarity between temperature and energy to the extreme'." (p. 437). What we see is ordinary properties, but Bohr had to account for such by tracing the "matter back to the behaviour of assemblies of immense numbers of atoms." (p. 437). Maybe modern political thinking, as reflected in the ability to devise opinion polls which tell politicians whatever they want to hear, is closer to this notion of complementarity of diverse elements than our typically academic study of the classical political thinking of Plato about the good, or of Machiavelli's writings about the powerful direction of mass thinking by some all-conquering big lie. But Aimee Mann can sing like hell:

You can play along, but you'll just end up wrong somehow, won't you?

Elementary.......2005-05-24

This man nos nuttiing bout scince i tink he shdntld rlease ne mre boks in da futr

Captivating!.......2003-01-11

Captivating biography! One of the best. In a class by itself!
Written before the popular Broadway play, "Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn, Pais' book covers the Heisenberg-Bohr meeting in 1941[the real one],--- and there is a lot more! We are fortunate that Pais has given us this, and several other wonderful biographies;-- the one about Albert Einstein stands out! It is especially fortunate that he has chosen to write for the general public. I can't think of anyone who did, or possibly could have done it better. His writing is captivating, and unique in its recreation of the times, and the social context of the scientific events. Pais further succeeds magnificently in bringing to life the many colorful personalities. This includes the young physicists born in Europe around 1900 who arrived in Copenhagen in the 1920ties to work with Bohr, some later to win the Nobel Prize,-- how he became a father figure to some of them,- Heisenberg, for example. And there are the other players,

Albert Einstein early on, and Pais himself later, in the drama of quantum physics of the Twentieth Century. Even if you might perhaps not be scientifically inclined, and if you choose to skip the physics sections, I don't think you will be disappointed.

QM a la Bohr.......2000-11-27

Historical description of the development of nuclear and quantum physics, especially from the viewpoint of Bohr and colleagues, many who Pais worked with. Provides a non-technical description of many of the principles of modern physics.

The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli Dialogue (Studies in the History of Modern Science)

Average customer rating:

The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli Dialogue (Studies in the History of Modern Science)
J. Hendry
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Science | Subjects | Books

General | History & Philosophy | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

Quantum Theory | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Nonfiction | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Professional | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Science | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
ASIN: 902771648X

Average customer rating:

Niels Bohr's Philosophy of Physics
D. R. Murdoch , and Dugald Murdoch
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Science | Subjects | Books

General | History & Philosophy | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 052137927X

Book Description

Murdoch describes the historical background of the physics from which Bohr's ideas grew; he traces the origins of his idea of complementarity and discusses its meaning and significance. Special emphasis is placed on the contrasting views of Einstein, and the great debate between Bohr and Einstein is thoroughly examined. Bohr's philosophy is revealed as being much more subtle, and more interesting than is generally acknowledged.

Average customer rating:

Atomic physics and human knowledge
Niels Henrik David Bohr
Manufacturer: Science Editions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature: Four Essays, With an Introductory Survey

Average customer rating:

Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature: Four Essays, With an Introductory Survey
Niels Bohr
Manufacturer: Ams Pr Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0404147372

Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida

Average customer rating:

Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida
Arkady Plotnitsky
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Epistemology | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

History & Surveys | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | History & Philosophy | Science | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the "Two Cultures" (Studies in Literature and Science)

ASIN: 0822314339

Book Description

Many commentators have remarked in passing on the resonance between deconstructionist theory and certain ideas of quantum physics. In this book, Arkady Plotnitsky rigorously elaborates the similarities and differences between the two by focusing on the work of Niels Bohr and Jacques Derrida. In detailed considerations of Bohr’s notion of complementarity and his debates with Einstein, and in analysis of Derrida’s work via Georges Bataille’s concept of general economy, Plotnitsky demonstrates the value of exploring these theories in relation to each other.
Bohr’s term complementarity describes a situation, unavoidable in quantum physics, in which two theories thought to be mutually exclusive are required to explain a single phenomenon. Light, for example, can only be explained as both wave and particle, but no synthesis of the two is possible. This theoretical transformation is then examined in relation to the ways that Derrida sets his work against or outside of Hegel, also resisting a similar kind of synthesis and enacting a transformation of its own.
Though concerned primarily with Bohr and Derrida, Plotnitsky also considers a wide range of anti-epistemological endeavors including the work of Nietzsche, Bataille, and the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Under the rubric of complementarity he develops a theoretical framework that raises new possiblilities for students and scholars of literary theory, philosophy, and philosophy of science.

The Description of Nature: Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Quantum Physics

Average customer rating:

The Description of Nature: Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Quantum Physics
John Honner
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | History & Philosophy | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

Quantum Theory | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Niels Bohr, the founding father of modern atomic physics and quantum theory, was as original a philosopher as he was a physicist. This study explores several dimensions of Bohr's vision: the formulation of quantum theory and the problems associated with its interpretation, the notions of complementarity and correspondence, the debates with Einstein about objectivity and realism, and his sense of the infinite harmony of nature. The author's chief attention is given to Bohr's epistemological lesson, the conviction that all our description of nature is dependent on the words we use and the ways we can unambiguously use them. Against those who would view Bohr as a vague positivist, the author argues here that Bohr is best understood as using transcendental arguments and shaping a kind of descriptive metaphysics in his defence of our abilities to offer a description of the world we live in.

Average customer rating:
Cooper's novels
James Fenimore Cooper
Manufacturer: Stringer & Townsend
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Cooper, James Fenimore | Classics | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
19th Century | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Cooper, James Fenimore | ( C ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B0008BSAD0

Average customer rating:
Sea Tales - I. The Pilot. II. The Red Rover. III. The Water-Witch. IV. Wing-and-Wing. V. The Two Admirals.
James Fenimore Cooper
Manufacturer: D. Appleton and Company, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Cooper, James Fenimore | Classics | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000I4LK84

Average customer rating:
The Two Admirals : A Tale
J. Fenimore Cooper
Manufacturer: Hurst & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000KF41T6

Average customer rating:
Two Admirals a Tale
J Fenimore Cooper
Manufacturer: MERSHON CO
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000U03CV4

Average customer rating:
Two Admirals a Tale of the Sea
J Fenimore Cooper
Manufacturer: JOHN W LOVELL
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000UD311M

Average customer rating:
THE TWO ADMIRALS, A TALE (TWO VOLUMES IN ONE)
James Fenimore Cooper
Manufacturer: Lea and Blanchard
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Cooper, James Fenimore | Classics | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000KA1L2G

Average customer rating:
The two admirals, a tale ...
Michigan Historical Reprint Series
Manufacturer: Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | United States | Americas | History | Subjects | Books
Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
United States | History | Historical Reproductions | Formats | Books
ASIN: 142556299X
Release Date: 2005-12-22

Book Description

This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program.

The two Admirals,: A tale ... with a new introduction, notes, &c.,

Average customer rating:

The two Admirals,: A tale ... with a new introduction, notes, &c.,
James Fenimore Cooper
Manufacturer: G.P. Putnam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

The Two Admirals. A Tale (Cooper's Novels)

Average customer rating:

The Two Admirals. A Tale (Cooper's Novels)
J. Fenimore Cooper
Manufacturer: London: Routledge, Warnes, & Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000WB2XMA

The two admirals. A tale. By J. Fenimore Cooper.

Average customer rating:

The two admirals. A tale. By J. Fenimore Cooper.
Michigan Historical Reprint Series
Manufacturer: Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

United States | History | Historical Reproductions | Formats | Books
ASIN: 1425553435
Release Date: 2005-12-22

Book Description

This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program.

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books