ABC of Physics

A Very Brief Guide

Translated from Russian by Vitaly Kisin

This little book concentrates on the foundations of modern physics (its "ABC's") and its most fundamental constants: c — the velocity of light and ℏ — the quantum of action.

First of all, the book is addressed to professional physicists, but in order to achieve maximal concentration and clarity it uses the simplest (high school) mathematics. As a result many pages of the book will be useful to college students and may appeal to a more general audience.

Contents:

• The Fundamentals
• Units
• A Minimum of Mathematics
• Translational Motion
• Rotation and Quantization
• Particles as Corpuscles and Waves
• More About Units
• The Hydrogen Atom
• Periodic Table of Chemical Elements
• Substance
• Quantum Electrodynamics — QED
• Transition to Classical Theory
• Gravitation
• Other Galaxies
• Big Bang
• Quantum Gravidynamics — QGD
• Intranuclear Forces
• Particles in Cosmic Rays
• Particles in Accelerators
• Three Discrete Symmetries
• Half a Century Later
• On Quantum Chromodynamics
• On the Electroweak Theory
• Supersymmetry
• Grand Unification
• In the Vicinity of the Planck Mass
• Concluding Remarks

Readership: College students and interested readers in the physical sciences.
Key Features:

• The book clarifies the relation between energy and mass
• The book stresses the key role of spin in physics
• The book introduces the concept of elementary quantum state whose properties are completely fixed by a few quantum numbers. It explains the probabilistic side of Quantum Mechanics by using the language of Feynman diagrams
• It is extremely important to distinguish between facts firmly established in certain fields of physics and hypothetical extrapolations to fields that await exploration