Of Things Visible and Invisible: From the Atom to Quarks - A Historical Journey Through the Conceptual Images of Matter(History of Physics)

This book highlights the historical roots and important philosophical debates that accompanied the introduction of different theoretical entities. Understanding what we see through objects that we cannot perceive may seem a paradox. Yet it is precisely such elusive objects—to the point that they cannot be revealed, like the quarks—which make it possible to situate what we call matter in the sphere of the intelligible. The search for a fundamental unit or units to which the construction of the polychromatic world around us can be traced has marked the history of thought, a search that has pushed inquiry into smaller and smaller regions of our universe. The result has been disruptive: we have disengaged from the safe references suggested by the most immediate intuition, lost the reassuring comfort of simple images, and abandoned the support of established philosophical categories. Terms such as particle, vacuum, and others have no right of citizenship in contemporary physics in their common meaning. Particles are not small bodies, and vacuum is not the absence of matter. Such terms, like many others, have become theoretical entities because they are increasingly unreachable by sensible experience. We cannot answer the legitimate question “what are they?”. What we can do instead—and what is done in this book—is to follow the evolution of their meanings through a journey among invisible objects and among images that have gradually become less and less imaginable. It is a singular journey in which we will meet the astonishing properties of the quantum vacuum, its seething virtual particles, the astonishing idea, using Dyson’s words, “that our solid world of trees and stones may be made of quantum fields and nothing else.” Most importantly, we will encounter powerful decoders that enable the scientific community to make theoretical entities “visible” by means of shared representations.

Table of Contents:
Introduction.- Invisible, Elemental and Indivisible.- The Dream of Unity.- A New Order.- Corpuscles, Electrons and Metabolons: New Pictures of Matter.- Bizarre Numbers and Late Passions.- Interlude. Traces of a Revolution: On What There Is.- Dirac and the Jewel of Physics.- A Dirty Trick and the Representation of the Invisible.- Invisible and Heavy.- The Subnuclear World.- Interlude. The Magic of Symmetry and the Plague of Groups.- Quarks: A World Made of Charm, Truth and Beauty.- The Standard Model.

About the Author :
Giuseppe Bruzzaniti graduated in physics from the University of Genoa and then specialized in the history and philosophy of science at Domus Galileiana in Pisa. He carried out his research activity at the History of Physics group of the University of Genoa coordinated by Prof. Enrico Bellone. His research focused on reconstructing the complex dynamics that led to the rise of Nuclear Physics and the profound changes, within the framework of quantum field theory, in the idea of the elementary particle. In addition to numerous articles in international journals, he has published La radioattività (Loescher), Dal segno al nucleo (Bollati-Boringhieri), Enrico Fermi (Einaudi, also published in English by Springer), Di cose visibili e invisibili, dall'atomo ai quark (Codice Edizioni). He wrote the framework entry "Nucleus" for the Treccani Encyclopedia of Physics. .