Doing Physics: How Physicists Take Hold of the World - Hardcover

Krieger, Martin H

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253331234 ISBN 13: 9780253331236

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2000

Synopsis

This book is a cultural phenomenology of doing physics. It describes the ways physicists actually do their work--their motives, and their ways of making sense of the world--so that outsiders can understand it. Martin H. Krieger explains that physicists employ a small number of everyday notions to get at the world experimentally and conceptually. Krieger's stories focus on five of these models: the division of labor among particles, fields, and spacetime in the ""factory"" of Nature; the analysis of the world as a clockworks of comparatively dumb parts whose composition is often surprisingly complex and rich; the play of freedom and necessity given by a set of kinship rules that govern the families of particles; the setting of a simple stage, a vacuum, on which something arises out of nothing; and a mode of grasping the world with the handles, probes, and tools that make up a physicist's tool kit. In each case, Krieger shows that the deepest principles of physics are embodied in the physicist's craft and conventions.

About this title

From the Back Cover

This is a book about how physicists take hold of the world, actually about how some physicists get ahold of some of the world.

About the Author

MARTIN H. KRIEGER who holds a doctorate in physics, is Professor of Planning at the University of Southern California and author of Advice and Planning and Marginalism and Discontinuity: Tools for the Crafts of Knowledge and Decision.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0253331234
• ISBN 13: 9780253331236
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 168