Schrodinger and other cats

Jeba, a great friend, lent me a book: In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat by John Gribbin. Usually, the Batman never lends books and movies but in my case, he made an exception. I am honored.

It was a wonderful reading after The Short History of Nearly Everything. I mean, there is so much out there and we are only beginning to even see it.

This book has quite enough of theoretical physics which would have been great for my mind had I read it in school. I know that these two books would have changed my outlook to physics and science in general.

I need to read more such stuff. At least I will know for sure that I don’t know much. That nothing is real, and that all scientific appliances work not because we know why but because we think we know why.

Like we don’t know whether there are electrons, protons, and neutrons. We assume because then our theory works. Light acts both as a particle and as a wave because in certain situations, it acts like a particle and in others, like a wave!

We have made great industrial advances and applications based on constants in equations. We have had lifelong debates between Bohr and Einstein over theories which were just peeping down the rabbit hole.

Physics is like getting cats out of a hat. Each a mystery, each a magic.

Ranga, I think you should definitely read these two books. By the way, I am reading Surely, You Must be Joking, Mr Feynman for quite some time now. And Ranga, you may feel bad about this: it is one of the most boring books I have ever come across. But I will finish it. I owe that much to Feynman and to you too, I guess ;-).