Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A matter of force
- 2 Stalking the wild rainbow
- 3 Light
- 4 Maybe I'm Heisenberg
- 5 Catch a falling quantum
- 6 Quantum beanbags
- 7 Symmetries
- 8 Quantum relativity: nothing is relative
- 9 Life, the Universe and everything
- 10 The physics of a tablecloth
- 11 Colour me red, green and blue
- 12 Smashing symmetry
- 13 How much is infinity minus infinity?
- 14 Excelsior! The ascent to SU(∞)
- A modest reading proposal
- References
- Glossary
- Index
2 - Stalking the wild rainbow
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A matter of force
- 2 Stalking the wild rainbow
- 3 Light
- 4 Maybe I'm Heisenberg
- 5 Catch a falling quantum
- 6 Quantum beanbags
- 7 Symmetries
- 8 Quantum relativity: nothing is relative
- 9 Life, the Universe and everything
- 10 The physics of a tablecloth
- 11 Colour me red, green and blue
- 12 Smashing symmetry
- 13 How much is infinity minus infinity?
- 14 Excelsior! The ascent to SU(∞)
- A modest reading proposal
- References
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Colours and spectra
There is a striking similarity between the struggle of today's physicists with particles and the pursuit by their predecessors of a hot topic: spectroscopy. A lot of the jargon of the present relativistic quantum field theories comes directly from spectroscopic descriptions. Our search for order in the bewildering array of particle masses is like the efforts of scientists who, towards the end of the preceding century and in the first decades of the the twentieth, tried to find some order in the arrays of light waves that can be emitted by atoms.
It has been known since time immemorial that there are colours, but it wasn't until the seventeenth century that it became clear that all colours are different manifestations of the same phenomenon: light. The behaviour of light began to yield to quantitative descriptions through the brilliant work of Snell and Huygens. The colours and behaviour of the rainbow, first correctly explained by Descartes, were then no longer a religious mystery. Newton worked systematically on the splitting of sunlight by glass prisms (Fig. 2.1) into its coloured components, and he showed that the colours can be recombined to yield white light.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Force of Symmetry , pp. 23 - 31Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995