Quanta and Fields

"Quanta and Fields," the second book in Sean Carroll's internationally acclaimed series "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe," is an adventure into the nature of reality. Sean Carroll develops a fundamentally new approach to making physics accessible to a broad audience, going beyond analogies to show how physicists truly think. He goes straight to the mathematical essence of our most profound theories and explains each step in a uniquely accessible way.

Quantum field theory is how modern physics describes nature at its deepest level. Starting from the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, Sean Carroll explains measurement and entanglement before detailing how the world is actually made up of fields. You will finally understand why matter is solid, why antimatter exists, where the sizes of atoms come from, and why the predictions of quantum field theory are so spectacularly successful. Fundamental concepts such as spin, symmetry, Feynman diagrams, and the Higgs mechanism are not only explained through entertaining stories but are truly understood.

Beyond Newton, beyond Einstein, and all the intuitive notions that have guided humanity for millennia, this book is a journey to an once unimaginable truth about what our universe is.