The beautiful invisible: creativity, imagination & theoretical physics Creativity, imagination, and theoretical physics

The realm of theoretical physics is teeming with abstract and beautiful concepts. And the task of imagining them is one that demands profound creativity, argues Giovanni Vignale. Explaining them is curiously akin to the craft of poets, or magical realist novelists such as Borges, and Musil, or Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. In this unusual and sometimes poetic book, Vignale presents his own unorthodox accounts of fundamental theoretical concepts such as Newtonian mechanics, superconductivity, and Einstein's theory of relativity, showing that what may seem at first quite simple in fact turns out to be much more profound. As we delve behind now-familiar metaphors such as 'electron spin' and 'black hole', the world that we take for granted melts away, leaving a glimpse of something much stranger.

Prologue. 1. The way of the abstract. 2. Limits. 3. Laws are made to be broken. 4. Of first and last things. 5. Representations. 6. The invisible light. 7. The double helix. 8. Quantum mechanics: the triumph of the abstract. 9. Tales of quantum reality. 10. The spinning electron and other metaphors. 11. Margarita.

Giovanni Vignale is Curator's Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is the co-author of an academic text, Quantum Theory of the Electron Liquid (CUP, 2005).

For anyone thinking of starting a physics degree, or wishing they had done one, this is an excellent book...by someone who is eveidently a first-rate teacher.