From Atoms to Galaxies - 9781439808498

In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart tells a tale as old as the Greeks---a story about the seductions of success. Beinart describes Washington on the eve of World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq: three moments when American leaders decided they could remake the world in their image. Each time, leading intellectuals declared that history was over, and the spread of democracy was inevitable. Each time, a president held the nation in the palm of his hand. And each time, a war conceived in arrogance brought untold tragedy.

In dazzling color, Beinart portrays three extraordinary generations: the progressives who took America into World War I, led by Woodrow Wilson, the lonely preacher's son who became the closest thing to a political messiah the world had ever seen; the Camelot intellectuals who took America into Vietnam, led by Lyndon Johnson, who lay awake night after night shaking with fear that his countrymen considered him weak; and George W. Bush and the post-cold war neoconservatives, the romantic bullies who believed they could bludgeon the Middle East and liberate it at the same time. Like Icarus, each of these generations crafted "wings"---theories about America's relationship to the world. They flapped carefully at first but gradually lost their inhibitions, until, giddy with success, they flew into the sun.

But each era also brought new leaders and thinkers who found wisdom in pain. They reconciled American optimism---our belief that anything is possible---with the realities of a world that will never fully bend to our will. In their struggles lie the seeds of American renewal today.

College students in the United States are becoming increasingly incapable of differentiating between proven facts delivered by scientific inquiry and the speculations of pseudoscience. In an effort to help stem this disturbing trend, From Atoms to Galaxies: A Conceptual Physics Approach to Scientific Awareness teaches heightened scientific acuity as it educates students about the physical world and gives them answers to questions large and small. Written by Sadri Hassani, the author of several mathematical physics textbooks, this work covers the essentials of modern physics, in a way that is as thorough as it is compelling and accessible.

Serving as a primary textbook for those undergraduate students not majoring in physics, it examines physical laws and their consequences from a conceptual perspective that requires no advanced mathematics. Half of its content explains quantum physics, relativity, nuclear and particle physics, gauge theory, quantum field theory, quarks and leptons, and cosmology.

Each chapter includes a glossary, review questions, and exercises as well as asides, which use the material developed in that chapter to debunk misconceptions, clarify the nature of science, and explore the history of physics as it relates to the development of ideas. The book also includes an accompanying CD-ROM, which provides algebraic details for the readers who have the background and the desire to see the concepts of physics through the readers who have the background and the desire to see the concepts of physics throught the beautiful poetry of mathematics.