Physics Fundamentalism

Abstract

This chapter begins by explaining why physics is the fundamental of all natural sciences. Throughout most its history, atoms were hardly the center of attention in physics. Once called natural philosophy, physics originated in the study of the motion of inanimate objects. From those studies emerged a body of knowledge, including various natural laws, that today we call ‘classical’ physics. Newton's laws of motion, the basis of the science of mechanics, come to mind, as does his law of universal gravitation. These laws are obeyed by objects that in some sense are ‘large’ and, in fact, the laws were discovered after careful observation of the behavior of such objects. The discussion then turns to the focus of the book—the quantum world—where the laws of physics turn out to be different from the laws of classical physics used to explain phenomena in the macroscopic world of everyday life. The book discusses a number of mostly recent experiments on quantum mechanical foundations, most of them involving light at the level of a few photons—sometimes only one.