Hacker News Reader

Comment by msravi | Hacker News Reader

Reading these articles about light and quantum theory is always a frustrating experience for me. They are all invariably hand-wavy and never seem to explain things from first-principles. Does anyone have a good reference for a book that does justice to the subject?

On a related note, Simon Singh's book on the Big Bang Theory (http://www.amazon.com/Big-Bang-Universe-Simon-Singh/dp/00071...) was the first book I read that explored the Big Bang in great detail without being hand wavy. I wish he'd write a book dealing with quantum theory!

View on HN

I suggest you read answers in Physics SE, some of them are very well written with the general audience in mind.

* For the question of why the speed of light has the value it does see the excellent answers in http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56973/why-does-th... and http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3644/the-origin-o.... Turns out, it the actual values is irrelevant, in fact c is set to one in regular work.

* On the question of why c is so special, see http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/80365/what-is-so-...

* Many people don't recognize that in modern physics c is not a measured constant, its value is set: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/92969/why-does-th...

>They are all invariably hand-wavy and never seem to explain things from first-principles.

For first principles, you'll need to talk to the designer - scientists only have runtime profilers and guesswork. Even the guesswork isn't complete - there's no unified theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything) so it is kind of weird to ask everything to trickle down from first principles, IMO.

It's not weird; it's more that it depends on the answers to unanswered questions that have been perplexing many people for a long time.

Maybe "premature" is a better description?

feynman's "QED": http://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Princeton-Science-Library/...

I think this article does a decent job of trying to describe the first principles we hope we can use to find why the speed of light in vacuum is what it is, but the reality is we still don't know. Plus, the article format doesn't allow for detailed explanation that a book would.

Have you read Weinberg's The First Three Minutes?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com