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    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
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Advanced Conceptual Physics - Volume II of IV: The Quantum World, and What Is Left

Advanced Conceptual Physics - Volume II of IV: The Quantum World, and What Is Left

Montgomery, Richard Murdoch

Paperback

Physics

ISBN13: 9798171560225
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 3 2026
Pages: 500
Weight: 2.53
Height: 1.01 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
Volume II begins where the innocence of elementary mechanics becomes difficult to maintain. Matter is molecular, yet the equations of continuum mechanics pretend that density and velocity exist at every mathematical point. Solids are collections of atoms, yet elasticity treats stress and strain as smooth tensor fields. Fluids obey equations that can be written in a few lines and generate turbulence that has resisted a century of analysis. Waves carry energy, information and structure, while dispersion forces us to distinguish the speed of a peak from the speed of a signal. Electromagnetism then makes the conceptual difficulty sharper still: the field was introduced as an intermediary and became an entity that carries energy and momentum; the potential appears redundant and nevertheless acquires measurable global consequences; gauge symmetry is not a symmetry between different physical states at all, yet modern particle physics cannot be formulated without the constraints produced by that redundancy. The governing rule is the same as in Volume I: nothing falls from the sky. Equations are not presented as ceremonial facts. The assumptions that permit them are stated, the variables are introduced before they are used, and the calculation is carried far enough to expose the parameter controlling the approximation. Where a formula predicts a measurable number, the number is computed. Where theory and measurement disagree, the disagreement is not quietly absorbed into an adjective such as small. It is quantified, and the reader is asked what the discrepancy means. That method is deliberately dialectical. Each substantive chapter contains objections to its own preferred account, not as decoration but as part of the reasoning. A useful objection identifies a hidden assumption, a singular limit, an alternative interpretation, or a regime in which the elegant statement ceases to be true. The proper reply is therefore seldom to dismiss the objection. It is to concede exactly what it wins and then determine what remains standing. Physics advances rather well under this kind of discourtesy. The first half of the volume comprises continua, elasticity, fluid motion, vorticity, turbulence, oscillations, coupled systems, normal modes, waves, dispersion, nonlinear waves, resonance and dissipation. The second half turns to the electromagnetic field, the relation between electric and magnetic descriptions, Maxwellian unification, potentials and gauge freedom, field energy and momentum, radiation, near and far fields, propagation in matter, the classical electron problem, and modern gauge theory. These are often taught as separate courses. Here they are joined because the same structural questions recur: what is fundamental, what is emergent, what is directly measured, what is inferred, what is a constitutive assumption, and what remains invariant when the description changes. The figures have the same status as the algebra. They are meant to calculate rather than decorate.Their full resolutions are part of the argument, and the multiple-choice questions explain why the attractive wrong answers are wrong. This volume is written for graduate students, working physicists, engineers, mathematically mature readers, and those who have previously learned much of the mathematics and would now like to know what the mathematics was claiming about the world. Conceptual should therefore not be read as non-mathematical. It means that calculation is required to answer conceptual questions rather than to postpone them. I am grateful to any reader who finds an error and reports it. Corrections may be sent to richard@scottishsciencesociety.org. In a work that insists so often upon exposing assumptions, it would be a peculiar vanity to pretend that the author is exempt from the requirement.

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