{ "item_title" : "Emergence in Condensed Matter and Quantum Gravity", "item_author" : [" George Musser "], "item_description" : "This book surveys the science at a semipopular, Scientific American-level. It is even-handed with regard to competing directions of research and philosophical positions. It is hard to get even two people to agree on anything, yet a million billion water molecules can suddenly and abruptly coordinate to lock themselves into an ice crystal or liberate one another to billow outwards as steam. The marvelous self-organizing capacity of matter is one of the central and deepest puzzles of physics, with implications for all the natural sciences. Physicists in the past century have found a remarkable diversity of phases of matter--and equally remarkable commonalities within that diversity. The pace of discovery has, if anything, only quickened in recent years with the appreciation of quantum phases of matter and so-called topological order. The study of seemingly humdrum materials has made contact with the more exotic realm of quantum gravity, as theorists realize that the spacetime continuummay itself be a phase of some deeper and still unknown constituents. These developments flesh out the sometimes vague concept of the emergence--how exactly it is that complexity begets simplicity. ", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/3/03/109/894/3031098943_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "37.99", "online_price" : "37.99", "our_price" : "37.99", "club_price" : "37.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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