One reason I went to Princeton University as an undergraduate was that I had read about a Professor John Wheeler suggesting that the atomic nucleus m… - Anthony Zee

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One reason I went to Princeton University as an undergraduate was that I had read about a Professor John Wheeler suggesting that the atomic nucleus might take on the form of a doughnut. When I got there, I learned that Wheeler was going to give a novel type of course for freshmen. A group of us were asked a few physics questions by Wheeler, and those who answered correctly were allowed into the course. The first homework assignment consisted of standing for 15 minutes in front of the house that Albert Einstein had lived in. It turned out that we were to learn physics from the top down: For example, we were taught “F = ma” as a limiting case of special relativity. If I remember correctly, the department did not allow Wheeler to teach the course again. But I learned a lot; in particular, I learned to “never calculate without first knowing the answer.”

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About Anthony Zee

Anthony Zee (, b. 1945) (Zee comes from the Shanghainese pronunciation of 徐) is a Chinese-American physicist and author.

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Alternative Names: Xu Yihong

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We show that the introduction of a charged scalar particle into the standard theory leads to numerous phenomenological consequences. In particular, muon-neutrino scattering on electron can resonate in the s-channel, a fact which is potentially important in high-energy neutrino experiments and conceivably relevant in explaining the recently reported underground muon events from Cygnus X-3. We focus on the violation of various quantum numbers, including electron, muon, and tauon numbers.

The goal of condensed matter physics is to understand the various states of matter. States of matter are characterized by the presence (or absence) of order: a ferromagnet becomes ordered below the transition temperature. In the Landau-Ginzburg theory ... , order is associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking, described naturally with group theory. Girvin and MacDonald first noted that the order in Hall fluids does not really fit into the Landau-Ginzburg scheme: We have not broken any obvious symmetry. The topological property of the Hall fluids provides a clue to what is going on. As explained in the preceding chapter, the ground state degeneracy of a Hall fluid depends on the topology of the manifold it lives on, a dependence group theory is incapable of accounting for. Wen has forcefully emphasized that the study of topological order, or more generally quantum order, may open up a vast new vista on the possible states of matter.

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That the exchange of a particle can produce a force was one of the most profound conceptual advances in physics. We now associate a particle with each of the known forces: for example, the photon with the electromagnetic force and the graviton with the gravitational force; the former is experimentally well established and while the latter has not yet been detected experimentally hardly anyone doubts its existence.

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