Condensed concepts

If you ever write a popular book about science I suggest you spend a lot of time honing your very last paragraph. If it is eloquent, grand, and hyperbolic it may be so widely quoted that many people will think that this is actually what the book is about or has proven. Here are a few examples that I often see. Where then shall we find the source of truth and the moral inspiration for a really scientific socialist humanism? Only, we suggest, in the sources of science itself,..... it is the conclusion to which the search for authenticity necessarily leads. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immmensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.'' Jacques Monod ,  Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modem Biology,  trans.   Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 167

 Here are my draft abstracts and keywords for the whole book and for chapters 6-10. Context and chapters 1-5 were given in the previous post. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction   There are many more states of matter than just solid, liquid, and gas. Examples include liquid crystal, ferromagnet, glass, superfluid, and superconductor. New states are continually, and unexpectedly, being discovered. A superconductor can be like Schrodinger’s cat and in the macroscopic world exhibit the weirdness associated with the microscopic world of atoms, photons, and electrons, that is described by quantum theory. Condensed matter physics investigates how states of matter, and their distinct physical properties emerge from the atoms that a material is composed of. Such a system composed of many interacting parts can have properties that the parts do not have. Water is wet, but a single water molecule is not. Your brain is conscious, but a single n

I am pleased to announce that Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction is scheduled to be published on December 29. The manuscript is currently with copy editors and in production.  For each chapter, I have been asked to provide abstracts and keywords for the online version of the book. This turns out to be somewhat interesting as it is an issue of marketing, using internet searches to sell books. There are no chapter abstracts for the hard copy. Here is some of the background provided by Oxford University Press. High quality A&K (Abstracts and Keywords) are those that help readers get to the content they are looking for, first by making the relevant content appear high in search results , and then by accurately describing the work so that they can decide whether it will be relevant to their needs. High quality A&K become even more important when readers are able to choose and purchase the relevant content from the results.   The availability of A&K is now an in

One of the many problems with hype in science is that it glosses over problems that means they do not get addressed which ultimately hinders real scientific progress.  There is a lot of hype about how quantum computers will be able to solve problems in materials science that are of industrial significance and thus "herald a new era of chemical research". Such claims are carefully examined and deconstructed in the following preprint. Most of the authors are at Schrodinger, Inc. How will quantum computers provide an industrially relevant computational advantage in quantum chemistry? V.E. Elfving, B.W. Broer, M. Webber, J. Gavartin, M.D. Halls, K. P. Lorton, A. Bochevarov The article is also a useful guide to current state-of-the-art computational chemistry on classical computers. I reproduce most of the paper abstract below as it is helpful summary. Numerous reports claim that quantum advantage, which should emerge as a direct consequence of the advent of quantum computers, w