Common misconceptions in physics (book)
This book does not offer an idealized view of physics, but a realistic view with its problems, inconsistencies, and limitations.
Popular science books written by physicists, physics textbooks, and the professional physics literature contain misleading or easily misinterpreted claims, and such misconceptions and myths are preventing a fundamental understanding of Nature.
This book identifies over two hundred common misconceptions in classical electrodynamics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and quantum field theory. The claims that the Coulomb gauge is not a physical gauge, that mass increases with velocity, that entropy is a quantity characterizing disorder, that general relativity is equivalent to the theory of a massless self-interacting spin-2 field, that molecular chaos is the source of irreversibility, that electrons and protons are sometimes particles and sometimes waves, and that relativistic quantum electrodynamics is a Lagrangian theory are some examples of misconceptions. Cosmological myths are also discussed.
This book is intended to be pedagogical and readable by a wide nonexpert audience. However, all the myths and misconceptions are technical in nature and I could not omit equations and details that are essential to understanding why those widely accepted claims in physics are not true (there are over 1400 equations). Readers interested in more technical details will find appendixes with further information.
