Universe Without Things

Physics is written in the language of mathematics, and its findings are based on thousands of experiments. But what kind of picture does physics paint of the world? What do theories like relativity or quantum mechanics contribute to it? How complete is this picture? This book sheds light on how the "things" these theories are about relate to our everyday things, and points out what questions remain unanswered and what problems are involved.

In this book, the author presents how physics works, what it can and cannot do. In doing so, he describes the surprising answers that physics provides to many of our questions about the nature of "things" and the world; answers that challenge to our intuition in many ways.

This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Universum ohne Dinge by Jan-Markus Schwindt, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

Jan-Markus Schwindt studied physics and mathematics in Heidelberg and Cambridge and received his PhD in theoretical physics in Heidelberg. He then worked for four years in research and teaching as a research associate at the Universities of Mainz and Heidelberg with research interests in cosmology and quantum gravity.