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Author: Yvan Saint-Aubin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475736711
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 646
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Book Description
Based on courses given at the CRM Banff summer school in 1999, this volume provides a snapshot of topics engaging theoretical physicists at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Young physicists will find in these chapters pedagogical introductions to subjects currently active in theoretical physics, and more seasoned physicists will find a chance to share the excitement of fields outside their immediate research interests.
Author: Yvan Saint-Aubin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475736711
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 646
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Book Description
Based on courses given at the CRM Banff summer school in 1999, this volume provides a snapshot of topics engaging theoretical physicists at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Young physicists will find in these chapters pedagogical introductions to subjects currently active in theoretical physics, and more seasoned physicists will find a chance to share the excitement of fields outside their immediate research interests.
Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691095523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
At the end of the nineteenth century, some physicists believed that the basic principles underlying their subject were already known, and that physics in the future would only consist of filling in the details. They could hardly have been more wrong. The past century has seen the rise of quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology, particle physics, and solid-state physics, among other fields. These subjects have fundamentally changed our understanding of space, time, and matter. They have also transformed daily life, inspiring a technological revolution that has included the development of radio, television, lasers, nuclear power, and computers. In Quantum Generations, Helge Kragh, one of the world's leading historians of physics, presents a sweeping account of these extraordinary achievements of the past one hundred years. The first comprehensive one-volume history of twentieth-century physics, the book takes us from the discovery of X rays in the mid-1890s to superstring theory in the 1990s. Unlike most previous histories of physics, written either from a scientific perspective or from a social and institutional perspective, Quantum Generations combines both approaches. Kragh writes about pure science with the expertise of a trained physicist, while keeping the content accessible to nonspecialists and paying careful attention to practical uses of science, ranging from compact disks to bombs. As a historian, Kragh skillfully outlines the social and economic contexts that have shaped the field in the twentieth century. He writes, for example, about the impact of the two world wars, the fate of physics under Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, the role of military research, the emerging leadership of the United States, and the backlash against science that began in the 1960s. He also shows how the revolutionary discoveries of scientists ranging from Einstein, Planck, and Bohr to Stephen Hawking have been built on the great traditions of earlier centuries. Combining a mastery of detail with a sure sense of the broad contours of historical change, Kragh has written a fitting tribute to the scientists who have played such a decisive role in the making of the modern world.
Author: Allan Franklin
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822979195
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
In Shifting Standards, Allan Franklin provides an overview of notable experiments in particle physics. Using papers published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, as his basis, Franklin details the experiments themselves, their data collection, the events witnessed, and the interpretation of results. From these papers, he distills the dramatic changes to particle physics experimentation from 1894 through 2009. Franklin develops a framework for his analysis, viewing each example according to exclusion and selection of data; possible experimenter bias; details of the experimental apparatus; size of the data set, apparatus, and number of authors; rates of data taking along with analysis and reduction; distinction between ideal and actual experiments; historical accounts of previous experiments; and personal comments and style. From Millikan's tabletop oil-drop experiment to the Compact Muon Solenoid apparatus measuring approximately 4,000 cubic meters (not including accelerators) and employing over 2,000 authors, Franklin's study follows the decade-by-decade evolution of scale and standards in particle physics experimentation. As he shows, where once there were only one or two collaborators, now it literally takes a village. Similar changes are seen in data collection: in 1909 Millikan's data set took 175 oil drops, of which he used 23 to determine the value of e, the charge of the electron; in contrast, the 1988-1992 E791 experiment using the Collider Detector at Fermilab, investigating the hadroproduction of charm quarks, recorded 20 billion events. As we also see, data collection took a quantum leap in the 1950s with the use of computers. Events are now recorded at rates as of a few hundred per second, and analysis rates have progressed similarly. Employing his epistemology of experimentation, Franklin deconstructs each example to view the arguments offered and the correctness of the results. Overall, he finds that despite the metamorphosis of the process, the role of experimentation has remained remarkably consistent through the years: to test theories and provide factual basis for scientific knowledge, to encourage new theories, and to reveal new phenomenon.
Author: Jim Al-Khalili
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691182302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Scale -- Space and time -- Energy and matter -- The quantum world -- Thermodynamics and the arrow of time -- Unification -- The future of physics -- The usefulness of physics -- Thinking like a physicist.
Author: George Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307765458
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
With a New Afterword "Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way. Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.
Author: Steve Adams
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 9780203017180
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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Book Description
The revolution in twentieth century physics has changed the way we think about space, time and matter and our own place in the universe. It has offered answers to many of the big questions of existence, such as the ultimate nature of things and the how the universe came into being. It has undermined our belief in a Newtonian mechanistic universe and a deterministic future, posing questions about parallel universes, time-travel and the origin and end of everything. At the same time we have witnessed amazing attempts at unification so that physicists are able to contemplate the discovery of a single 'theory of everything' from which we could derive the masses and types of all particles and their interactions. This book tells the story of these discoveries and the people who made them, largely through the work of Nobel Prize winning physicists.
Author: John C. Taylor
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 1848161603
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
By the end of the 1970s, it was clear that all the known forces of nature (including, in a sense, gravity) were examples of gauge theories, characterized by invariance under symmetry transformations chosen independently at each position and each time. These ideas culminated with the finding of the W and Z gauge bosons (and perhaps also the Higgs boson). This important book brings together the key papers in the history of gauge theories, including the discoveries of: the role of gauge transformations in the quantum theory of electrically charged particles in the 1920s; nonabelian gauge groups in the 1950s; vacuum symmetry-breaking in the 1960s; asymptotic freedom in the 1970s. A short introduction explains the significance of the papers, and the connections between them. Contents: Gauge Invariance in Electromagnetism; Non-Abelian Gauge Theories; Gravity as a Gauge Theory; Gauge Invariance and Superconductivity; Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Particle Physics; Gauge-Fixing in Non-Abelian Gauge Theories; Gauge Identities and Unitarity; Asymptotic Freedom; Monopoles and Vortex Lines; Non-Pertubative Approaches; Instantons and Vacuum Structure; Three-Dimensional Gauge Fields and Topological Actions; Gauge Theories and Mathematics. Readership: Graduate students, researchers and lecturers in mathematical, theoretical, quantum and high energy physics, as well as historians of science.
Author: Laura Garwin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226284166
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
Many of the scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century were first reported in the journal Nature. A Century of Nature brings together in one volume Nature's greatest hits—reproductions of seminal contributions that changed science and the world, accompanied by essays written by leading scientists (including four Nobel laureates) that provide historical context for each article, explain its insights in graceful, accessible prose, and celebrate the serendipity of discovery and the rewards of searching for needles in haystacks.
Author: Lee Smolin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618551057
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
Sample Text
Author: David Lindley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
The author presents a history of the attempts to find the final "theory of everything," gives a forceful argument that one can never be found, and a warning that the compromises necessary to produce a final theory may well undermine the rules of doing good science. At the heart of the story is the rise of the particle physicists and their attempts to reach far out into the cosmos for a unifying theory. Unable to subject their findings and theories to experimental scrutiny, they have moved into a world governed entirely by mathematical and highly speculative theories, none of which can be empirically verified. "Does physics then become a branch of aesthetics?" Lindley asks. For an opposing viewpoint, see Stephen Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
