Theoretical Physics At The End Of The Twentieth Century
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Theoretical Physics at the End of the Twentieth Century by Yvan Saint-Aubin,Luc Vinet Pdf
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.
A History of the Ideas of Theoretical Physics by S. D'Agostino Pdf
This book presents a perspective on the history of theoretical physics over the past two hundreds years. It comprises essays on the history of pre-Maxwellian electrodynamics, of Maxwell's and Hertz's field theories, and of the present century's relativity and quantum physics. A common thread across the essays is the search for and the exploration of themes that influenced significant con ceptual changes in the great movement of ideas and experiments which heralded the emergence of theoretical physics (hereafter: TP). The fun. damental change involved the recognition of the scien tific validity of theoretical physics. In the second half of the nine teenth century, it was not easy for many physicists to understand the nature and scope of theoretical physics and of its adept, the theoreti cal physicist. A physicist like Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the eminent contributors to the new discipline, confessed in 1895 that, "even the formulation of this concept [of a theoretical physicist] is not entirely without difficulty". 1 Although science had always been divided into theory and experiment, it was only in physics that theoretical work developed into a major research and teaching specialty in its own right. 2 It is true that theoretical physics was mainly a creation of tum of-the century German physics, where it received full institutional recognition, but it is also undeniable that outstanding physicists in other European countries, namely, Ampere, Fourier, and Maxwell, also had an important part in its creation.
State Of Physics At The End Of The 20th Century, The: In Honor Of Peter Carruthers' 61st Birthday by Frederick M Cooper,Geoffrey West,Ina Sarcevic,Chung-i Tan Pdf
This is a volume in honor of Professor Peter Carruthers on the occasion of his 61st birthday. It is a unique collection of papers by the world's leading experts, describing the most exciting developments in many areas of theoretical physics. While traditionally physics is driven to ever smaller and simpler systems, end-of-this-century scientists see themselves confronted with complex systems in many of their areas. It is just this interdisciplinary character of complexity that is addressed in this book, with topics ranging from the origin of intelligent life and of universal scaling laws in biology via heartbeats, proteins, fireballs, phase transitions, all the way to parton branching in collisions of elementary particles at high energies. The contributions include extensive discussions on complexity (M Gell-Mann, M Feigenbaum, D Champbell, D Pines and L M Simmons), neutrino masses (R Slansky and P Rosen), high temperature superconductors (D Pines), low Moon (M Feigenbaum), origin of intelligent life (S Colgate), chaos of the heart (M Duong-Van), origin of universal scaling laws in biological systems (G West), critical behavior of quarks (R Hwa), status of LEGO (S Meshov), disoriented chiral condensate (F Cooper), and many others.
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.
Twentieth Century Physics by L Brown,B Pippard,A Pais Pdf
Twentieth Century Physics, Second Edition is a major historical study of the scientific and cultural development of physics in the twentieth century. This unique three-volume work offers a scholarly but highly readable overview of the development of physics, addressing both the cultural and the scientific aspects of the discipline. The three volumes deal with the major themes of physics in a quasi-chronological manner. The first volume covers the early part of the century while the second and third volumes discuss more recent issues. In each case, the development of the theme is traced from its inception to the present day. The list of contributors includes Nobel laureates, fellows of the Royal Society, and other distinguished international physicists. Where appropriate, specialists in the history of physics have written their own commentaries, providing a valuable counterpoint to the physicists' perspectives.
Author : Fred Cooper Publisher : World Scientific Publishing Company Page : 256 pages File Size : 54,6 Mb Release : 1999 Category : Carruthers, Peter A. ISBN : 9810232519
The State of Physics at the End of the 20th Century by Fred Cooper Pdf
This is a volume in honor of Professor Peter Carruthers on the occasion of his 61st birthday. It is a unique collection of papers by the world's leading experts, describing the most exciting developments in many areas of theoretical physics. While traditionally physics is driven to ever smaller and simpler systems, end-of-this-century scientists see themselves confronted with complex systems in many of their areas. It is just this interdisciplinary character of complexity that is addressed in this book, with topics ranging from the origin of intelligent life and of universal scaling laws in biology via heartbeats, proteins, fireballs, phase transitions, all the way to parton branching in collisions of elementary particles at high energies. The contributions include extensive discussions on complexity (M Gell-Mann, M Feigenbaum, D Champbell, D Pines and L M Simmons), neutrino masses (R Slansky and P Rosen), high temperature superconductors (D Pines), low Moon (M Feigenbaum), origin of intelligent life (S Colgate), chaos of the heart (M Duong-Van), origin of universal scaling laws in biological systems (G West), critical behavior of quarks (R Hwa), status of LEGO (S Meshov), disoriented chiral condensate (F Cooper), and many others.
Great Solid State Physicists of the 20th Century by Carmen Arag¢ L¢pez,Julio Antonio Gonzalo Pdf
The 20th Century has been called the Century of Physics. It could be even more appropriate to call it the Century of Solid State Physics . All the technological developments which had changed the world by the end of the century had been based upon previous scientific developments in Solid State Physics. The Braggs, Debye, Bardeen, Landau were certainly at the forefront of all those revolutionary changes. Contents: The Braggs; Peter Debye; John Bardeen; Lev Davidovich Landau; The Relevance of Materials Science. Readership: Final-year undergraduates, graduate students, teachers, researchers working in materials physics, condensed matter/solid-state physics.
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.
Gauge Theories in the Twentieth Century by John C. Taylor Pdf
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.
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.
Nuclear and Particle Physics by Wolfgang Demtröder Pdf
This introduction to nuclear physics and particle physics provides an accessible and clear treatment of the fundamentals. Starting with the structure of nuclei and explaining instability of nuclei, this textbook enables the reader to understand all basics in nuclear physics. The text is written from the experimental physics point of view, giving numerous real-life examples and applications of nuclear forces in modern technology. This highly motivating presentation deepens the reader's knowledge in a very accessible way. The second part of the text gives a concise introduction to elementary particle physics, again together with applications and instrumentation. Nuclear fusion, fission, radionuclides in medicine and particle accelerators are amongst the many examples explained in detail. Numerous problems with solutions are perfect for self-study.
Intellectual Mastery of Nature. Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, Volume 1 by Christa Jungnickel,Russell McCormmach Pdf
Christina Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach have created in these two volumes a panoramic history of German theoretical physics. Bridging social, institutional, and intellectual history, they chronicle the work of the researchers who, from the first years of the nineteenth century, strove for an intellectual mastery of nature. Volume 1 opens with an account of physics in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century and of German physicists' reception of foreign mathematical and experimental work. Jungnickel and McCormmach follow G. S. Ohm, Wilhelm Weber, Franz Neumann, and others as these scientists work out the new possibilities for physics, introduce student laboratories and instruction in mathematical physics, organize societies and journals, and establish and advance major theories of classical physics. Before the end of the nineteenth century, German physics and its offspring, theoretical physics, had acquired nearly their present organizational forms. The foundations of the classical picture of the physical world had been securely laid, preparing the way for the developments that are the subject of volume 2.
