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The essays selected for this book comprise ideas presented in oral or written form between 1972 and 2000, some of them originally in German or French. They are preceded by a biographical and topical introduction.As the title suggests, attention is directed on the one hand toward the material world which is viewed in its extreme spatial extensions of the universe and of the elementary particles. In particular, the fascinating notion of the void and its fluctuating energy is the subject of various discussions, as is the subdivision of material bodies and its limits. The latter as well as the limit of gravitational stability are depicted in a diagram leading to the ultimate point of the Planck mass and length.The other topic of the title is the spiritual realm which, as in the Introduction, is based on reflections and quotations from religious texts. This rather personal aspect is also apparent in the frequent mention of the author's teacher Wolfgang Pauli, who on the psychological side is associated with C G Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz and on the physical side with Albert Einstein and the author's colleague Ernest Stueckelberg.
This book retraces the life of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, analyses his scientific work, and describes the evolution of his thinking. Pauli spent 30 years as a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich, which occupies a central place in this biography. It would beincomplete, however, without a rendering of Pauli's sarcastic wit and, most importantly, of the world of his dreams. It is through the latter that quite a different aspect of Pauli's life comes in, namely his association with the psychology of C.G. Jung and his school.
The main aim of this book is to give a self-contained and representative cross section through present-day research in solid-state physics. This covers metallic and mesoscopic transport, localization by disorder and superconductivity, including questions related to high-temperature superconductors and to heavy fermion systems. An important part of the book is devoted to itinerant-electron magnetism, discussing paramagnons, strong correlation, magnetization fluctuations and spin density waves. All the formal tools used in these chapters are developed in the first part of the book which contains a thorough discussion of second quantization and of perturbation theory for an arbitrary complex time path and also describes the functional approach to Feynman diagrams including general ward identities. Each chapter contains an extensive list of the relevant literature and a series of problems with detailed solutions which complement the main text. The book is meant both as a course and a research tool.
In the 1950s the distinguished theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli delivered a landmark series of lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His comprehensive coverage of the fundamentals of classical and modern physics was painstakingly recorded not only by his students, but also by a number of collaborators whose carefully edited transcriptions resulted in a remarkable six-volume work. This volume, the sixth in the series, focuses on selected topics in field quantization and considers such subjects as quantization of the electron-positron field, response to an external field, quantization of free fields, quantum electrodynamics, interacting fields, the Heisenberg representation, the S-matrix, and Feynman's approach to quantum electrodynamics. As does each book in the series, Volume 6 includes an index and a wealth of helpful figures. Originally published in 1973, the text remains entirely relevant thanks to Pauli's manner of presentation. As Victor F. Weisskopf notes in the Foreword to the series, Pauli's style is "commensurate to the greatness of its subject in its clarity and impact…. Pauli's lectures show how physical ideas can be presented clearly
Explore the evolution of astronomy from Dante to Einstein, as seen through the eyes of trailblazing Victorian astronomer Mary Acworth Evershed In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the twentieth century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars. From the perspective of one remarkable amateur astronomer, readers will see how ideas developed during Galileo's time evolved or were discarded in Newtonian conceptions of the cosmos and then recast in Einstein's theories. The result is a book about the history of science but also a poetic meditation on literature, science, and the evolution of ideas.
In 1932, world-renowned physicist Wolfgang Pauli had already done the work that would win him the 1945 Nobel Prize. He was also suffering after a series of troubling personal events. He was drinking heavily, quarrelling frequently, and experiencing powerful, disturbing dreams. Pauli turned to C. G. Jung for help, forging an extraordinary intellectual conjunction not just between a physicist and a psychologist but between physics and psychology. As their acquaintance developed, Jung and Pauli discussed the nature of dreams and their relation to reality, finding surprising common ground between depth psychology and quantum physics and profoundly influencing each other's work. This portrait of an incredible friendship will fascinate readers interested in psychology, science, creativity, and genius.
Besides containing insights from both expert scientists and theologians, The Trinity and an Entangled World considers the way in which these parallel insights can contribute to a harmonious dialogue between science and religion. --Book Jacket.
Observability and Scientific Realism It is commonly thought that the birth of modern natural science was made possible by an intellectual shift from a mainly abstract and specuJative conception of the world to a carefully elaborated image based on observations. There is some grain of truth in this claim, but this grain depends very much on what one takes observation to be. In the philosophy of science of our century, observation has been practically equated with sense perception. This is understandable if we think of the attitude of radical empiricism that inspired Ernst Mach and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, who powerfully influenced our century's philosophy of science. However, th...
Whether in science or in international politics, neutrality has sometimes been promoted, not only as a viable political alternative but as a lofty ideal – in politics by nations proclaiming their peacefulness, in science as an underpinning of epistemology, in journalism and other intellectual pursuits as a foundation of a professional ethos. Time and again scientists and other intellectuals have claimed their endeavors to be neutral, elevated above the world of partisan conflict and power politics. This volume studies the resonances between neutrality in science and culture and neutrality in politics. By analyzing the activities of scientists, intellectuals, and politicians (sometimes over...