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In the follow-up to his acclaimed Science in the Looking Glass, Brian Davies discusses deep problems about our place in the world, using a minimum of technical jargon. The book argues that 'absolutist' ideas of the objectivity of science, dating back to Plato, continue to mislead generations of both theoretical physicists and theologians. It explains that the multi-layered nature of our present descriptions of the world is unavoidable, not because of anything about the world, but because of our own human natures. It tries to rescue mathematics from the singular and exceptional status that it has been assigned, as much by those who understand it as by those who do not. Working throughout from direct quotations from many of the important contributors to its subject, it concludes with a penetrating criticism of many of the recent contributions to the often acrimonious debates about science and religions.
This book is an updated version of the classic 1987 monograph "Spectral Theory and Differential Operators".The original book was a cutting edge account of the theory of bounded and closed linear operators in Banach and Hilbert spaces relevant to spectral problems involving differential equations. It is accessible to a graduate student as well as meeting the needs of seasoned researchers in mathematics and mathematical physics. This revised edition corrects various errors, and adds extensive notes to the end of each chapter which describe the considerable progress that has been made on the topic in the last 30 years.
Heat Kernels and Spectral Theory investigates the theory of second-order elliptic operators.
This book could be used either for self-study or as a course text, and aims to lead the reader to the more advanced literature on partial differential operators.
How do scientific conjectures become laws? Why does proof mean different things in different sciences? Do numbers exist, or were they invented? Why do some laws turn out to be wrong?In this wide-ranging book, Brian Davies discusses the basis for scientists' claims to knowledge about the world. He looks at science historically, emphasizing not only the achievements of scientists from Galileo onwards, but also their mistakes. He rejects the claim that all scientific knowledge is provisional, by citing examples from chemistry, biology and geology. A major feature of the book is its defence of the view that mathematics was invented rather than discovered. While experience hasshown that disentangling knowledge from opinion and aspiration is a hard task, this book provides a clear guide to the difficulties.Full of illuminating examples and quotations, and with a scope ranging from psychology and evolution to quantum theory and mathematics, this book brings alive issues at the heart of all science.
This volume presents an introduction to Aquinas and a guide to his thinking on almost all the major topics on which he wrote. The book begins with an account of Aquinas's life and the historical context of his thought. The subsequent sections address topics that Aquinas himself discussed. The final sections of the volume address the development of Aquinas's thought and its historical influence.
This book is intended to serve as introductory and reference material for the application of integral transforms to a range of common mathematical problems. It has its im mediate origin in lecture notes prepared for senior level courses at the Australian National University, although I owe a great deal to my colleague Barry Ninham, a matter to which I refer below. In preparing the notes for publication as a book, I have added a considerable amount of material ad- tional to the lecture notes, with the intention of making the book more useful, particularly to the graduate student - volved in the solution of mathematical problems in the physi cal, chemical, engineering and related sciences. Any book is necessarily a statement of the author's viewpoint, and involves a number of compromises. My prime consideration has been to produce a work whose scope is selective rather than encyclopedic; consequently there are many facets of the subject which have been omitted--in not a few cases after a preliminary draft was written--because I v believe that their inclusion would make the book too long.
This book presents elements of the theory of chaos in dynamical systems in a framework of theoretical understanding coupled with numerical and graphical experimentation. It describes the theory of fractals, focusing on the importance of scaling and ordinary differential equations.