You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This collection of essays explores the significance of modern chaos theory as a new paradigm in literary studies and argues for the usefulness of borrowings from one discipline to another. Its thesis is that external reality is real and is not merely a social construct. On the other hand, this volume reflects the belief that literature, as a social and cultural construct, is not unrelated to that external reality. The authors represented here furthermore believe that learning to communicate across disciplinary divides is worth the risk of looking silly to purists and dogmatists. In applying a contemporary scientific grid to a by-gone era, the authors play out Steven Weinberg's exhortation to...
POPULAR BOOK
Complex plasmas are dusty plasmas in which the density and electric charges of the dust grains are sufficiently high to induce long-range grain-grain interactions, as well as strong absorption of charged-plasma components. Together with the sources replenishing the plasma such systems form a highly dissipative thermodynamically open system that exhibits many features of collective behaviour generally found in complex systems. Most notably among them are self-organized patterns such as plasma crystals, plasma clusters, dust stars and further spectacular new structures. Beyond their intrinsic scientific interest, the study of complex plasmas grows in importance in a great variety of fields, ra...
This book tells the inside story of Germany's first contributions to space research by experiments with artificial plasma clouds in space. In this autobiography, Gerhard Haerendel, former director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, describes his 60 adventurous years in space research. The narrative of exciting events—covering 40 years of rocket and satellite work–is underpinned with accessible accounts of the actual physical phenomena and processes involved. The reader also learns about how the goals set by a visionary astrophysicist eventually led to one of Germany's first major contributions to space research by the creation of artificial comets in the solar wind...
Proceedings of the Summer Advanced Study Institute held at Graz, Austria, August 4-15, 1975
This book is about intersections among science, philosophy, and literature. It bridges the gap between the traditional "cultures" of science and the humanities by constituting an area of interaction that some have called a "third culture." By asking questions about three disciplines rather than about just two, as is customary in research, this inquiry breaks new ground and resists easy categorization. It seeks to answer the following questions: What impact has the remapping of reality in scientific terms since the Copernican Revolution through thermodynamics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics had on the way writers and thinkers conceptualized the place of human culture within the tota...
In our daily lives we conceive of our surroundings as an objectively given reality. The world is perceived through our senses, and ~hese provide us, so we believe, with a faithful image of the world. But occ~ipnally we are forced to realize that our senses deceive us, e. g. , by illusions. For a while it was believed that the sensation of color is directly r~lated to the frequency of light waves, until E. Land (the inventor of the polaroid camera) showed in detailed experiments that our perception of, say, a colored spot depends on the colors of its surrounding. On the other hand, we may experience hallucinations or dreams as real. Quite evidently, the relationship between the "world" and ou...
The two experimental studies reported in this thesis contribute important new knowledge about phase transitions in two-dimensional complex plasmas: in one case a determination of the coupling parameter (ratio of mean potential to mean kinetic energy of the particles in an ensemble), and in the other a detailed characterization of the non-equilibrium recrystallization of a two-dimensional system. The latter results are used to establish the connection between structural order parameters and the kinetic energy, which in turn gives novel insights into the underlying physical processes determining the two-dimensional phase transition.
Responding to a new interest in thematic studies, the volume features essays by some of the leading scholars from the United States and Europe. In honor of Horst S. Daemmrich, the co-author with Ingrid Daemmrich of the handbook Themes and Motifs in Western Literature, the contributors reassess, both in theory and in case studies, the viability of thematics as part of contemporary literary criticism. They demonstrate the broad scope of methodologies between strict systematization of themes and motifs and reader-response conceptions of 'theming.' Special topics include a thematology of the Jewish people; motifs in folklore; a cluster on madness, hysteria, and mastery; the story of Judith; Cinderella; thematics in Dürrenmatt and Isaac Babel; chaos as a theme. A concluding chapter illuminates aspects of nineteenth-century literary history.
Focuses on a very significant psycho-cultural concept (that of "agonistics" or "contestatory creativity") with ramifications in several areas of the postmodern debate: cultural philosophy, psychologies of race, gender and the body, and narratology.