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This is the first major history of Imperial College London. The book tells the story of a new type of institution that came into being in 1907 with the federation of three older colleges. Imperial College was founded by the state for advanced university-level training in science and technology, and for the promotion of research in support of industry throughout the British Empire. True to its name the college built a wide number of Imperial links and was an outward looking institution from the start. Today, in the post-colonial world, it retains its outward-looking stance, both in its many international research connections, and with staff and students from around the world. Connections to industry and the state remain important. The College is one of BritainOCOs premier research and teaching institutions, including now medicine alongside science and engineering. This book is an in-depth study of Imperial College; it covers both governance and academic activity within the larger context of political, economic and socio-cultural life in twentieth-century Britain."
This book provides a challenging and stimulating introduction to the contemporary topics of complexity and criticality, and explores their common basis of scale invariance, a central unifying theme of the book.Criticality refers to the behaviour of extended systems at a phase transition where scale invariance prevails. The many constituent microscopic parts bring about macroscopic phenomena that cannot be understood by considering a single part alone. The phenomenology of phase transitions is introduced by considering percolation, a simple model with a purely geometrical phase transition, thus enabling the reader to become intuitively familiar with concepts such as scale invariance and renor...
The Nobel Prize, as founded in Alfred Nobel's will, was the first truly international prize. There is no other award with the same global scope and mission. The Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (from 1969) have not only captured the most significant contributions to the progress of mankind, they also constitute distinct markers of the major trends in their respective areas. The main reason for the prestige of the Prize today is, however, the lasting importance of the names on the list of Laureates and their contributions to human development. In celebration of the centennial of the Nobel Prize in ...
Building on the material learned by students in their first few years of study, Topics in Statistical Mechanics (Second Edition) presents an advanced level course on statistical and thermal physics. It begins with a review of the formal structure of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics considered from a unified viewpoint. There is a brief revision of non-interacting systems, including quantum gases and a discussion of negative temperatures. Following this, emphasis is on interacting systems. First, weakly interacting systems are considered, where the interest is in seeing how small interactions cause small deviations from the non-interacting case. Second, systems are examined where inter...
A synthesis of biomechanics and neural control that draws on recent advances in robotics to address control problems solved by the human sensorimotor system. This book proposes a transdisciplinary approach to investigating human motor control that synthesizes musculoskeletal biomechanics and neural control. The authors argue that this integrated approach—which uses the framework of robotics to understand sensorimotor control problems—offers a more complete and accurate description than either a purely neural computational approach or a purely biomechanical one. The authors offer an account of motor control in which explanatory models are based on experimental evidence using mathematical ...
At colleges and universities throughout the United States, political protest and intellectual dissent are increasingly being met with repressive tactics by administrators, politicians, and the police—from the use of SWAT teams to disperse student protestors and the profiling of Muslim and Arab American students to the denial of tenure and dismissal of politically engaged faculty. The Imperial University brings together scholars, including some who have been targeted for their open criticism of American foreign policy and settler colonialism, to explore the policing of knowledge by explicitly linking the academy to the broader politics of militarism, racism, nationalism, and neoliberalism t...
The definitive history of how witchcraft and black magic have survived, through the modern era and into the present dayCursed Britain unveils the enduring power of witchcraft, curses and black magic in modern times. Few topics are so secretive or controversial. Yet, whether in the 1800s or the early 2000s, when disasters struck or personal misfortunes mounted, many Britons found themselves believing in things they had previously dismissed – dark supernatural forces.Historian Thomas Waters here explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. Waters takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-r...
Congenital malformations of the heart are often dismissed as a form of complex heart disease, which is too difficult to understand, and is best referred to the specialists. The authors of this handbook, however, aim to dispel this myth. The advent of cross-sectional and, more recently, three-dimensional echocardiography, enables the structural malformations to be visualised virtually non-invasively. Without a thorough understanding of the arrangement of cardiac structures, interpretation of these images can be very frustrating, not to mention having to cope with difficult terminology. Contrary to popular belief, however, the reader does not require a knowledge of cardiac embryology in order ...
In the second half of the nineteenth century, British firms and engineers built, laid, and ran a vast global network of submarine telegraph cables. For the first time, cities around the world were put into almost instantaneous contact, with profound effects on commerce, international affairs, and the dissemination of news. Science, too, was strongly affected, as cable telegraphy exposed electrical researchers to important new phenomena while also providing a new and vastly larger market for their expertise. By examining the deep ties that linked the cable industry to work in electrical physics in the nineteenth century - culminating in James Clerk Maxwell's formulation of his theory of the electromagnetic field - Bruce J. Hunt sheds new light both on the history of the Victorian British Empire and on the relationship between science and technology.
This is the 2nd edition of the book, Flow Visualization: Techniques and Examples, which was published by Imperial College Press in 2000. Many of the chapters have been revised and updated to take into consideration recent changes in a number of flow visualization and measurement techniques, including an updated high quality flow gallery. Unique among similar publications, this book focuses on the practical rather than theoretical aspects. Obtaining high quality flow visualization results is, in many ways, more of an art than a science, and experience plays a key deciding role. The depth and breadth of the material will make this book invaluable to readers of all levels of experience in the field.