You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A groundbreaking theoretical physicist traces his career, reflecting on the successes and failures, triumphs and insecurities of a life cut short by cancer. The groundbreaking theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski explained the genesis of his memoir this way: “Having only two bodies of knowledge, myself and physics, I decided to write an autobiography about my development as a theoretical physicist.” In this posthumously published account of his life and work, Polchinski (1954–2018) describes successes and failures, triumphs and insecurities, and the sheer persistence that led to his greatest discoveries. Writing engagingly and accessibly, with the wry humor for which he was known, P...
Loop quantum gravity is one of the modern contenders for a unified description of quantum mechanics and gravity. Up to now no book has covered the material at the level of a college student or of other readers with some knowledge of college level physics. This book fills that gap.
Lee Smolin offers a new theory of the universe that is at once elegant, comprehensive, and radically different from anything proposed before. Smolin posits that a process of self organization like that of biological evolution shapes the universe, as it develops and eventually reproduces through black holes, each of which may result in a new big bang and a new universe. Natural selection may guide the appearance of the laws of physics, favoring those universes which best reproduce. The result would be a cosmology according to which life is a natural consequence of the fundamental principles on which the universe has been built, and a science that would give us a picture of the universe in which, as the author writes, "the occurrence of novelty, indeed the perpetual birth of novelty, can be understood." Smolin is one of the leading cosmologists at work today, and he writes with an expertise and force of argument that will command attention throughout the world of physics. But it is the humanity and sharp clarity of his prose that offers access for the layperson to the mind bending space at the forefront of today's physics.
It is with great joy that we present a collection of essays written in honour of Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, who completed 60 years of age on July 19, 1998, by his friends and colleagues, including several of his for mer students. Jayant has had a long research career in astrophysics and cosmology, which he began at Cambridge in 1960, as a student of Sir Fred Hoyle. He started his work with a big bang, expounding on the steady state theory of the Universe and creating a new theory of gravity inspired by Mach's principle. He also worked on action-at-a-distance electrodynamics, inspired by the explorations of Wheeler, Feynman and Hogarth in that direction. This body of work established Jayant's re...
This book focus on examining the thermodynamic properties of various prominent field theories concerning high-energy and condensed matter physics. We make the usage of the theory of ensembles to perform our analysis. At the beginning, we supply the thermodynamic properties based on the formalism of canonical ensemble to the Aharonov-Bohm quantum ring considering both scenarios: the relativistic and the non-relativistic cases. Next, we construct a model in order to study quantum gases. In this context, we examine bosons, fermions and spinless particles within the grand-canonical ensemble taking into account two different approaches: interacting and noninteracting particles. To corroborate our...
Quantum cosmology has gradually emerged as the focus of devoted research, mostly within the second half of last century. As we entered the 21st century, the subject is still very much alive. The outcome of results and templates for investigation have been enlarged, some very recent and fascinating. Hence this book, where the authors bequeath some of their views, as they believe this current century is the one where quantum cosmology will be fully accomplished.Though some aspects are not discussed (namely, supersymmetry or loop structures), there are perhaps a set of challenges that in the authors' opinion remain, some since the dawn of quantum mechanics and applications to cosmology. Others ...
Presents a collection of essays that examine contemporary research in quantum physics, including a discussion of its origins, principles, and evolving theories.
Contents:CPT, SSB, Ether, and All That (Y Nambu)Sub-Millimeter Tests of the Gravitational Inverse Square Law (E G Adelberger)Test of CPT and Lorentz Invariance from Muonium Spectroscopy (D Kawall et al.)Study of CPT Violation at BELLE (Y Sakai)Tests of CPT and Lorentz Symmetry Using Hydrogen and Noble-Gas Masers (R L Walsworth)CPT and Lorentz Tests with Clocks in Space (N E Russell)CPT Results from KTeV (H Nguyen)Physical Instances of Noncommuting Coordinates (R Jackiw)Torsion Balance Tests of Spin Coupled Forces (B R Heckel)Prospects for Symmetry Breaking in String Theory (R Potting)Cold Antihydrogen and CPT (G Gabrielse et al.)and other papers Readership: Theoretical and experimental physicists with an interest in relativity and space-time symmetries. Keywords:
Proceedings of the 10th Hellenic Relativity Conference on Recent Developments in Gravity, held in Kalithea, Chalkidiki, Greece from May 30 to June 2, 2002.
The first part is devoted to the topic of quantum gravity and string theories, mainly concerned with recent authoritative results in the study of discretizations in classical and quantum general relativity, non-commutative theories of gravity, (2+1)-dimensional supergravity, and Berezin description of Kaehler quotients. The field to particle transition problem is also considered. The second part deals with cosmology and black holes. Here, cosmological, inflationary, and braneworld scenarios are investigated. Moreover, some scalar field models for the dark matter content of the universe as well as new models of protostellar collapse and fragmentation are presented. This part includes also a s...