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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.
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...
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.
This volume provides a self-contained introduction to applications of loop representations in particle physics and quantum gravity, in order to explore the gauge invariant quantization of Yang-Mills theories and gravity. First published in 1996, this title has been reissued as an Open Access publication on Cambridge Core.
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...
For the past 20 years, the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) has been at the forefront of efforts to promote science and science-based developments in the developing world. This history of TWAS, the first of its kind, seeks to examine the forces that led to the creation of the Academy and that have sustained its growth and development ever since. This is a history of an organization that has made a difference in the advancement of science in the developing world and one that has been operated largely by and for scientists from the South. It provides a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities that have driven science in the South over the past two decades and offers a window on the progress that has been made and the enormous amount of work that still needs to be done.
Thanks to Einstein's relativity theories, our notions of space and time underwent profound revisions about a 100 years ago. The resulting interplay between geometry and physics has dominated all of fundamental physics since then. This volume contains contributions from leading researchers, worldwide, who have thought deeply about the nature and consequences of this interplay. The articles take a long-range view of the subject and distill the most important advances in broad terms, making them easily accessible to non-specialists. The first part is devoted to a summary of how relativity theories were born (J Stachel). The second part discusses the most dramatic ramifications of general relati...
This volume contains the conference on quantum topology, held at Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 24 - 28 March 1993.Quantum topology is a rapidly growing field of mathematics dealing with the recently discovered interactions between low-dimensional topology, the theory of quantum groups, category theory, C∗-algebra theory, gauge theory, conformal and topological field theory and statistical mechanics. The conference, attended by over 60 mathematicians and theoretical physicists from Canada, Denmark, England, France, Japan, Poland and the United States, was highlighted by lecture series given by Louis Kauffman, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago and Nicholai Reshetikhin, Univ. of Califonia, Berkeley.
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 ...