In 1992, many scientists gathered to honour C.N. Yang on his 70th birthday. This volume documents the scientific contributions resulting from that conference, and features several biographical and historical contributions that discuss the impact that C.N. Yang has had on research.
'The book is an engaging and influential collection of significant contributions from an assembly of world expert leaders and pioneers from different fields, working at the interface between topology and physics or applications of topology to physical systems … The book explores many interesting and novel topics that lie at the intersection between gravity, quantum fields, condensed matter, physical cosmology and topology … A rich, well-organized, and comprehensive overview of remarkable and insightful connections between physics and topology is here made available to the physics reader.'Contemporary PhysicsSince its birth in Poincaré's seminal 1894 'Analysis Situs', topology has become a cornerstone of mathematics. As with all beautiful mathematical concepts, topology inevitably — resonating with that Wignerian principle of the effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences — finds its prominent role in physics. From Chern-Simons theory to topological quantum field theory, from knot invariants to Calabi-Yau compactification in string theory, from spacetime topology in cosmology to the recent Nobel Prize winning work on topological insulators, the interactions between topology and physics have been a triumph over the past few decades.In this eponymous volume, we are honoured to have contributions from an assembly of grand masters of the field, guiding us with their world-renowned expertise on the subject of the interplay between 'Topology' and 'Physics'. Beginning with a preface by Chen Ning Yang on his recollections of the early days, we proceed to a novel view of nuclei from the perspective of complex geometry by Sir Michael Atiyah and Nick Manton, followed by an entrée toward recent developments in two-dimensional gravity and intersection theory on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces by Robbert Dijkgraaf and Edward Witten; a study of Majorana fermions and relations to the Braid group by Louis H Kauffman; a pioneering investigation on arithmetic gauge theory by Minhyong Kim; an anecdote-enriched review of singularity theorems in black-hole physics by Sir Roger Penrose; an adventure beyond anyons by Zhenghan Wang; an aperçu on topological insulators from first-principle calculations by Haijun Zhang and Shou-Cheng Zhang; finishing with synopsis on quantum information theory as one of the four revolutions in physics and the second quantum revolution by Xiao-Gang Wen. We hope that this book will serve to inspire the research community.
Lee Kuan Yew through the Eyes of Chinese Scholars is a compilation of essays by highly-respected Chinese scholars in which they evaluate the life, work and philosophy of Lee Kuan Yew, founding Prime Minister of Singapore. Presenting a range of views from a uniquely Chinese/Asian perspective, this book provides valuable insights for those who wish to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of Lee Kuan Yew — the man, as well as Singapore — his nation.Marking the momentous event of his death as well as the 50th anniversary of Singapore's independence in 2015, this compilation reflects both the high regard in which Lee Kuan Yew is held across the Chinese-speaking world as well as the reservations of a few. The contributors are all ethnic Chinese from different academic disciplines ranging from a Nobel laureate in physics, Chen-Ning Yang, to historians, economists and political scientists. They include Singaporeans such as Wang Gungwu and Chew Cheng Hai, as well as scholars from China, the US and Hong Kong such as Yongnian Zheng, Ying-Shih Yu, Lawrence Lau and Hang-Chi Lam among others.Originally published in Chinese, this English translation makes the material accessible to a wider English-reading audience.
This memorial volume in honor of Dr Akira Tonomura is to commemorate his enormous contributions to fundamental physics in addition to the basic technology of electron microscopy. Dr Tonomura passed away on May 2, 2012 at the age of 70. He was Fellow of Hitachi, Ltd., Group Director of Single Quantum Dynamics Research Group of RIKEN, Principal Investigator of the FIRST Tonomura Project, and Professor of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University. The book consists of: 1) contributions from distinguished physicists, who participated in the OC Tonomura FIRST International Symposium on Electron Microscopy and Gauge FieldsOCO planned by Tonomura himself and held in Tokyo on May 9OCo10, 2012, and 2) reprints of key papers by Tonomura and his team. Invited speakers at this Symposium include Chen Ning Yang and other distinguished physicists such as Yakir Aharonov, Gordon Baym, Christian Colliex, Anthony J Leggett, Naoto Nagaosa, Nobuyuki Osakabe and Masahito Ueda. This OC memorialOCO Symposium was originally planned to commemorate the start of the Japanese-government-sponsored FIRST Tonomura Project to construct the 1.2 MV holography electron microscope capable of observing quantum phenomena in the microscopic world. In addition, the book includes contributions from participants of the past ISQM-Tokyo symposia held at Hitachi and from Tonomura''s longtime friends, including Michael Berry, Jerome Friedman, Hidetoshi Fukuyama, Joseph Imry, Yoshinori Tokura, Jaw-Shen Tsai, and Anton Zeilinger. The co-editors are Kazuo Fujikawa, Tonomura''s longtime friend, and Yoshimasa A Ono who is Tonomura''s associate at Hitachi Advanced Research Laboratory and now in the FIRST Tonomura Project. Contents: My Dream of Ultimate Holography Electron Microscope (Akira Tonomura); Biography of Akira Tonomura (April 1942 OCo May 2012) (Nobuyuki Osakabe); Tonomura FIRST International Symposium on OC Electron Microscopy and Gauge FieldsOCO (Yoshimasa A Ono); Recollections of Akira Tonomura: Thank You and Farewell to Tonomura-kun (Hidetoshi Fukuyama); Remembering Akira Tonomura (Michael Berry); Akira Tonomura: An Experimental Visionary (Anton Zeilinger); Dr. Akira Tonomura: Master of Experimental Physics (Kazuo Fujikawa); Gauge Theory and Aharonov-Bohm Effect: Topology and Gauge Theory in Physics (Chen Ning Yang); On the Aharonov-Bohm Effect and Why Heisenberg Captures Nonlocality Better Than SchrAdinger (Yakir Aharonov); How the Test of Aharonov-Bohm Effect was Initiated at Hitachi Laboratory (Nobuyuki Osakabe); Some Reflections Concerning Geometrical Phases (Anthony J Leggett and Yiruo Lin); Mesoscopic Aharonov-Bohm Interferometers: Decoherence and Thermoelectric Transport (Ora Entin-Wohlman, Amnon Aharony and Yoseph Imry); Spin Textures and Gauge Fields in Frustrated Magnets (Naoto Nagaosa and Yoshinori Tokura); Gauge Theory and Artificial Spin Ices: Imaging Emergent Monopoles with Electron Microscopy (Shawn D Pollard and Yimei Zhu); Do Dispersionless Forces Exist? (Herman Batelaan and Scot McGregor); Aharonov-Bohm Effect and Geometric Phases OCo Exact and Approximate Topology (Kazuo Fujikawa); A Brief Overview and Topological Aspects of Gaseous Bose-Einstein Condensates (Masahito Ueda); Application of Electron Microscopy to Quantum Mechanics and Materials Sciences: Mapping Electric Fields with Inelastic Electrons in a Transmission Electron Microscope (Christian Colliex); OC The Picture is My LifeOCO (Shuji Hasegawa); Direct Observation of Electronically Phase-Separated Charge Density Waves in Lu 2 Ir 3 Si 5 by Transmission Electron Microscopy (Cheng-Hsuan Chen); Basic Discoveries in Electromagnetic Field Visualization (Daisuke Shindo); Nanomagnetism Visualized by Electron Holography (Hyun Soon Park); Quantum Physics: Probing the Proton with Electron Microscopy (Jerome I Friedman); Hanbury BrownOCoTwiss Interferometry with Electrons: Coulomb vs. Quantum Statistics (Gordon Baym and Kan Shen); Vortex Molecules in Thin Films of Layered Superconductors (Alexander I Buzdin); Coherent Quantum Phase Slip (Jaw-Shen Tsai); Coherency of Spin Precession in Metallic Lateral Spin Valves (YoshiChika Otani, Hiroshi Idzuchi and Yasuhiro Fukuma); Transverse Relativistic Effects in Paraxial Wave Interference (Konstantin Y Bliokh, Yana V Izdebskaya and Franco Nori). Readership: Graduate students and researchers in physics, materials science and related fields."
The purpose of this book is to foster the pursuit of literature and science for people in the world. The book attempts to narrate the struggles endured by the Laureates and the immense joy and awards garnered once their dreams became reality, while at the same time, bringing about momentous benefits to humankind.By chronicling what the Laureates went through in order to win the prestigious awards, the book inspires youth to emulate them in the hope that some young readers might themselves become Laureates one day.
This book is a collection of Professor Chen Ning Yang's personally selected papers (1971-2012) supplemented by his commentaries. Its contents reflect the professor's changing interests after he reached age sixty.
This volume is a collection of the Nobel lectures delivered by the prizewinners, together with their biographies and the presentation speeches by Nobel Committee members for the period 2006-2010. The criterion for the Physics award is to the discoverer of a physical phenomenon that changed our views, or to the inventor of a new physical process that gave enormous benefits to either science at large or to the public. The biographies are remarkably interesting to read and the Nobel lectures provide detailed explanations of the phenomena for which the Laureates were awarded the Nobel Prize.Aspiring young scientists as well as more experienced ones, but also the interested public will learn a lot from and appreciate the geniuses of these narrations.List of prizewinners and their discoveries:(2006) to John C Mather and George F Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation” The very detailed observations that the Laureates have carried out from the COBE satellite have played a major role in the development of modern cosmology into a precise science.(2007) to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg “for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance” Applications of this phenomenon have revolutionized techniques for retrieving data from hard disks. The discovery also plays a major role in various magnetic sensors as well as for the development of a new generation of electronics. The use of Giant Magnetoresistance can be regarded as one of the first major applications of nanotechnology.(2008) to Yoichiro Nambu “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics“, and to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature” Why is there something instead of nothing? Why are there so many different elementary particles? The Laureates presented theoretical insights that give us a deeper understanding of what happens far inside the tiniest building blocks of matter.(2009) to Charles Kuen Kao “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication“, and to Willard S Boyle and George E Smith “for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit — the CCD sensor” Kao's discoveries have paved the way for optical fiber technology, which today is used for almost all telephony and data communication. Boyle and Smith have invented a digital image sensor — CCD, or charge-coupled device — which today has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography.(2010) to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene” The Laureates have shown that a thin flake of ordinary carbon, just one atom thick, has exceptional properties that originate from the remarkable world of quantum physics.
The volume also features extensive university archival material - including correspondence between Fermi and biophysicist Leo Szilard and a letter from Harry Truman - with new introductions that provide context for both the history of physics and the academic tradition at the University of Chicago."--Jacket.
A fascinating tour of particle physics from Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman. At the root of particle physics is an invincible sense of curiosity. Leon Lederman embraces this spirit of inquiry as he moves from the Greeks' earliest scientific observations to Einstein and beyond to chart this unique arm of scientific study. His survey concludes with the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God Particle, which scientists hypothesize will help unlock the last secrets of the subatomic universe, quarks and all--it's the dogged pursuit of this almost mystical entity that inspires Lederman's witty and accessible history.