This unique book contains a biographical portrait, accounts of Chandrasekhar's role and impact on modern science, historical perspectives and personal reminiscences, several of which appeared in Physics Today, and reviews by leading experts in areas which Prof. Chandrasekhar pioneered. The reviews, which appeared in the Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of India, are either based on papers presented by scholars in the Chandrasekhar Centennial Symposium at the University of Chicago during 15OCo17 October 2010, or were additional reviews covering topics not represented at the conference by other distinguished astrophysicists. It provides a glimpse of some of the most exciting areas of modern astrophysics as a tribute to Prof Chandrasekhar on his birth centenary.
This unique book contains a biographical portrait, accounts of Chandrasekhar's role and impact on modern science, historical perspectives and personal reminiscences, several of which appeared in Physics Today, and reviews by leading experts in areas which Prof. Chandrasekhar pioneered. The reviews, which appeared in the Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of India, are either based on papers presented by scholars in the Chandrasekhar Centennial Symposium at the University of Chicago during 15-17 October 2010, or were additional reviews covering topics not represented at the conference by other distinguished astrophysicists. It provides a glimpse of some of the most exciting areas of modern astrophysics as a tribute to Prof Chandrasekhar on his birth centenary.
Particularly in the humanities and social sciences, festschrifts are a popular forum for discussion. The IJBF provides quick and easy general access to these important resources for scholars and students. The festschrifts are located in state and regional libraries and their bibliographic details are recorded. Since 1983, more than 659,000 articles from more than 30,500 festschrifts, published between 1977 and 2011, have been catalogued.
The objective of spatial analysis techniques is to describe the patterns existing in spatial data and to establish, preferably quantitatively, the relationships between different geographic variables. The notion of spatial analysis in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) environment encompasses the idea of integrating spatial data and alphanumeric attributes and translating it into a series of functions related to selection and data search, on the one hand, and with modeling, on the other. There have been substantial advances in spatial analysis techniques in GIS, mainly in the form of more faithfully apprehending the relationships inherent to the geographic phenomenon, something that was proven impossible to do with non-spatial techniques. Nowadays, spatial analysis involves a set of techniques used to analyze and model variables with distribution in space and/or time. The new era of spatial analysis must also consider the possibilities of integrating artificial intelligence in simulation (geosimulation) processes in computerized environments (geocomputation) in close relationship with models developed in real situations. GIS have emerged as useful tools in geographic modeling processes, helping to answer questions about the time variability of the landscape structure, study the behavior of fire, predict areas of urban expansion, analyze propagation phenomena, model animal movement and behavior, and determine periods and areas of high risk of flooding, among other phenomena. GIS and Spatial Analysis is a critical book that provides different methodologies that combine the potential data (including Big Data) analysis with GIS applications. It gives readers a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art methods of spatial analysis, focusing both on the new philosophical and theoretical foundations for spatial analysis and on a flexible framework for analysis in the real world, for problems such as complexity and uncertainty.
Why is it important to have a revolutionary critical pedagogy? What are the new inter/disciplinary engagements possible within the university? What will it be like to live and learn in this university of the future? Drawing on these essential questions, this volume explores the political future(s) of the university. It does not take a simplistic recourse to the tenets of liberal democracy but seeks a more engaged positioning of the university space within everyday practices of the social. It cross-examines the history of this ‘ideal’ university’s relationship with the banal everyday, the ‘apolitical’ outside and what exceeds intellectual reason, to finally question if such historicizing of the university is necessary at all. Along with its companion The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts, this brave new intervention makes a compelling foray into the political future(s) of the university. It will be of interest to academics, educators and students of the social sciences and humanities, especially education. It will also be of use to policy-makers and education analysts, and be central to the concerns of any citizen.
Stellar dynamics is an interdisciplinary field where mathematics, statistics, physics, and astronomy overlap. The approaches to studying a stellar system include dealing with the collisionless Boltzmann equation, the Chandrasekhar equations, and stellar hydrodynamic equations, which are comparable to the equations of motion of a compressible viscous fluid. Their equivalence gives rise to the closure problem, connected with the higher-order moments of the stellar velocity distribution, which is explained and solved for maximum entropy distributions and for any velocity distribution function, depending on a polynomial function in the velocity variables. On the other hand, the Milky Way kinematics in the solar neighbourhood needs to be described as a mixture distribution accounting for the stellar populations composing the Galactic components. As such, the book offers a statistical study, according to the moments and cumulants of a population mixture, and a dynamical approach, according to a superposition of Chandrasekhar stellar systems, connected with the potential function and the symmetries of the model.
In a time of spectacular developments in the new astronomy, the concept of black holes captures top honors. As scientific evidence for them mounts, black holes loom as an ominous development in the life, measured in billions of years, of the universe.
From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
The true history of physics can only be read in the life stories of those who made its progress possible. Matvei Bronstein was one of those for whom the vast territory of theoretical physics was as familiar as his own home: he worked in cosmology, nuclear physics, gravitation, semiconductors, atmospheric physics, quantum electrodynamics, astro physics and the relativistic quantum theory. Everyone who knew him was struck by his wide knowledge, far beyond the limits of his trade. This partly explains why his life was closely intertwined with the social, historical and scientific context of his time. One might doubt that during his short life Bronstein could have made truly weighty contributions to science and have become, in a sense, a symbol ofhis time. Unlike mathematicians and poets, physicists reach the peak oftheir careers after the age of thirty. His thirty years of life, however, proved enough to secure him a place in theGreaterSovietEncyclopedia. In 1967, in describing the first generation of physicists educated after the 1917 revolution, Igor Tamm referred to Bronstein as "an exceptionally brilliant and promising" theoretician [268].
In light of the barrage of popular books on physics and cosmology, one may question the need for another. Here, two books especially come to mind: Steven Weinberg's The First Three Minutes, written 12 years ago, and the recent best-seller ABriefHistory of Time by Stephen Hawking. The two books are complementary. Weinberg-Nobel prize winner/physicist-wrote from the standpoint of an elementary particle physicist with emphasis on the contents of the universe, whereas Hawking wrote more as a general relativist with emphasis on gravity and the geometry of the universe. Neither one, however, presented the complete story. Weinberg did not 13 venture back beyond the time when temperature was higher than 10 K and 32 perhaps as high as 10 K. He gave no explanation for the origin of particles and the singularity or source of the overwhelming radiation energy in our uni verse of one billion photons for each proton. Hawking presents a uni verse that has no boundaries, was not created, and will not be destroyed. The object of this book is to describe my new theory on the creation of our uni verse in a multi-universe cosmos. The new cosmological model eliminates the troublesome singularity-big bang theory and explains for the first time the origin of matter and the overwhelming electromagnetic radiation contained in the universe. My new theory also predicted the existence ofhigh-energy gamma rays, which were recendy detected in powerful bursts.
