For over a hundred and fifty years, the rarest and most valuable substance in the solar system has been mined from the only location where it exists in significant quantity: Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. For all of this time, the remote mining outpost has been serviced by clone slaves who are drugged into mindlessness, and all of it has been monitored, controlled, and administered by the artificial intelligence known as Prinox. But what happens when a failed rescue mission causes a small band of escaped clones to begin questioning their lives, their society, and their very existence? Hunted by deadly killing machines, confused and scared, these renegade slaves are about to find out--for better or worse--just what it means to be human.
This book focuses on one mechanism in black hole physics which has proven to be universal, multifaceted and with a rich phenomenology: rotational superradiance. This is an energy extraction process, whereby black holes can deposit their rotational energy in their surroundings, leading to Penrose processes, black-hole bombs, and even Hawking radiation. Black holes are key players in star formation mechanisms and as engines to some of the most violent events in our universe. Their simplicity and compactness make them perfect laboratories, ideally suited to probe new fields or modifications to the theory of gravity. Thus, black holes can also be used to probe some of the most important open problems in physics, including the nature of dark matter or the strong CP problem in particle physics. This monograph is directed to researchers and graduate students and provides a unified view of the subject, covering the theoretical machinery, experimental efforts in the laboratory, and astrophysics searches. It is focused on recent developments and works out a number of novel examples and applications, ranging from fundamental physics to astrophysics. Non-specialists with a scientific background should also find this text a valuable resource for understanding the critical issues of contemporary research in black-hole physics. This second edition stresses the role of ergoregions in superradiance, and completes its catalogue of energy-extraction processes. It presents a unified description of instabilities of spinning black holes in the presence of massive fields. Finally, it covers the first experimental observation of superradiance, and reviews the state-of-the-art in the searches for new light fields in the universe using superradiance as a mechanism.
Even if you're not a programmer, you can quickly learn to write macros, automate tasks, and create custom applications for Office 2007 with Microsoft'sVisual Basic for Applications (VBA) and the in-depth instruction in this comprehensive guide. You'll jump right into the basics of recording and running macros with Office's built-in Macro Recorder, before quickly moving to the essentials of VBA syntax, using loops and functions, building effective code, and programming applications in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access. Includes pages of real-world examples and techniques.
Meteorology at the Millennium details recent advances in meteorology and explores its interfaces with science, technology, and society. Ways in which modern meteorology is contributing to the developments in other sciences are described, as well as how atmospheric scientists are learning from colleagues in related disciplines. Meteorology at the Millennium will serve as a point of reference for students and researchers of meteorology and climatology for many years to come. The areas covered include weather prediction at the millennium, climate variability and change, atmosphere-ocean coupling, the biogeochemical system, weather on other planets. This book is a compilation of the best invited papers presented at a conference celebrating the 150 years of the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS).
Ultracold atomic gases is a rapidly developing field of physics that attracts many young researchers around the world. This book gives a comprehensive overview of exciting developments in Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity from a theoretical perspective and makes sense of key experiments with a special focus on ultracold atomic gases.
