The action of the book takes place in 2056. The life of the main character – a famous Professor of mathematics changes as soon as he visits his homeland. The book is permeated with the thoughts of the hero, which reveal his personal life, the process of mental research and discoveries. The unification of all Sciences into a single science is on the agenda. Symmetry is the cornerstone of this great union. The quantum revolution is in full swing.
Ludmila Naumova, born in 1964, Yekaterinburg, Russia, science fiction writer. The author’s field of view includes scientific achievements of mathematics, physics and philosophy.
The fantastic reality that is modern physics is open for your exploration, guided by one of its primary architects and interpreters, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek. Some jokes, some poems, and extracts from wife Betsy Devine's sparkling chronicle of what it's like to live through a Nobel Prize provide easy entertainment. There's also some history, some philosophy, some exposition of frontier science, and some frontier science, for your lasting edification. 49 pieces, including many from Wilczek's award-winning Reference Frame columns in Physics Today, and some never before published, are gathered by style and subject into a dozen chapters, each with a revealing, witty introduction. Profound ideas, presented with style: What could be better? Enjoy.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Michael Marinov, the theorist who together with Felix Berezin introduced the classical description of spin by anticommuting Grassmann variables. The Volume contains original papers and reviews of physicists and mathematicians written specifically for this book. These articles reflect the current status and recent developments in the areas of Marinov's research interests: quantum tunneling, quantization of constrained systems, supersymmetry and others. Included personal recollections portray a human face of Michael Marinov, a person of great knowledge and integrity.
This volume comprises the contributions to the proceedings of Deserfest — a festschrift in honor of Stanley Deser. Many of Stanley Deser's colleagues and longtime collaborators, including Richard Arnowitt and Charles Misner of “ADM” fame, contribute insighted article. Ranging from lower dimensional gravity theories all the way to supergravity in eleven dimensions and M-theory, the papers highlight the wide impact that Deser has had in the field.
Over the last forty years, scientists have uncovered evidence that if the Universe had been forged with even slightly different properties, life as we know it - and life as we can imagine it - would be impossible. Join us on a journey through how we understand the Universe, from its most basic particles and forces, to planets, stars and galaxies, and back through cosmic history to the birth of the cosmos. Conflicting notions about our place in the Universe are defined, defended and critiqued from scientific, philosophical and religious viewpoints. The authors' engaging and witty style addresses what fine-tuning might mean for the future of physics and the search for the ultimate laws of nature. Tackling difficult questions and providing thought-provoking answers, this volumes challenges us to consider our place in the cosmos, regardless of our initial convictions.
‘Witty, approachable and captivating’ - Robin Ince ‘A fascinating exploration of how we learned what matter really is’ - Sean Carroll ‘A delightfully fresh and accessible approach to one of the great quests of science’ - Graham Farmelo ‘Lays out not just what we know, but how we found out (and what is left to be discovered’ - Katie Mack ‘If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe’ - Carl Sagan Inspired by Sagan’s famous line, How To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch sets out on a journey to unearth everything we know about our universe: how it started, how we found out, and what we still have left to discover. Will we ever be able to understand the very first moments of the world we inhabit? What is matter really made of? How did anything survive the fearsome heat of the Big Bang? In pursuit of answers, we meet the scientists, astronomers and philosophers who brought us to our present understanding of the world – offering readers a front-row seat to the most dramatic journey human beings have ever embarked on. Harry Cliff's How To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch is an essential, fresh and funny guide to how we got to where we are now – and what we have to come.
From acclaimed science author Jim Baggot, a lively, provocative, and “intellectually gratifying” critique of modern theoretical physics (The Economist). Where does one draw the line between solid science and fairy-tale physics? Jim Baggott argues that there is no observational or experimental evidence for many of the ideas of modern theoretical physics: super-symmetric particles, super strings, the multiverse, the holographic principle, or the anthropic cosmological principle. Unafraid to challenge prominent theorists, Baggott offers engaging portraits of many central figures of modern physics, including Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, John D. Barrow, Brian Greene, and Leonard Susskind. Informed, comprehensive, and balanced, Farewell to Reality discusses the latest ideas about the nature of physical reality while clearly distinguishing between fact and fantasy, providing essential and entertaining reading for everyone interested in what we know and don’t know about the nature of the universe and reality itself.
A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality. For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe? In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These strange numbers include Graham’s number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, because to do so would take so much time that the universe would experience a Poincaré Recurrence—resetting to precisely the state it currently holds, down to the arrangement of individual atoms; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more than just a moment, to extend beyond the size of a single atom—in other words, the mystery of our unexpected universe. Leading us down the rabbit hole to a deeper understanding of reality, Padilla explains how these unusual numbers are the key to understanding such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes, relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant—that the two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the universe contradict one another. Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them is a combination of popular and cutting-edge science—and a lively, entertaining, and even funny exploration of the most fundamental truths about the universe.
Die Elementarteilchenphysik ist auf der ganzen Welt ein fester Bestandteil im Curriculum des Physikstudiums. Umso wichtiger ist es daher, dass auf diesem Gebiet bereits in den ersten Semestern ein solides Wissensfundament gelegt wird - nicht zuletzt als Vorbereitung auf die Themenbereiche Hochenergie- oder Kernphysik. In diesen Band ist die gesamte Lehrerfahrung von David Griffiths eingeflossen - eine begehrte "Ware", die in der Neuauflage nun auch ein Lösungsmanual präsentiert, das die zahlreichen Aufgaben und Fragen der Kapitelenden aufnimmt. Der Autor versteht es, sich den Themen in einer lebendigen Sprache zu nähern, die jedoch im Hinblick auf Präzision keine Kompromisse eingeht. So eröffnet der Band den Zugang zu den Theorien ebenso wie zu Modellen und Rechenoperationen. Das Werk wird von vielen Lehrenden empfohlen und kann bereits jetzt als Klassiker innerhalb der einführenden Werke zur Elementarteilchenphysik bezeichnet werden.