Download or read book Drawing Theories Apart written by David Kaiser and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-11-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics since the middle of the twentieth century. Introduced by the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) soon after World War II as a means of simplifying lengthy calculations in quantum electrodynamics, they soon gained adherents in many branches of the discipline. Yet as new physicists adopted the tiny line drawings, they also adapted the diagrams and introduced their own interpretations. Drawing Theories Apart traces how generations of young theorists learned to frame their research in terms of the diagrams—and how both the diagrams and their users were molded in the process. Drawing on rich archival materials, interviews, and more than five hundred scientific articles from the period, Drawing Theories Apart uses the Feynman diagrams as a means to explore the development of American postwar physics. By focusing on the ways young physicists learned new calculational skills, David Kaiser frames his story around the crafting and stabilizing of the basic tools in the physicist's kit—thus offering the first book to follow the diagrams once they left Feynman's hands and entered the physics vernacular.
Download or read book Advanced Quantum Mechanics Second Edition written by Freeman J Dyson and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011-11-25 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson is famous for his work in quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons policy and bold visions for the future of humanity. In the 1940s, he was responsible for demonstrating the equivalence of the two formulations of quantum electrodynamics — Richard Feynman's diagrammatic path integral formulation and the variational methods developed by Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonoga — showing the mathematical consistency of QED.This invaluable volume comprises the legendary lectures on quantum electrodynamics first given by Dyson at Cornell University in 1951. The late theorist Edwin Thompson Jaynes once remarked, “For a generation of physicists they were the happy medium: clearer and better motivated than Feynman, and getting to the point faster than Schwinger”.This edition has been printed on the 60th anniversary of the Cornell lectures, and includes a foreword by science historian David Kaiser, as well as notes from Dyson's lectures at the Les Houches Summer School of Theoretical Physics in 1954. The Les Houches lectures, described as a supplement to the original Cornell notes, provide a more detailed look at field theory, a careful and rigorous derivation of Fermi's Golden Rule, and a masterful treatment of renormalization and Ward's Identity.Future generations of physicists are bound to read these lectures with pleasure, benefiting from the lucid style that is so characteristic of Dyson's exposition.
Download or read book Julian Schwinger The Physicist The Teacher And The Man written by Jack Ng Yee and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1996-01-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the post-quantum-mechanics era, few physicists, if any, have matched Julian Schwinger in contributions to and influence on the development of physics. A deep and provocative thinker, Schwinger left his indelible mark on all areas of theoretical physics; an eloquent lecturer and immensely successful mentor, he was gentle, intensely private, and known for being “modest about everything except his physics”. This book is a collection of talks in memory of him by some of his contemporaries and his former students: A Klein, F Dyson, B DeWitt, W Kohn, D Saxon, P C Martin, K Johnson, S Deser, R Finkelstein, Y J Ng, H Feshbach, L Brown, S Glashow, K A Milton, and C N Yang. From it, one can get a glimpse of Julian Schwinger, the physicist, the teacher, and the man. Altogether, this book is a must for all physicists, physics students, and others who are interested in great legends.
Download or read book Tuva Or Bust written by Ralph Leighton and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close friend of physicist Richard Feynman chronicles his relationship with the scientist and describes their ten-year quest to reach the remote country of Tannu Tuva.
Download or read book QED and the Men Who Made It written by S. S. Schweber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s, physics was in a crisis. There appeared to be no way to reconcile the new theory of quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity. Several approaches had been tried and had failed. In the post-World War II period, four eminent physicists rose to the challenge and developed a calculable version of quantum electrodynamics (QED), probably the most successful theory in physics. This formulation of QED was pioneered by Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, three of whom won the Nobel Prize for their work. In this book, physicist and historian Silvan Schweber tells the story of these four physicists, blending discussions of their scientific work with fascinating biographical sketches. Setting the achievements of these four men in context, Schweber begins with an account of the early work done by physicists such as Dirac and Jordan, and describes the gathering of eminent theorists at Shelter Island in 1947, the meeting that heralded the new era of QED. The rest of his narrative comprises individual biographies of the four physicists, discussions of their major contributions, and the story of the scientific community in which they worked. Throughout, Schweber draws on his technical expertise to offer a lively and lucid explanation of how this theory was finally established as the appropriate way to describe the atomic and subatomic realms.
Download or read book Spectrum of Belief written by Myles W. Jackson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, scientific practice underwent a dramatic transformation from personal endeavor to business enterprise. In Spectrum of Belief, Myles Jackson explores this transformation through a sociocultural history of the rise of precision optics in Germany. He uses the career of the optician Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787-1826) to probe the relationship between science and society, and between artisans and experimental natural philosophers, during this important transition. Fraunhofer came from a long line of glassmakers. Orphaned at age eleven, the young apprentice moved in with his master, the court decorative glass cutter. At age nineteen, bored with his work and angered by his master's refusal to allow him to study optical theory, Fraunhofer took a position at the Optical Institute assisting in the manufacture of achromatic lenses. Within ten years he was producing the world's finest achromatic lenses and prisms. Housed in an old Benedictine monastery, Fraunhofer's laboratory mirrored the labor of the monks. Because of his secrecy (after his death, even those who had worked most closely with him could not achieve his success), British experimental natural philosophers were unable to reproduce his work. This secrecy, while guaranteeing his institute's monopoly, thwarted Fraunhofer's attempts to gain credibility within the scientific community, which looked down on artisanal work and its clandestine practices as an affront. The response to the ensuing rise of German optical technology sheds light on crucial social, economic, and political issues of the period, such as mechanization, patent law reform, the role of skills in both physics and society, the rise of Mechanics' Institutes, and scientific patronage. After his death, Fraunhofer's example was used in the newly united Germany to argue for the merging of scientific research and technological innovation with industrial and state support.
Download or read book Fixing Broken Windows written by George L. Kelling and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cites successful examples of community-based policing.
Download or read book Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur written by Tom Lancaster and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quantum field theory provides the theoretical backbone to most modern physics. This book is designed to bring quantum field theory to a wider audience of physicists. It is packed with worked examples, witty diagrams, and applications intended to introduce a new audience to this revolutionary theory.
Download or read book Math with Bad Drawings written by Ben Orlin and published by Black Dog & Leventhal. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hilarious reeducation in mathematics-full of joy, jokes, and stick figures-that sheds light on the countless practical and wonderful ways that math structures and shapes our world. In Math With Bad Drawings, Ben Orlin reveals to us what math actually is; its myriad uses, its strange symbols, and the wild leaps of logic and faith that define the usually impenetrable work of the mathematician. Truth and knowledge come in multiple forms: colorful drawings, encouraging jokes, and the stories and insights of an empathetic teacher who believes that math should belong to everyone. Orlin shows us how to think like a mathematician by teaching us a brand-new game of tic-tac-toe, how to understand an economic crises by rolling a pair of dice, and the mathematical headache that ensues when attempting to build a spherical Death Star. Every discussion in the book is illustrated with Orlin's trademark "bad drawings," which convey his message and insights with perfect pitch and clarity. With 24 chapters covering topics from the electoral college to human genetics to the reasons not to trust statistics, Math with Bad Drawings is a life-changing book for the math-estranged and math-enamored alike.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell written by Anthony Zee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully updated edition of the classic text by acclaimed physicist A. Zee Since it was first published, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell has quickly established itself as the most accessible and comprehensive introduction to this profound and deeply fascinating area of theoretical physics. Now in this fully revised and expanded edition, A. Zee covers the latest advances while providing a solid conceptual foundation for students to build on, making this the most up-to-date and modern textbook on quantum field theory available. This expanded edition features several additional chapters, as well as an entirely new section describing recent developments in quantum field theory such as gravitational waves, the helicity spinor formalism, on-shell gluon scattering, recursion relations for amplitudes with complex momenta, and the hidden connection between Yang-Mills theory and Einstein gravity. Zee also provides added exercises, explanations, and examples, as well as detailed appendices, solutions to selected exercises, and suggestions for further reading. The most accessible and comprehensive introductory textbook available Features a fully revised, updated, and expanded text Covers the latest exciting advances in the field Includes new exercises Offers a one-of-a-kind resource for students and researchers Leading universities that have adopted this book include: Arizona State University Boston University Brandeis University Brown University California Institute of Technology Carnegie Mellon College of William & Mary Cornell Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Northwestern University Ohio State University Princeton University Purdue University - Main Campus Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rutgers University - New Brunswick Stanford University University of California - Berkeley University of Central Florida University of Chicago University of Michigan University of Montreal University of Notre Dame Vanderbilt University Virginia Tech University
Download or read book Endless Universe written by Paul J. Steinhardt and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-05-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two world-renowned scientists present an audacious new vision of the cosmos that “steals the thunder from the Big Bang theory.” —Wall Street Journal The Big Bang theory—widely regarded as the leading explanation for the origin of the universe—posits that space and time sprang into being about 14 billion years ago in a hot, expanding fireball of nearly infinite density. Over the last three decades the theory has been repeatedly revised to address such issues as how galaxies and stars first formed and why the expansion of the universe is speeding up today. Furthermore, an explanation has yet to be found for what caused the Big Bang in the first place. In Endless Universe, Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, both distinguished theoretical physicists, present a bold new cosmology. Steinhardt and Turok “contend that what we think of as the moment of creation was simply part of an infinite cycle of titanic collisions between our universe and a parallel world” (Discover). They recount the remarkable developments in astronomy, particle physics, and superstring theory that form the basis for their groundbreaking “Cyclic Universe” theory. According to this theory, the Big Bang was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution, each accompanied by the creation of new matter and the formation of new galaxies, stars, and planets. Endless Universe provides answers to longstanding problems with the Big Bang model, while offering a provocative new view of both the past and the future of the cosmos. It is a “theory that could solve the cosmic mystery” (USA Today).
Download or read book Traveling at the Speed of Thought written by Daniel Kennefick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Einstein first described them nearly a century ago, gravitational waves have been the subject of more sustained controversy than perhaps any other phenomenon in physics. These as yet undetected fluctuations in the shape of space-time were first predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, but only now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, are we on the brink of finally observing them. Daniel Kennefick's landmark book takes readers through the theoretical controversies and thorny debates that raged around the subject of gravitational waves after the publication of Einstein's theory. The previously untold story of how we arrived at a settled theory of gravitational waves includes a stellar cast from the front ranks of twentieth-century physics, including Richard Feynman, Hermann Bondi, John Wheeler, Kip Thorne, and Einstein himself, who on two occasions avowed that gravitational waves do not exist, changing his mind both times. The book derives its title from a famously skeptical comment made by Arthur Stanley Eddington in 1922--namely, that "gravitational waves propagate at the speed of thought." Kennefick uses the title metaphorically to contrast the individual brilliance of each of the physicists grappling with gravitational-wave theory against the frustratingly slow progression of the field as a whole. Accessibly written and impeccably researched, this book sheds new light on the trials and conflicts that have led to the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves today--poised to bring the story of gravitational waves full circle by directly confirming their existence for the very first time.
Download or read book Feynman and His Physics written by Jörg Resag and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes the reader on a journey through the life of Richard Feynman and describes, in non-technical terms, his revolutionary contributions to modern physics. Feynman was an unconventional thinker who always tried to get to the bottom of things. In doing so, he developed an intuitive view that made him one of the greatest teachers of physics. The author captures this development and explains it in the context of the zeitgeist of modern physics: What revolutionary ideas did Feynman have, what contribution did he make to the development of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, how can Feynman's methods be understood? Be enchanted by this book and understand the physics of the genius whose 100th birthday was celebrated in 2018.
Download or read book The Emergence of Spacetime in String Theory written by Tiziana Vistarini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of space and time is one of the most fascinating and fundamental philosophical issues which presently engages at the deepest level with physics. During the last thirty years this notion has been object of an intense critical review in the light of new scientific theories which try to combine the principles of both general relativity and quantum theory—called theories of quantum gravity. This book considers the way string theory shapes its own account of spacetime disappearance from the fundamental level.
Download or read book Condensed Matter Field Theory written by Alexander Altland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-11 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This primer is aimed at elevating graduate students of condensed matter theory to a level where they can engage in independent research. Topics covered include second quantisation, path and functional field integration, mean-field theory and collective phenomena.
Download or read book Critical Properties of Greek Letter Phi 4 theories written by Hagen Kleinert and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2001 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains in detail how to perform perturbation expansions in quantum field theory to high orders, and how to extract the critical properties of the theory from the resulting divergent power series. These properties are calculated for various second-order phase transitions of three-dimensional systems with high accuracy, in particular the critical exponents observable in experiments close to the phase transition.Beginning with an introduction to critical phenomena, this book develops the functional-integral description of quantum field theories, their perturbation expansions, and a method for finding recursively all Feynman diagrams to any order in the coupling strength. Algebraic computer programs are supplied on accompanying World Wide Web pages. The diagrams correspond to integrals in momentum space. They are evaluated in 4-î dimensions, where they possess pole terms in 1/î. The pole terms are collected into renormalization constants.The theory of the renormalization group is used to find the critical scaling laws. They contain critical exponents which are obtained from the renormalization constants in the form of power series. These are divergent, due to factorially growing expansion coefficients. The evaluation requires resummation procedures, which are performed in two ways: (1) using traditional methods based on Pad and Borel transformations, combined with analytic mappings; (2) using modern variational perturbation theory, where the results follow from a simple strong-coupling formula. As a crucial test of the accuracy of the methods, the critical exponent à governing the divergence of the specific heat of superfluid helium is shown to agree very well with the extremely precise experimental number found in the space shuttle orbiting the earth (whose data are displayed on the cover of the book).The phi4-theories investigated in this book contain any number N of fields in an O(N)-symmetric interaction, or in an interaction in which O(N)-symmetry is broken by a term of a cubic symmetry. The crossover behavior between the different symmetries is investigated. In addition, alternative ways of obtaining critical exponents of phi4-theories are sketched, such as variational perturbation expansions in three rather than 4-î dimensions, and improved ratio tests in high-temperature expansions of lattice models.
