Download or read book More and Different written by Philip W. Anderson and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I. Personal reminiscences. Introduction. "BCS" and me. A mile of dirty lead wire: a fable for the scientifically literate. Scientific and personal reminiscences of Ryogo Kubo -- II. History. Introduction. Physics at Bell Labs, 1949-1984: young Turks and younger Turks. It's not over till the fat lady sings. Reflections on twentieth century physics: historical overview of the 20t century in Physics. 21st century Physics. Y. Nambu and broken symmetry. Nevill Mott, John Slater, and the "magnetic state": winning the prize and losing the PR battle -- III. Philosophy and sociology. Introduction. Emergence vs. reductionism. Is the theory of everything the theory of anything? Is measurement itself an emergent property? Good news and bad news. The future lies ahead. Could modern America have invented wave mechanics?. Loose ends and Gordian knots of the string cult. Imaginary friend, who art in heaven -- IV. Science tactics and strategy. Introduction. Solid state experimentalists: theory should be on tap, not on top. Shadows of doubt. The Reverend Thomas Bayes, needles in haystacks, and the fifth force. Emerging physics. On the nature of physical laws. On the "unreasonable efficacy of mathematics"--A proposition by Wigner. When scientists go astray. Further investigations -- V. Genius. Introduction. What mad pursuit. Complexities of Feynman coffee-table complexities. Search for polymath's elementary particles. Giant who started the silicon age. The quiet man of physics. A theoretical physicist. Some thoughtful words (not mine) on research strategy for theorists -- VI. Science wars. Introduction. They think it's all over. Science: a 'dappled world' or a 'seamless web'? Reply to Cartwright. Postmodernism, politics and religion -- VII. Politics and science. Introduction. Politics and science. The case against Star Wars. A dialogue about Star Wars. No facts, just the right answers -- VIII. Futurology. Introduction. Futurology. Dizzy with future Schlock. Einstein and the p-branes. Forecaster fails to detect any clouds -- IX. Complexity. Introduction. Physics: the opening to complexity. Is complexity physics? Is it science? What is it? Complexity II: the Santa Fe Institute. Whole truths false in part -- X. Popularization attempts. Introduction. Who or what is RVB? More on RVB. Brainwashed by Feynman? Just exactly what do you do, Dr. Anderson? What is a condensed matter theorist? Global economy II: or, how do you follow a great act?
Download or read book More And Different Notes From A Thoughtful Curmudgeon written by Philip W Anderson and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Top Five Book of 2012 by Physics Today, USA.“Anderson has put together an entertaining and instructive collection of highly readable reviews, columns, talks, and unpublished essays on science and the scientists he has known. He is rarely inappropriately provocative, and he is a pleasure to read.”Physics TodayPhilip Anderson was educated at University High School in Urbana, Illinois, at Harvard (BS 1943, PhD 1949), and further educated at Bell Laboratories, where his career (1949-1984) coincided with the greatest period of that remarkable institution. Starting in 1967, he shared his time with Cambridge University (until 1975) and then with Princeton, where he continued full time as Joseph Henry Professor until 1997. As an emeritus he remains active in research, and at press time he was involved in several scientific controversies about high profile subjects, in which his point of view, though unpopular at the moment, is likely to prevail eventually. His colleagues have made him one of the two physicists most often cited in the scientific literature, for several decades.His work is characterized by mathematical simplicity combined with conceptual depth, and by profound respect for experimental findings. He has explored areas outside his main discipline, the quantum theory of condensed matter (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize), on several occasions: his paper on what is now called the “Anderson-Higgs mechanism” was a main source for Peter Higgs' elucidation of the boson; a crucial insight led to work on the dynamics of neutron stars (pulsars); and his concept of the spin glass led far afield, to developments in practical computer algorithms and neural nets, and eventually to his involvement in the early years of the Santa Fe Institute and his co-leadership with Kenneth Arrow of two influential workshops on economics at that institution. His writing career started with a much-quoted article in Science titled “More is Different” in 1971; he was an occasional columnist for Physics Today in the 1980s and 1990s. He was more recently a reviewer of science and science-related books for the Times (London) Higher Education Supplement as well as an occasional contributor to Science, Nature, and other journals.
Download or read book Basic Notions Of Condensed Matter Physics written by Philip W. Anderson and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2018. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.
Download or read book The Curmudgeon s Guide to Getting Ahead written by Charles Murray and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For those starting out in their careers—and those who wish to advance more quickly—this is a delightfully fussy guide to the hidden rules of the road in the workplace and in life. As bestselling author and social historian Charles Murray explains, at senior levels of an organization there are curmudgeons everywhere, judging your every move. Yet it is their good opinion you need to win if you hope to get ahead. Among the curmudgeon’s day-to-day tips for the workplace: • Excise the word “like” from your spoken English • Don’t suck up • Stop “reaching out” and “sharing” • Rid yourself of piercings, tattoos, and weird hair colors • Make strong language count His larger career advice includes: • What to do if you have a bad boss • Coming to grips with the difference between being nice and being good • How to write when you don’t know what to say • Being judgmental (it’s good, and you don’t have a choice anyway) And on the great topics of life, the curmudgeon urges us to leave home no matter what, get real jobs (not internships), put ourselves in scary situations, and watch Groundhog Day repeatedly (he’ll explain). Witty, wise, and pulling no punches, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead is an indispensable sourcebook for living an adult life.
Download or read book A Mind Over Matter written by Andrew Zangwill and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Mind Over Matter is a biography of the Nobel-prize winner Philip W. Anderson, a person widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential physicists of the second half of the twentieth century. Anderson (1923-2020) was a theoretician who specialized in the physics of matter, including window glass and metals, magnets and semiconductors, liquid crystals and superconductors. More than any other single person, Anderson transformed the patchwork subject of solid-state physics into the deep, subtle, and coherent discipline known today as condensed matter physics. Among his many world-class research achievements, Anderson discovered an aspect of wave physics that had been missed by all previous scientists going back to Isaac Newton. He became a public figure when he testified before Congress to oppose its funding of an expensive project intended exclusively for particle physics research. Over the years, he published many articles designed to influence a broad audience about issues where science impacted public policy and culture. Anderson grew up in the American mid-west, was educated at Harvard, and rose to the pinnacle of his profession during the first decade of his thirty-five career as a theoretical physicist at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Almost uniquely, he spent many years working half-time as a professor at the University of Cambridge and at Princeton University. The outspoken Anderson enjoyed broad influence outside of physics when he helped develop and champion the concepts of emergence and complexity as organizing principles to help attack very difficult problems in technically challenging disciplines.
Download or read book Solid State Insurrection written by Joseph D. Martin and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-09-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solid state physics, the study of the physical properties of solid matter, was the most populous subfield of Cold War American physics. Despite prolific contributions to consumer and medical technology, such as the transistor and magnetic resonance imaging, it garnered less professional prestige and public attention than nuclear and particle physics. Solid State Insurrection argues that solid state physics was essential to securing the vast social, political, and financial capital Cold War physics enjoyed in the twentieth century. Solid state’s technological bent, and its challenge to the “pure science” ideal many physicists cherished, helped physics as a whole respond more readily to Cold War social, political, and economic pressures. Its research kept physics economically and technologically relevant, sustaining its cultural standing and policy influence long after the sheen of the Manhattan Project had faded. With this book, Joseph D. Martin brings a new perspective to some of the most enduring questions about the role of physics in American history.
Download or read book Physics Nature and Society written by Joaquín Marro and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging and accessible book serves as a fascinating guide to the strategies and concepts that help us understand the boundaries between physics, on the one hand, and sociology, economics, and biology on the other. From cooperation and criticality to flock dynamics and fractals, the author addresses many of the topics belonging to the broad theme of complexity. He chooses excellent examples (requiring no prior mathematical knowledge) to illuminate these ideas and their implications. The lively style and clear description of the relevant models will appeal both to novices and those with an existing knowledge of the field.
Download or read book From Electrons to Elephants and Elections written by Shyam Wuppuluri and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-04-08 with total page 886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly interdisciplinary book, covering more than six fields, from philosophy and sciences all the way up to the humanities and with contributions from eminent authors, addresses the interplay between content and context, reductionism and holism and their meeting point: the notion of emergence. Much of today’s science is reductionist (bottom-up); in other words, behaviour on one level is explained by reducing it to components on a lower level. Chemistry is reduced to atoms, ecosystems are explained in terms of DNA and proteins, etc. This approach fails quickly since we can’t cannot extrapolate to the properties of atoms solely from Schrödinger's equation, nor figure out protein folding from an amino acid sequence or obtain the phenotype of an organism from its genotype. An alternative approach to this is holism (top-down). Consider an ecosystem or an organism as a whole: seek patterns on the same scale. Model a galaxy not as 400 billion-point masses (stars) but as an object in its own right with its own properties (spiral, elliptic). Or a hurricane as a structured form of moist air and water vapour. Reductionism is largely about content, whereas holistic models are more attuned to context. Reductionism (content) and holism (context) are not opposing philosophies — in fact, they work best in tandem. Join us on a journey to understand the multifaceted dialectic concerning this duo and how they shape the foundations of sciences and humanities, our thoughts and, the very nature of reality itself.
Download or read book The Physics of Emergence written by Robert C Bishop and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A standard view of elementary particles and forces is that they determine everything else in the rest of physics, the whole of chemistry, biology, geology, physiology and perhaps even human behavior. This reductive view of physics is popular among some physicists. Yet, there are other physicists who argue this is an oversimplified and that the relationship of elementary particle physics to these other domains is one of emergence. Several objections have been raised from physics against proposals for emergence (e.g., that genuinely emergent phenomena would violate the standard model of elementary particle physics, or that genuine emergence would disrupt the lawlike order physics has revealed). Many of these objections rightly call into question typical conceptions of emergence found in the philosophy literature. This book explores whether physics points to a reductive or an emergent structure of the world and proposes a physics-motivated conception of emergence that leaves behind many of the problematic intuitions shaping the philosophical conceptions. Examining several detailed case studies reveal that the structure of physics and the practice of physics research are both more interesting than is captured in this reduction/emergence debate. The results point to stability conditions playing a crucial though underappreciated role in the physics of emergence. This contextual emergence has thought-provoking consequences for physics and beyond, and will be of interest to physics students, researchers, as well as those interested in physics.
Download or read book Complexity Science written by Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introductory textbook provides detailed coverage of the rapidly growing field of complexity science and accommodates readers from a wide variety of backgrounds, and with varying levels of mathematical skill. The book contains a broad range of end of chapter problems and extended projects, with solutions available to instructors online.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management written by Bent Flyvbjerg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides state-of-the-art scholarship in the emerging field of megaproject management. The 25 chapters cover all aspects of megaproject management, from front-end planning to project delivery, including how to deal with stakeholders, risk, finance, complexity, innovation, governance, ethics, project breakdowns, and scale itself.
Download or read book On the Origin of Natural Constants written by Hans Peter Good and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as the circle number π or the Euler constant e determines mathematics, fundamental constants of nature define the scales of the natural sciences. This book presents a new perspective by means of a few axioms and compares the resulting validity with experimental data. By the axiomatic approach Sommerfeld's mysterious fine-structure constant and Dirac's cosmic number are fixed as pure number constants. Thanks to these number constants, it is possible to calculate the value for the anomalous magnetic-moment of the electron in a simple way compared to QED calculations. With the same number constants it is also possible to calculate masses, partial lifetimes, magnetic-moments or charge radii of fundamental particles. The expressions used for the calculations, with few exceptions, yield values within the experimental error limits of the Particle Data Group. The author shows that the introduced number constants give even better predictions than the complicated QED calculations of today's doctrine. In the first part only experimental data from the literature for checking the postulates are used. In the second part the author explains electrical transport measurements with emergent behaviour, which were carried out in a professional environment.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Modern Age written by Peter J. T. Morris and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Modern Age covers the period from 1914 to the present. The impact of chemistry and the chemical industry on science, war, society, and the economy has made this era the “Chemical Age”. Having prospered in the West, chemical science spread across the globe and slowly became more diversified in terms of its ethnic and gendered mix. After flourishing for sixty years, the chemical industry was impacted by the Oil Crisis of the 1970s and became almost invisible in the West. While the industry has clearly delivered many benefits to society-such as new materials and better drugs-it has been excoriated by critics for its impact on the environment. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Chemistry presents the first comprehensive history from the Bronze Age to today, covering all forms and aspects of chemistry and its ever-changing social context. The themes covered in each volume are theory and concepts; practice and experiment; laboratories and technology; culture and science; society and environment; trade and industry; learning and institutions; art and representation. Peter J. T. Morris is Honorary Research Associate at the Science Museum, London, and at University College London, UK Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Chemistry set. General Editors: Peter J. T. Morris, University College London, UK, and Alan Rocke, Case Western Reserve University, USA.
Download or read book Augmented Cognition Users and Contexts written by Dylan D. Schmorrow and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set LNCS 10915 and 10916 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12h International Conference on Augmented Cognition, AC 2018, held as part of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2018, in Las Vegas, NV, USA in July 2018. The 1171 papers presented at HCII 2018 conferences were carefully reviewed and selected from 4346 submissions. The papers cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of applications areas. The papers in this volume are organized in the following topical sections:Cognitive modeling, perception, emotion and interaction, augmented learning and training, shared cognition, team performance and decision-making.
Download or read book The Portable Curmudgeon written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1992-10-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 1,000 outrageously irreverent quotations, anecdotes, and interviews on a vast array of subjects, from an illustrious list of world class grouches. “If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.”—Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Download or read book The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions written by Venkatesh Narayanamurti and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research powers innovation and technoscientific advance, but it is due for a rethink, one consistent with its deeply holistic nature, requiring deeply human nurturing. Research is a deeply human endeavor that must be nurtured to achieve its full potential. As with tending a garden, care must be taken to organize, plant, feed, and weedÑand the manner in which this nurturing is done must be consistent with the nature of what is being nurtured. In The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions, Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Jeffrey Tsao propose a new and holistic system, a rethinking of the nature and nurturing of research. They share lessons from their vast research experience in the physical sciences and engineering, as well as from perspectives drawn from the history and philosophy of science and technology, research policy and management, and the evolutionary biological, complexity, physical, and economic sciences. Narayanamurti and Tsao argue that research is a recursive, reciprocal process at many levels: between science and technology; between questions and answer finding; and between the consolidation and challenging of conventional wisdom. These fundamental aspects of the nature of research should be reflected in how it is nurtured. To that end, Narayanamurti and Tsao propose aligning organization, funding, and governance with research; embracing a culture of holistic technoscientific exploration; and instructing people with care and accountability.
Download or read book Emergence in Context written by Robert C. Bishop and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Science, philosophy of science, and metaphysics have long been concerned with the question of how novel things emerge. How can order come out of disorder? This book introduces a new account, contextual emergence, seeking to answer such questions."--Back cover.
