Download or read book Notes on the Lumped Backward Master Equation for the Neutron Extinction Survival Probability written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expected or mean neutron number (or density) provides an adequate characterization of the neutron population and its dynamical excursions in most neutronic applications, in particular power reactors. Fluctuations in the neutron number, originating from the inherent randomness of neutron interactions and fission neutron multiplicities, are relatively small and ignorable for operational purposes, although measurements of the variance and time correlations provide valuable diagnostic information on fundamental reactor physics parameters. However, it is well known that there exist situations of great interest and importance in which a strictly deterministic description, or even one supplemented with a knowledge of low order statistical averages (variance, correlation), provides an incomplete and very unsatisfactory description of the state of the neutron population. These situations are marked by persistent large fluctuations in the neutron number where the emergence of a deterministic phase is suppressed. Such situations are strongly stochastic and therefore unpredictable (i.e., the mean is not representative of the actual population), and can arise either by design or by accident. Examples where the stochastic behavior of neutron populations must be taken into account include: nuclear weapon single-point safety assessment; criticality excursions in spent fuel storage and in the handling of fissile solutions in fuel fabrication and reprocessing; approach to critical under suboptimal reactor start-up conditions; preinitiation in fast burst research reactors; and weak nuclear signatures in the passive detection of nuclear materials. What distinguishes strongly stochastic neutronic systems from strongly deterministic systems is that, in the former, neutron multiplication occurs in the presence of weak neutron sources, such as spontaneous fission and background (cosmic) radiation. Weak sources (in a sense that can be made quite precise) lead to well separated fission chains (a fission chain is defined as the initial source neutron and all its subsequent progeny) in which some chains are short lived while others propagate for unusually long times. Under these conditions, fission chains do not overlap strongly and this precludes the cancellation of neutron number fluctuations necessary for the mean to become established as the dominant measure of the neutron population. The fate of individual chains then plays a defining role in the evolution of the neutron population in strongly stochastic systems, and of particular interest and importance in supercritical systems is the extinction probability, defined as the probability that the neutron chain (initiating neutron and its progeny) will be extinguished at a particular time, or its complement, the time-dependent survival probability. The time-asymptotic limit of the latter, the probability of divergence, gives the probability that the neutron population will grow without bound, and is more commonly known as the probability of initiation or just POI. The ability to numerically compute these probabilities, with high accuracy and without overly restricting the underlying physics (e.g., fission neutron multiplicity, reactivity variation) is clearly essential in developing an understanding of the behavior of strongly stochastic systems.
Download or read book Numerical Solution of the Phase space Dependent Backward Master Equation for the Probability Distribution of Neutron Number in a Subcritical Multiplying Sample written by Joanna Elizabeth May Saxby and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Statistical Mechanics written by James Sethna and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-04-07 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In each generation, scientists must redefine their fields: abstracting, simplifying and distilling the previous standard topics to make room for new advances and methods. Sethna's book takes this step for statistical mechanics - a field rooted in physics and chemistry whose ideas and methods are now central to information theory, complexity, and modern biology. Aimed at advanced undergraduates and early graduate students in all of these fields, Sethna limits his main presentation to the topics that future mathematicians and biologists, as well as physicists and chemists, will find fascinating and central to their work. The amazing breadth of the field is reflected in the author's large supply of carefully crafted exercises, each an introduction to a whole field of study: everything from chaos through information theory to life at the end of the universe.
Download or read book Complexity written by M. Mitchell Waldrop and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Acceptable Risk written by Baruch Fischhoff and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A framework for making decisions about risks, with recommendations for research, public policy, and practice.
Download or read book Carbon Black written by Jean-Baptiste Donnet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of this reference provides comprehensive examinations of developments in the processing and applications of carbon black, including the use of new analytical tools such as scanning tunnelling microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and inverse gas chromatography.;Completely rewritten and updated by numerous experts in the field to reflect the enormous growth of the field since the publication of the previous edition, Carbon Black: discusses the mechanism of carbon black formation based on recent advances such as the discovery of fullerenes; elucidates micro- and macrostructure morphology and other physical characteristics; outlines the fractal geometry of carbon black as a new approach to characterization; reviews the effect of carbon black on the electrical and thermal conductivity of filled polymers; delineates the applications of carbon black in elastomers, plastics, and zerographic toners; and surveys possible health consequences of exposure to carbon black.;With over 1200 literature citations, tables, and figures, this resource is intended for physical, polymer, surface and colloid chemists; chemical and plastics engineers; spectroscopists; materials scientists; occupational safety and health physicians; and upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in these disciplines.
Download or read book The Precipice written by Toby Ord and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker
Download or read book No Sense of Obligation written by Matt Young and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2001-10-31 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the Praise for No Sense of Obligation . . . fascinating analysis of religious belief -- Steve Allen, author, composer, entertainer [A] tour de force of science and religion, reason and faith, denoting in clear and unmistakable language and rhetoric what science really reveals about the cosmos, the world, and ourselves. Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic Magazine; Author, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science About the Book Rejecting belief without evidence, a scientist searches the scientific, theological, and philosophical literature for a sign from God--and finds him to be an allegory. This remarkable book, written in the laypersons language, leaves no room for unproven ideas and instead seeks hard evidence for the existence of God. The author, a sympathetic critic and observer of religion, finds instead a physical universe that exists reasonlessly. He attributes good and evil to biology, not to God. In place of theism, the author gives us the knowledge that the universe is intelligible and that we are grownups, responsible for ourselves. He finds salvation in the here and now, and no ultimate purpose in life, except as we define it.
Download or read book Radiation Hydrodynamics written by John I. Castor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book The Disappearing Spoon written by Sam Kean and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2010-07-12 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, finance, mythology, the arts, medicine, and more, as told by the Periodic Table. Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie's reputation? And why is gallium (Ga, 31) the go-to element for laboratory pranksters? The Periodic Table is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of adventure, betrayal, and obsession. These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. The Disappearing Spoon masterfully fuses science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, and discovery -- from the Big Bang through the end of time. Though solid at room temperature, gallium is a moldable metal that melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. A classic science prank is to mold gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch guests recoil as their utensils disappear.
Download or read book The Equations of Radiation Hydrodynamics written by Gerald C. Pomraning and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graduate-level text examines propagation of thermal radiation through a fluid and its effects on the hydrodynamics of fluid motion. Topics include approximate formulations of radiative transfer and relativistic effects of fluid motion; microscopic physics associated with the equation of transfer; inverse Compton scattering; and hydrodynamic description of fluid. 1973 edition.
Download or read book The Physical Theory of Neutron Chain Reactors written by Alvin Martin Weinberg and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 862 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Thesaurus of English Word Roots written by Horace Gerald Danner and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-03-27 with total page 1007 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horace G. Danner’s A Thesaurus of English Word Roots is a compendium of the most-used word roots of the English language. As Timothy B. Noone notes in his foreword: “Dr. Danner’s book allows you not only to build up your passive English vocabulary, resulting in word recognition knowledge, but also gives you the rudiments for developing your active English vocabulary, making it possible to infer the meaning of words with which you are not yet acquainted. Your knowledge can now expand and will do so exponentially as your awareness of the roots in English words and your corresponding ability to decode unfamiliar words grows apace. This is the beginning of a fine mental linguistic library: so enjoy!” In A Thesaurus of English Word Roots, all word roots are listed alphabetically, along with the Greek or Latin words from which they derive, together with the roots’ original meanings. If the current meaning of an individual root differs from the original meaning, that is listed in a separate column. In the examples column, the words which contain the root are then listed, starting with their prefixes, for example, dysacousia, hyperacousia. These root-starting terms then are followed by terms where the root falls behind the word, e.g., acouesthesia and acoumeter. These words are followed by words where the root falls in the middle or the end, as in such terms as bradyacusia and odynacusis.. In this manner, A Thesaurus of English Word Roots places the word in as many word families as there are elements in the word. This work will interest linguists and philologists and anyone interested in the etymological aspects of English language.
Download or read book Risk Assessment Methods written by V.T. Covello and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has already been written about risk assessment. Epidemiologists write books on how risk assessment is used to explore the factors that influence the distribution of disease in populations of people. Toxicologists write books on how risk assess ment involves exposing animals to risk agents and concluding from the results what risks people might experience if similarly exposed. Engineers write books on how risk assessment is utilized to estimate the risks of constructing a new facility such as a nuclear power plant. Statisticians write books on how risk assessment may be used to analyze mortality or accident data to determine risks. There are already many books on risk assessment-the trouble is that they all seem to be about different sUbjects! This book takes another approach. It brings together all the methods for assessing risk into a common framework, thus demonstrating how the various methods relate to one another. This produces four important benefits: • First, it provides a comprehensive reference for risk assessment. This one source offers readers concise explanations of the many methods currently available for describing and quantifying diverse types of risks. • Second, it consistently evaluates and compares available risk assessment methods and identifies their specific strengths and limitations. Understand ing the limitations of risk assessment methods is important. The field is still in its infancy, and the problems with available methods are disappoint ingly numerous. At the same time, risk assessment is being used.
Download or read book A Universe of Atoms An Atom in the Universe written by Mark P. Silverman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-04-08 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: jThis thoroughly updated and revised text contains a selection of well-written essays based on Silvermans work on a wide range of topics, including: quantum mechanics, including atomic and nuclear physics, electromagnetism and optics, gravity, thermodynamics, and the physics of fluids. Presenting a personal odyssey in physics, Silverman investigates processes for which no visualizable mechanism can be given, or that seem to violate fundamental physical laws (but do not). The discussions use little mathematics, and anyone with a little college physics will be able to read the book with pleasure. -Engagingly written -Easily understandable by both the general reader and the seasoned physicist -Covers a diversity of subjects from "hot" topics in contemporary physics to less widely known but subtle and intriguing issues in physics -Discusses real physical systems whose behavior provokes, surprises and challenges the imagination -This second edition is newly revised and updated
Download or read book Foundations of Complex system Theories written by Sunny Y. Auyang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes approaches to the study of complexity in the physical, biological, and social sciences.
