Contemporary Physics And The Limits Of Knowledge

Author : Morton Tavel
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813530772
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contemporary Physics and the Limits of Knowledge written by Morton Tavel and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tavel (physics, Vassar College) developed the text from a course for nonscience majors over many years. He draws analogies from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and keeps the technical and mathematical details to the bare minimum. He does not provide a bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Author : John Horgan
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465050859
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The End Of Science written by John Horgan and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.

Author : Charis Anastopoulos
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691135120
Total Pages : 444 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Particle Or Wave written by Charis Anastopoulos and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Particle or Wave' explains the origins and development of modern physical concepts about matter and the controversies surrounding them.

Author : Thomas Grissom
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421400847
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Physicist's World written by Thomas Grissom and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Grissom explains what physics really is: the science of understanding how everything in the universe works. This book tells the unfolding story of our attempt to quantify the material world and to conceptualize the nature of physical laws.

Author : John Dirk Walecka
Publisher : World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9814436917
Total Pages : 500 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Topics in Modern Physics written by John Dirk Walecka and published by World Scientific Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013-01-21 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the two previous books entitled Introduction to Modern Physics: Theoretical Foundations and Advanced Modern Physics: Theoretical Foundations exposed the reader to the foundations and frontiers of today's physics, the goal of this third volume is to cover in some detail several topics omitted in the essentially linear progression of the first two. This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 is on quantum mechanics. Analytic solutions to the Schrödinger equation are developed for some basic systems. The analysis is then formalized, concluding with a set of postulates for the theory. Part 2 is on applications of quantum mechanics: approximation methods for bound states, scattering theory, time-dependent perturbation theory, and electromagnetic radiation and quantum electrodynamics. Part 3 covers some selected topics in relativistic quantum field theory: discrete symmetries, the Heisenberg picture, and the Feynman rules for quantum chromodynamics. The three volumes in this series taken together provide a clear, logical, self-contained, and comprehensive base from which the very best students can learn modern physics. When finished, readers should have an elementary working knowledge in the principal areas of theoretical physics of the twentieth century.

Author : Jim Al-Khalili
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691182302
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The World According to Physics written by Jim Al-Khalili and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scale -- Space and time -- Energy and matter -- The quantum world -- Thermodynamics and the arrow of time -- Unification -- The future of physics -- The usefulness of physics -- Thinking like a physicist.

Author : Paul Fleisher
Publisher : Lerner Books [UK]
ISBN 13 : 1580134823
Total Pages : 66 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Relativity and Quantum Mechanics written by Paul Fleisher and published by Lerner Books [UK]. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 13 yrs+

Author : Robert S. Cohen
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9400971788
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Physical Sciences and History of Physics written by Robert S. Cohen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays on the conceptual understanding of modern physics strike directly at some of the principal difficulties faced by contemporary philos ophers of physical science. Moreover, they reverberate to earlier and classical struggles with those difficulties. Each of these essays may be seen as both a commentary on our predecessors and an original analytic interpretation. They come from work of the past decade, most from meetings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, and they demonstrate again how problematic the fundamentals of our understanding of nature still are. The themes will seem to be familiar but the variations are not only ingenious but also stimulating, in some ways counterpoint. And so once again we are confronted with issues of space and time, irreversibility and measurement, matter and process, hypothetical reality and verifiability, explanation and reduction, phenomenal base and sophisticated theory, unified science and the unity of nature, and the limits of conventionalism. We are grateful for the cooperation of our contributors, and in particular for the agreement of George Ellis and C. F. von Weizsiicker to allow us to use previously published papers.

Author : Michael Spivak
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780914098324
Total Pages : 733 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Physics for Mathematicians written by Michael Spivak and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Rui F. M. Lobo
Publisher : CRC Press
ISBN 13 : 1000829537
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Advanced Topics in Contemporary Physics for Engineering written by Rui F. M. Lobo and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-12-21 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights cutting-edge topics in contemporary physics, discussing exciting advances and new forms of thinking in evolving fields with emphases both on natural phenomena and applications to modern engineering. It provides material for thought and practice in nanophysics, plasma physics, and electrodynamics. Nanophysics and plasmas are synergic physical areas where the whole is more than the sum of the parts (quantum, atomic and molecular, electrodynamics, photonics, condensed matter, thermodynamics, transport phenomena). The authors emphasize both fundamentals and more complex concepts, making the contents accessible as well challenging. Nanoscale properties and physical phenomena are explained under the umbrella of quantum physics. Advances made in the physical knowledge of the nanoworld, and its metrology are addressed, along with experimental achievements which have furthered studies of extreme weak forces present at nano- or sub-micron scales. The book does not focus in detail on the diversity of applications in nanotechnology and instrumentation, considering that the reader already has basic prior knowledge on that. It also covers an introduction to plasma universe phenomenology, the basics of advanced mathematics applied to the electromagnetic field, longitudinal forces in the vacuum, concepts of helicity and topological torsion, SU(2) representation of Maxwell equations, 2D representation of the electromagnetic field, the use of the fractional derivative, and ergontropic dynamics. The chapters include theory, applications, bibliographic references, and solved exercises. The synergies of the book’s topics demonstrate their potential in critical issues, such as relieving humans from barriers imposed by energetic and entropic dependencies and penetrating the realm of weak forces at the nanoscale. The book will boost both post-graduate students and mature scientists to implement new scientific and technological projects.