Author: Larry D. Thomas Publisher: Texas A&M University Press ISBN: 1680030256 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
The present volume draws on nine book-length collections of Thomas’s poetry, and includes a generous selection of new poems. Five of the collections are comprised of poems of geographic place, four of which are set primarily in Texas. His fifth “place” collection is set on the coast of Maine. The poems selected from his remaining collections range in subject matter from outlaw bikers to ekphrasis; from the avian world to an asylum for the criminally insane. PIANO TUNER The tools of his trade are unassuming and relatively primitive. The stagehand is his counterpart in drama. In the shadows of architects, for grand cathedrals of sonatas, he lays the bricks. Of pitch and tone, he is master. Even a concert pianist steers clear of his ear.
Author: Randy Pausch Publisher: ISBN: 9780340978504 Category : Cancer Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.
Author: Richard P. Feynman Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 140084746X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Feynman’s bestselling introduction to the mind-blowing physics of QED—presented with humor, not mathematics Celebrated for his brilliantly quirky insights into the physical world, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman also possessed an extraordinary talent for explaining difficult concepts to the public. In this extraordinary book, Feynman provides a lively and accessible introduction to QED, or quantum electrodynamics, an area of quantum field theory that describes the interactions of light with charged particles. Using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations, and his renowned Feynman diagrams instead of advanced mathematics, Feynman clearly and humorously communicates the substance and spirit of QED to the nonscientist. With an incisive introduction by A. Zee that places Feynman’s contribution to QED in historical context and highlights Feynman’s uniquely appealing and illuminating style, this Princeton Science Library edition of QED makes Feynman’s legendary talks on quantum electrodynamics available to a new generation of readers.
Author: Daniele Funaro Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1036405990 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
With an opinionated and irreverent tone, the author debunks most of the current theories in the field of modern physics, appealing to the scientific method and common sense. At the same time, in strict compliance with the already known experimental evidence, he proposes his own version of the facts, aimed at rationalizing and unifying the various aspects in which the nature that surrounds us manifests itself. The result is a possible model of the universe where events are all connected by a common thread, even if distributed on different scales, ranging from the subatomic to that of galaxies. In this perspective, in the middle, the living cell profits from a substrate and a habitat that have favoured its very existence. Reading of this book does not require any advanced scientific knowledge and is therefore accessible to non-experts, provided they are equipped with the necessary dose of eccentricity that allows them to appreciate these provocative pages.
Author: Paul S Wesson Publisher: World Scientific ISBN: 9814470007 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
To the eyes of the average person and the trained scientist, the night sky is dark, even though the universe is populated by myriads of bright galaxies. Why this happens is a question commonly called Olbers' Paradox, and dates from at least 1823. How dark is the night sky is a question which preoccupies astrophysicists at the present. The answer to both questions tells us about the origin of the universe and the nature of its contents — luminous galaxies like the Milky Way, plus the dark matter between them and the mysterious dark energy which appears to be pushing everything apart. In this book, the fascinating history of Olbers' Paradox is reviewed, and the intricate physics of the light/dark universe is examined in detail. The fact that the night sky is dark (a basic astronomical observation that anybody can make) turns out to be connected with the finite age of the universe, thereby confirming some event like the Big Bang. But the space between the galaxies is not perfectly black, and data on its murkiness at various wavelengths can be used to constrain and identify its unseen constituents.
Author: Augusto Garuccio Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 1461525500 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 610
Book Description
From September 24 through 30, 1992 the Workshop on "Waves and Parti cles in Light and Matter" was held in the Italian city of Trani in celebration of the centenary of Louis de Broglie's birth. As is well known, the relationship between quantum theory and ob jective reality was one of the main threads running through the researches of this French physicist. It was therefore in a fitting tribute to him on his 90th birthday that ten years ago an international conference on the same subject was convened in Perugia. On that occasion, physicists from all over the world interested in the problematics of wave-particle duality engaged in thoughtful debates (the proceedings of which were subsequently published) on recent theoretical and experimental developments in our understanding of the foundations of quantum mechanics. This time around, about 120 scientists, coming from 5 continents, in the warm and pleasant atmosphere of Trani's Colonna Conference Center focussed their discussions on recent results concerned with the EPR para dox, matter-interferometry, reality of de Broglie's waves, photon detection, macroscopic quantum coherence, alternative theories to usual quantum mechanics, special relativity, state reduction, and other related topics. The workshop was organized in plenary sessions, round tables, and poster sessions, and the present volume collects most-but not all-of the presented papers. A number of acknowledgements are due. We thank, first of all, the contributors, without whose constant dedication this volume could not have been published.
Author: Christian Maes Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3031333349 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
. The main aim of this book is to shine a spotlight on key experiments and their crucial importance for advancing our understanding of physics. Physics is an empirical science, and experiments have always been a driving force in the development of our understanding of nature. Facts matter. In that sense, the book attempts to be complementary to the many popularizations of theoretical physics, and to counterbalance the frequent emphasis there on more speculative ideas. Experimental physics is also an essential pillar in physics teaching, as well as helping broader audiences to better understand important concepts, particularly in challenging fields such as relativity or quantum physics, where our common sense intuition often fails. Readers are taken on an historical journey, starting with “Free Fall” and culminating in “Spooky Action at a Distance”. En route they will encounter many important branches of physics, whose main ideas and theoretical description will be given a more empirical meaning. At the end, the reader is invited to reflect on what could be exciting and important directions for fundamental physics. All readers with an undergraduate degree in physical sciences or engineering will enjoy and learn much from this stimulating and original text.
Author: Louis De Broglie Publisher: Read Books Ltd ISBN: 1447496752 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
THE amiable insistence of my friend André George has induced me to collect in the present Volume a number of Studies on contemporary Physics written from both the general and the more metaphysical point of view. Each of these Studies forms an independent whole, and can be read by itself. A slight degree of repetition—which the reader is asked to overlook—has been the inevitable result: for on more than one occasion I have been compelled to duplicate a summary of the great fundamental stages of contemporary Physics, such as the classification of simple substances, the investigation of the photo-electric effect and the origin of the Theory of Light Quanta and of Wave Mechanics: the subjects are somewhat technical, and I cannot well assume that they are common knowledge. But though the same subject is outlined in several of these Studies, I have tried to take up a different point of view in each, and have endeavoured to throw light on different aspects of the essential problems of Quantum Physics in order to facilitate a grasp of their importance. On comparing the different chapters the reader will observe that, while overlapping, they also complement one another; and he will feel the fascination and greatness inherent in the vast structure of modern Physics. And while admiring the vast number and the extreme delicacy of experimental facts which laboratory physicists have succeeded in revealing, and the strange and brilliant concepts devised by theorists to explain them, he will appreciate to what a degree the methods and ideas of physicists have grown in subtlety during recent years, and how great has been the progress from the somewhat ingenuous Realism and the over-simplified Mechanics of earlier thinkers. The more deeply we descend into the minutest structures of Matter, the more clearly we see that the concepts evolved by the mind in the course of everyday experience—especially those of Time and Space—must fail us in an endeavour to describe the new worlds which we are entering. One feels tempted to say that the outlines of our concepts must undergo a progressive blurring, in order that they may retain some semblance of relevance to the realities of the subatomic scales. Time and Space, in other words, are too loose a dress for the elementary entities; individuality becomes attenuated in the mysterious processes of interaction, and even Determinism, the darling of an older generation of physicists, is forced to yield. But the great book of Science is never finished: other surprises await us: who knows what mysteries are hidden within the nucleus of an atom, which, although a million million times smaller than the smallest living thing, is yet a universe in itself?
Author: H. Bilz Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 3642464335 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 614
Book Description
The dynamical properties of solids have recently attracted renewed interest in connection with the increasing understanding of phase transitions and re lated phenomena. In particular, soft modes or, more generally, phonon 'anom alies' seem to play an important role in structural and electronic phase tran sitions, such as ferroelectric or superconducting transitions. The understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the occurrence of unusually low frequencies in phonon spectra requires a detailed analysis of the microscopic forces governing the lattice vibrations. Of particular importance is the influence of the electron lattice interaction in the adiabatic approximation which in many cases is the origin of peculiarities in the phonon self-energy. In this work the vibrational spectra of pure non-metals and of those con taining point defects are investigated. ' In these materials the interrelation be tween the pseudo-harmonic forces (determining the phonon dispersion re lations) and the non-linear anharmonic and electron-phonon forces (as they act in infrared and Raman spectra) is most obvious and can be quantitatively analysed in terms of appropriate models. The main task is to arrive at a physically correct treatment of electronic degrees of freedom, as for example in an electronic 'shell' model, which leads to the description of phonon spectra in terms of long-range polarizabilities and short-range deformabilities. The pur pose of our review is to stimulate further investigations which, we hope, will result in explicit relations between the parameters of the semi-microscopic models and the matrix elements from the electronic band structure.
Author: Larry D. Thomas
Author: Randy Pausch
Author: Richard P. Feynman
Author: Susan James
Author: Daniele Funaro
Author: Paul S Wesson
Author: Augusto Garuccio
Author: Christian Maes
Author: Louis De Broglie
Author: H. Bilz