Paul Ehrenfest: The making of a theoretical physicist PDF Download

Author: Martin J. Klein
Publisher: North Holland
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This volume covers Ehrenfest's life and work up to 1920: his childhood in a Jewish family in Vienna, his student years in Vienna and Gouml;ttingen and the five years he spent in Russia before World War I. In 1912 he succeeded H.A. Lorentz at Leiden and his early years there are covered in detail. He was a close personal friend of Albert Einstein and the first decade of this friendship is portrayed through their correspondence.

Author: Martin J. Klein
Publisher: North Holland
ISBN:
Category : Physicists
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Author: Martin J. Klein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ehrenfest, Paul, 1880-1933
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description

Author: A. Sarlemijn
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483293858
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
H.B.G. Casimir's life, interests and works are intertwined with the important developments that have taken place in physics during this century. This book was compiled by his friends and admirers in honour of his 80th birthday and concentrates mainly on Casimir's achievements in the field of physics, though without ignoring the peripheral areas of the history and philosophy of physics in which he was greatly interested. The book is divided into four parts. Part I describes Casimir's teachers, Ehrenfest, Bohr and Pauli, and will be of general interest due to the key role which these physicists played in modern developments. The articles do give new facts and provide new insights into the history of modern physics.Part II consists of essays on recent developments in various areas of physics in which Casimir has taken an active interest, such as the modern concept of time, statistical foundations of electrodynamic theory and field theory.The subjects covered in Part III have been selected because of Casimir's efforts in the industrial research area of physics. They cover past, present and future expectations in research.Part IV contains an essay which discusses a philosophy of physics currently under discussion, which states that phenomenological laws prevail over fundamental ones for the purpose of experimental and technical physics. A second chapter in this final part gives a critical analysis of this philosophical view.The book is concluded by an appendix discussing Casimir's activities as a lecturer, written by a former student.

Author: Martin J. Klein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780444869487
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: David D. Nolte
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192528505
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems. Galileo published the first modern law of motion, the Law of Fall, that was ideal and simple, laying the foundation upon which Newton built the first theory of dynamics. Early in the twentieth century, geometry became the cause of motion rather than the result when Einstein envisioned the fabric of space-time warped by mass and energy, forcing light rays to bend past the Sun. Possibly more radical was Feynman's dilemma of quantum particles taking all paths at once — setting the stage for the modern fields of quantum field theory and quantum computing. Yet as concepts of motion have evolved, one thing has remained constant, the need to track ever more complex changes and to capture their essence, to find patterns in the chaos as we try to predict and control our world.

Author: Graham Farmelo
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571250076
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael Frayn The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history. 'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

Author: A.J. Kox
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401102171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Beginning with a couple of essays dealing with the experimental and mathematical foundations of physics in the work of Henry Cavendish and Joseph Fourier, the volume goes on to consider the broad areas of investigation that constituted the central foci of the development of the physics discipline in the nineteenth century: electricity and magnetism, including especially the work of Michael Faraday, William Thomson, and James Clerk Maxwell; and thermodynamics and matter theory, including the theoretical work and legacy of Josiah Willard Gibbs, some experimental work relating to thermodynamics and kinetic theory of Heinrich Hertz, and the work of Felix Seyler-Hoppe on hemoglobin in the neighboring field of biophysics/biochemistry. Moving on to the beginning of the twentieth century, a set of three articles on Albert Einstein deal with his early career and various influences on his work. Finally, a set of historiographical issues important for the history of physics are discussed, and the chronological conclusion of the volume is an article on the Solvay Conference of 1933. For physicists interested in the history of their discipline, historians and philosophers of science, and graduate students in these and related disciplines.

Author: Erwin Dekker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108495990
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
This biography presents the interaction between his socialist ideals, scientific aspirations and work as an economic expert.

Author: Thomas S. Kuhn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226458008
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"A masterly assessment of the way the idea of quanta of radiation became part of 20th-century physics. . . . The book not only deals with a topic of importance and interest to all scientists, but is also a polished literary work, described (accurately) by one of its original reviewers as a scientific detective story."—John Gribbin, New Scientist "Every scientist should have this book."—Paul Davies, New Scientist