On a Beam of Light

On a Beam of Light PDF Author: Jennifer Berne
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452113092
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 58

Book Description
A boy rides a bicycle down a dusty road. But in his mind, he envisions himself traveling at a speed beyond imagining, on a beam of light. This brilliant mind will one day offer up some of the most revolutionary ideas ever conceived. From a boy endlessly fascinated by the wonders around him, Albert Einstein ultimately grows into a man of genius recognized the world over for profoundly illuminating our understanding of the universe. Jennifer Berne and Vladimir Radunsky invite the reader to travel along with Einstein on a journey full of curiosity, laughter, and scientific discovery. Parents and children alike will appreciate this moving story of the powerful difference imagination can make in any life.

Quantum Theory at the Crossroads

Quantum Theory at the Crossroads PDF Author: Guido Bacciagaluppi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139643711
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 557

Book Description
The 1927 Solvay conference was perhaps the most important in the history of quantum theory. Contrary to popular belief, questions of interpretation were not settled at this conference. Instead, a range of sharply conflicting views were extensively discussed, including de Broglie's pilot-wave theory (which de Broglie presented for a many-body system), Born and Heisenberg's 'quantum mechanics' (which apparently lacked wave function collapse or fundamental time evolution), and Schrödinger's wave mechanics. Today, there is no longer a dominant interpretation of quantum theory, so it is important to re-evaluate the historical sources and keep the debate open. This book contains a complete translation of the original proceedings, with essays on the three main interpretations presented, and a detailed analysis of the lectures and discussions in the light of current research. This book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in physics and in the history and philosophy of quantum theory.

The Making of Modern Science

The Making of Modern Science PDF Author: David Knight
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745657990
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
Of all the inventions of the nineteenth century, the scientist is one of the most striking. In revolutionary France the science student, taught by men active in research, was born; and a generation later, the graduate student doing a PhD emerged in Germany. In 1833 the word 'scientist' was coined; forty years later science (increasingly specialised) was a becoming a profession. Men of science rivalled clerics and critics as sages; they were honoured as national treasures, and buried in state funerals. Their new ideas invigorated the life of the mind. Peripatetic congresses, great exhibitions, museums, technical colleges and laboratories blossomed; and new industries based on chemistry and electricity brought prosperity and power, economic and military. Eighteenth-century steam engines preceded understanding of the physics underlying them; but electric telegraphs and motors were applied science, based upon painstaking interpretation of nature. The ideas, discoveries and inventions of scientists transformed the world: lives were longer and healthier, cities and empires grew, societies became urban rather than agrarian, the local became global. And by the opening years of the twentieth century, science was spreading beyond Europe and North America, and women were beginning to be visible in the ranks of scientists. Bringing together the people, events, and discoveries of this exciting period into a lively narrative, this book will be essential reading both for students of the history of science and for anyone interested in the foundations of the world as we know it today.

Understanding Information and Computation

Understanding Information and Computation PDF Author: Philip Tetlow
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1317004841
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Book Description
The World Wide Web is truly astounding. It has changed the way we interact, learn and innovate. It is the largest sociotechnical system humankind has created and is advancing at a pace that leaves most in awe. It is an unavoidable fact that the future of the world is now inextricably linked to the future of the Web. Almost every day it appears to change, to get better and increase its hold on us. For all this we are starting to see underlying stability emerge. The way that Web sites rank in terms of popularity, for example, appears to follow laws with which we are familiar. What is fascinating is that these laws were first discovered, not in fields like computer science or information technology, but in what we regard as more fundamental disciplines like biology, physics and mathematics. Consequently the Web, although synthetic at its surface, seems to be quite 'natural' deeper down, and one of the driving aims of the new field of Web Science is to discover how far down such ’naturalness’ goes. If the Web is natural to its core, that raises some fundamental questions. It forces us, for example, to ask if the central properties of the Web might be more elemental than the truths we cling to from our understandings of the physical world. In essence, it demands that we question the very nature of information. Understanding Information and Computation is about such questions and one possible route to potentially mind-blowing answers.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Encyclopaedia Britannica PDF Author: Hugh Chisholm
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 1090

Book Description
This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

The Albert Einstein Collection Volume Two

The Albert Einstein Collection Volume Two PDF Author: Albert Einstein
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504058674
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
From revealing, personal letters to brilliant essays on the nature of science, these three volumes demonstrate the breadth of Einstein’s thought. The man who became famous for conceiving of the equation E=mc2 kept his mind sharp through stimulating correspondence and applied his intellectual acuity to a number of important scientific issues. The second volume of the Albert Einstein Collection offers a fascinating window into how he developed his ideas. Essays in Science: In these sixteen essays, written at the height of his intellectual powers, Einstein sets out his views on scientific knowledge, its relationship to human experience, and the underlying principles of any scientific pursuit. He discusses his own work in theoretical physics and its basis in field theory, as well as the many achievements of other scientific thinkers—including Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and others. Letters to Solovine: This collection of personal letters from Einstein to his longtime friend and translator Maurice Solovine offers a rare glimpse into the evolution of his thought, as well as a revealing portrait of the man himself. Spanning Einstein’s career and ranging from philosophical discussion to personal gossip, these letters are presented in English translation alongside the German text, with facsimiles of the original letters also included. Letters on Wave Mechanics: In this stirring collection of correspondence, four of the twentieth century’s greatest minds—H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein—discuss, debate, and refine Schrödinger’s then-nascent theory of wave mechanics. As the physicist Karl Przibram states in his foreword to this edition, “little needs to be added to the letters; they speak for themselves. Apart from their essential content, they reveal something of the personalities of the four men of genius.”

The World As I See It

The World As I See It PDF Author: Albert Einstein
Publisher: Book Tree
ISBN: 1585092878
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
Often called he most advanced and celebrated mind of the 20th Century, this book allows us to meet Albert Einstein as a person. Explores his beliefs, philosophical ideas, and opinions on many subjects.

The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein

The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein PDF Author: Albert Einstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400889952
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
The first publication of Albert Einstein’s travel diary to the Far East and Middle East In the fall of 1922, Albert Einstein, along with his then-wife, Elsa Einstein, embarked on a five-and-a-half-month voyage to the Far East and Middle East, regions that the renowned physicist had never visited before. Einstein's lengthy itinerary consisted of stops in Hong Kong and Singapore, two brief stays in China, a six-week whirlwind lecture tour of Japan, a twelve-day tour of Palestine, and a three-week visit to Spain. This handsome edition makes available, for the first time, the complete journal that Einstein kept on this momentous journey. The telegraphic-style diary entries--quirky, succinct, and at times irreverent—record Einstein's musings on science, philosophy, art, and politics, as well as his immediate impressions and broader thoughts on such events as his inaugural lecture at the future site of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a garden party hosted by the Japanese Empress, an audience with the King of Spain, and meetings with other prominent colleagues and statesmen. Entries also contain passages that reveal Einstein's stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race. This beautiful edition features stunning facsimiles of the diary's pages, accompanied by an English translation, an extensive historical introduction, numerous illustrations, and annotations. Supplementary materials include letters, postcards, speeches, and articles, a map of the voyage, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Einstein would go on to keep a journal for all succeeding trips abroad, and this first volume of his travel diaries offers an initial, intimate glimpse into a brilliant mind encountering the great, wide world.

The Publishers Weekly

The Publishers Weekly PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 736

Book Description


The Extravagant Universe

The Extravagant Universe PDF Author: Robert P. Kirshner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400883806
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
The Extravagant Universe tells the story of a remarkable adventure of scientific discovery. One of the world's leading astronomers, Robert Kirshner, takes readers inside a lively research team on the quest that led them to an extraordinary cosmological discovery: the expansion of the universe is accelerating under the influence of a dark energy that makes space itself expand. In addition to sharing the story of this exciting discovery, Kirshner also brings the science up-to-date in a new epilogue. He explains how the idea of an accelerating universe--once a daring interpretation of sketchy data--is now the standard assumption in cosmology today. This measurement of dark energy--a quality of space itself that causes cosmic acceleration--points to a gaping hole in our understanding of fundamental physics. In 1917, Einstein proposed the "cosmological constant" to explain a static universe. When observations proved that the universe was expanding, he cast this early form of dark energy aside. But recent observations described first-hand in this book show that the cosmological constant--or something just like it--dominates the universe's mass and energy budget and determines its fate and shape. Warned by Einstein's blunder, and contradicted by the initial results of a competing research team, Kirshner and his colleagues were reluctant to accept their own result. But, convinced by evidence built on their hard-earned understanding of exploding stars, they announced their conclusion that the universe is accelerating in February 1998. Other lines of inquiry and parallel supernova research now support a new synthesis of a cosmos dominated by dark energy but also containing several forms of dark matter. We live in an extravagant universe with a surprising number of essential ingredients: the real universe we measure is not the simplest one we could imagine.