Bøger i Fundamental Theories of Physics serien

"Quantum Physics of the Solid State: an Introduction" Draft foreword: 26/09/03 If only this book had been available when I was starting out in science!

To accept the special theory of relativity has, it is universally agreed, consequences for our philosophical views about space and time.

The tremendous progress in astronomical observations over the past sixty years has revealed a vast structured universe whose fundamental parti cles are galaxies, and clusters thereof. He further demonstrated that matter exists in two interchangeable forms - a mass form and an energy form - which interact closely at all levels.

There have been earlier attempts to approach the subject in this way, to be sure, reflected in the books by Tribus [Thermostat ics and Thermodynamics, Van Nostrand, 1961], Baierlein [Atoms and Information Theory, Freeman, 1971], and Hobson [Concepts in Statistical Mechanics, Gordon and Breach, 1971].

The notion of group is fundamental in our days, not only in mathematics, but also in classical mechanics, electromagnetism, theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, theory of elementary particles, etc.

Bell's Theorem and its associated implications for the nature of the physical world remain topics of great interest. The Fall Workshop held at George Mason University on October 21 and 22, 1988 and titled "Bell's Theorem, Quantum Theory and Conceptions of the Universe" was of a more general scope.

We refer to (1) the confinement of single electrons for long term study, and (2) the interaction of electrons with high intensity laser fields. The precision experiments on trapped electrons by the Washington group quoted above have already led to a Nobel prize for the most accurate measurements of the electron magnetic moment.

We may call this a striving for "physical rigor," rigor in reasoning, or intellectual rigor.

However, the absence of rigorous meth ods of calculations of many particle nuclear systems with strong interaction makes it necessary to use macroscopic nuclear models to describe particular nuclear properties.

I believe that the book makes a reasonable transition between the many excellent elementary books such as Gri?th's Introduction to Electrodynamics and the obviously graduate level books such as Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics or Landau and Lifshitz' Elect- dynamics of Continuous Media.

Due to its extraordinary predictive power and the great generality of its mathematical structure, quantum theory is able, at least in principle, to describe all the microscopic and macroscopic properties of the physical world, from the subatomic to the cosmological level. Nevertheless, ever since the Copen­ hagen and Gottingen schools in 1927 gave it the definitive formu­ lation, now commonly known as the orthodox interpretation, the theory has suffered from very serious logical and epistemologi­ cal problems. These shortcomings were immediately pointed out by some of the principal founders themselves of quantum theory, to wit, Planck, Einstein, Ehrenfest, Schrodinger, and de Broglie, and by the philosopher Karl Popper, who assumed a position of radical criticism with regard to the standard formulation of the theory. The aim of the participants in the workshop on Open Questions in Quantum Physics, which was held in Bari (Italy), in the Department of Physics of the University, during May 1983 and whose Proceedings are collected in the present volume, accord­ ingly was to discuss the formal, the physical and the epistemo­ logical difficulties of quantum theory in the light of recent crucial developments and to propose some possible resolutions of three basic conceptual dilemmas, which are posed respectively ~: (a) the physical developments of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument and Bell's theorem, i. e.

Part I eases the mainstream reader into the ideas of the new paradigm by providing the reader with a discussion that should look very familiar, but contains subtle nuances.

Although the debate about the true nature of the quantum behavior of atomic systems has never ceased, there are two periods during which it has been particularly intense: the years that saw the founding of quantum mechanics and, increasingly, these modern times.

It is shown there to exhibit an explicit unification of the gravitational and electromagnetic fields of force with the inertial manifestations of matter, expressing the latter explicitly in terms of a covariant field theory within the structure of this general theory.

Remarkable recent progress in quantum optics has given rise to extremely precise quantum measurements that are used in the research into the fundamentals of quantum physics, and in different branches of physics such as optical spectroscopy.

A revised English version of "Aufbau der Physik." It includes insights and results of ur-theoretic research of the late 1980's and 1990's. It combines the perspectives of science, philosophy, religion and politics with a view towards the challenges as well as the responsibilities of our time.

The main focus of this volume is the question: is spacetime nothing more than a mathematical space (which describes the evolution in time of the ordinary three-dimensional world) or is it a mathematical model of a real four-dimensional world with time entirely given as the fourth dimension?

The original papers contained in this volume are useful as supplementary reading material for students in courses on group theory, relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, relativistic electrodynamics, general relativity, and elementary particle physics.

Recent results from high-energy scattering and theoretical developments of string theory require a change in our understanding of the basic structure of space-time. The various chapters address topics such as space-time fluctuation and random potential, non-local fields, and the origin of stochasticity.

This book evolved out of some one hundred lectures given by twenty experts at a special instructional conference sponsored by the University Grants Commis sion, India.

Contains discussions by researchers of a spate of experimental techniques developed to test some of the stranger predictions of quantum physics. This book is intended for physicists, philosophers of science, mathematicians, graduate students and those interested in the foundations of quantum theory.

This text explores the relationships between epistemology and probability in quantum mechanics, in physics as a whole, and in the works of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger. It then considers the radical, controversial implications of these relationships.

This text presents a basic understanding of the mutual conditioning of spacetime and interactions and matter. In it, the spacetime manifold is looked at as a reservoir for the parametrization of operation Lie groups or subgroup classes of Lie groups.

Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods of Statistical Analysis

Shortly after its inauguration in 1985 the Birla Science Centre, Hyderabad, India, started a series of lectures by Nobel Laureates and other scientists of international renown, mostly on Physics and Astronomy. The transcript of each lecture is preceded by a short biography of the Nobel Laureate/Scientist in question.

This volume provides a detailed discussion of the mathematical aspects and physical applications of a new geometrical structure of space-time, based on a generalization ("deformation") of the usual Minkowski space, as supposed to be endowed with a metric whose coefficients depend on the energy.

However, being aware of some of the problematic sides and ambiguities of his views and of new developments which have taken place in QM after his time, the main challenge would be to develop a more up to date version version of his approach and express it in a philosophically unobjectionable way.

Proceedings of a Symposium in Honour of Jean-Pierre Vigier

Theoretical physicists allover the world are acquainted with Lande's celebrated computation of the g factor or splitting factor or, more precisely, the magne togyric factor.