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The Shortt clock, made in the 1920s, is the most famous accurate clock pendulum ever known, having an accuracy of one second per year when kept at nearly constant temperature. Almost all of a pendulum clock's accuracy resides in its pendulum. If the pendulum is accurate, the clock will be accurate. This book describes many scientific aspects of pendulum design and operation in simple terms with experimental data, and little mathematics. It has been written, looking at all the different parts and aspects of the pendulum in great detail, chapter by chapter, reflecting the degree of attention necessary for making a pendulum run accurately. The topics covered include the dimensional stability of different pendulum materials, good and poor suspension spring designs, the design of mechanical joints and clamps, effect of quartz on accuracy, temperature compensation, air drag of different bob shapes and making a sinusoidal electromagnetic drive. One whole chapter is devoted to simple ways of improving the accuracy of ordinary low-cost pendulum clocks, which have a different construction compared to the more expensive designs of substantially well-made ones. This book will prove invaluable to anyone who wants to know how to make a more accurate pendulum or pendulum clock.

Nuclear physics emerged as the dominant field in experimental and theoretical physics between 1919 and 1939, the two decades between the First and Second World Wars. Milestones were Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of artificial nuclear disintegration (1919), George Gamow’s and Ronald Gurney and Edward Condon’s simultaneous quantum-mechanical theory of alpha decay (1928), Harold Urey’s discovery of deuterium (the deuteron), James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, Carl Anderson’s discovery of the positron, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton’s invention of their eponymous linear accelerator, and Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron (1931–2), Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie’s discovery and confirmation of artificial radioactivity (1934), Enrico Fermi’s theory of beta decay based on Wolfgang Pauli’s neutrino hypothesis and Fermi’s discovery of the efficacy of slow neutrons in nuclear reactions (1934), Niels Bohr’s theory of the compound nucleus and Gregory Breit and Eugene Wigner’s theory of nucleus+neutron resonances (1936), and Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch’s interpretation of nuclear fission, based on Gamow’s liquid-drop model of the nucleus (1938), which Frisch confirmed experimentally (1939). These achievements reflected the idiosyncratic personalities of the physicists who made them; they were shaped by the physical and intellectual environments of the countries and institutions in which they worked; and they were buffeted by the profound social and political upheavals after the Great War: the punitive postwar treaties, the runaway inflation in Germany and Austria, the Great Depression, and the greatest intellectual migration in history, which encompassed some of the most gifted experimental and theoretical nuclear physicists in the world.

One of the pillars of modern science, statistical mechanics, owes much to one man, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906). As a result of his unusual working and writing styles, his enormous contribution remains little read and poorly understood. The purpose of this book is to make the Boltzmann corpus more accessible to physicists, philosophers, and historians, and so give it new life. The means are introductory biographical and historical materials, detailed and lucid summaries of every relevant publication, and a final chapter of critical synthesis. Special attention is given to Boltzmann’s theoretical tool-box and to his patient construction of lofty formal systems, even before their full conceptual import could be known. This constructive tendency largely accounts for his lengthy style, for the abundance of new constructions, for the relative vagueness of their object, and for the puzzlement of commentators. This book will help the reader cross the stylistic barrier and see how ingeniously Boltzmann combined atoms, mechanics, and probability to invent new bridges between the micro- and macro-worlds.

Theoretical physics and foundations of physics have not made much progress in the last few decades. There is no consensus among researchers on how to approach unifying general relativity and quantum field theory (quantum gravity), explaining so-called dark energy and dark matter (cosmology), or the interpretation and implications of quantum mechanics and relativity. In addition, both fields are deeply puzzled about various facets of time including, above all, time as experienced. This book argues that this impasse is the result of the “dynamical universe paradigm,” the idea that reality fundamentally comprises physical entities that evolve in time from some initial state according to dynamical laws. Thus, in the dynamical universe, the initial conditions plus the dynamical laws explain everything else going exclusively forward in time. In cosmology, for example, the initial conditions reside in the Big Bang and the dynamical law is supplied by general relativity. Accordingly, the present state of the universe is explained exclusively by its past. A completely new paradigm (called Relational Blockworld) is offered here whereby the past, present, and future co-determine each other via “adynamical global constraints,” such as the least action principle. Accordingly, the future is just as important for explaining the present as the past is. Most of the book is devoted to showing how Relational Blockworld resolves many of the current conundrums of both theoretical physics and foundations of physics, including the mystery of time as experienced and how that experience relates to the block universe.

This guidebook introduces the reader—the scientific tourist and others—to the visible memorabilia of science and scientists in Budapest—statues, busts, plaques, buildings, and other artefacts. According to the Hungarian–American Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi, this metropolis at the crossroads of Europe has a special atmosphere of respect for science. It has been the venue of numerous scientific achievements and the cradle, literally, of many individuals who in Hungary, and even more beyond its borders became world-renowned contributors to science and culture. Six of the eight chapters of the book cover the Hungarian Nobel laureates, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the university, the medical school, agricultural sciences, and technology and engineering. One chapter is about selected gimnáziums from which seven Nobel laureates (Szent-Györgyi, de Hevesy, Wigner, Gabor, Harsanyi, Olah, and Kertész) and the five “Martians of Science” (von Kármán, Szilard, Wigner, von Neumann, and Teller) had graduated. The concluding chapter is devoted to scientist martyrs of the Holocaust. A special feature in surveying Hungarian science is the contributions of scientists that left their homeland before their careers blossomed and made their seminal discoveries elsewhere, especially in Great Britain and the United States. The book covers the memorabilia referring to both émigré scientists and those that remained in Hungary.

Celestial Tapestry places mathematics within a vibrant cultural and historical context, highlighting links to the visual arts and design, and broader areas of artistic creativity. Threads are woven together telling of surprising influences that have passed between the arts and mathematics. The story involves many intriguing characters: Gaston Julia, who laid the foundations for fractals and computer art while recovering in hospital after suffering serious injury in the First World War; Charles Howard, Hinton who was imprisoned for bigamy but whose books had a huge influence on twentieth-century art; Michael Scott, the Scottish necromancer who was the dedicatee of Fibonacci’s Book of Calculation, the most important medieval book of mathematics; Richard of Wallingford, the pioneer clockmaker who suffered from leprosy and who never recovered from a lightning strike on his bedchamber; Alicia Stott Boole, the Victorian housewife who amazed mathematicians with her intuition for higher-dimensional space. The book includes more than 200 colour illustrations, puzzles to engage the reader, and many remarkable tales: the secret message in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors; the link between Viking runes, a Milanese banking dynasty, and modern sculpture; the connection between astrology, religion, and the Apocalypse; binary numbers and the I Ching. It also explains topics on the school mathematics curriculum: algorithms; arithmetic progressions; combinations and permutations; number sequences; the axiomatic method; geometrical proof; tessellations and polyhedra, as well as many essential topics for arts and humanities students: single-point perspective; fractals; computer art; the golden section; the higher-dimensional inspiration behind modern art.

This book records the long scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Although philosophical speculation about alien civilizations dates to antiquity, the invention of the telescope in the 17th century inspired scientists like Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Christiaan Huygens to consider the possibility of intelligent creatures living on the Moon or on the planets of our solar system. By the late 19th century, Mars became the focus of attention for astronomers searching for civilized life near the earth. The belief that Mars contained a superior civilization capable of building a global system of irrigation canals on the planet was supported by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and the American Percival Lowell. In the 1960s and 1970s, data gathered by Soviet and American spacecraft challenged the assumption that Mars was the habitat for life of any sort. As the hunt for alien civilizations in the solar system waned, a new search began for signs of intelligent life in remote parts of the universe. This search used radio telescopes to scan the skies for any messages transmitted to earth by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Distinguished modern astronomers and physicists — Frank Drake, Philip Morrison, Carl Sagan — were convinced that electronic technology would allow contact with civilizations located many light years from earth. Unfortunately, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was compromised by anthropomorphism (attributing human qualities to alien life and culture) and by an unconscious religious outlook that the superior beings living in outer space would help solve pressing social, economic, and technological problems.

Julian Schwinger was one of the leading theoretical physicists of the 20th century. His contributions are as important, and as pervasive, as those of Richard Feynman, with whom he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics (along with Sin-itiro Tomonaga). Yet, while Feynman is universally recognised as a cultural icon, Schwinger is little known to many even within the physics community. In his youth, Schwinger was a nuclear physicist, turning to classical electrodynamics after World War II. In the years after the war, he was the first to renormalise quantum electrodynamics. Subsequently, he presented the most complete formulation of quantum field theory and laid the foundations for the electroweak synthesis of Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and Abdus Salam, and he made fundamental contributions to the theory of nuclear magnetic resonance as well as many-body theory and quantum optics. Schwinger also developed a unique approach to quantum mechanics, measurement algebra, and a general quantum action principle. His discoveries include ‘Feynman's’ parameters and ‘Glauber's’ coherent states; in later years he also developed an alternative to operator quantum field theory which he called source theory, reflecting his profound phenomenological bent. His late work on the Thomas-Fermi model of atoms and on the Casimir effect continues to be an inspiration to a new generation of physicists. This first full-length biography describes the many strands of his research life, while tracing the personal life of this private and gentle genius.

This is the first of two volumes on the genesis of quantum mechanics. It covers the key developments in the period 1900–1923 that provided the scaffold on which the arch of modern quantum mechanics was built in the period 1923–1927 (covered in the second volume). After tracing the early contributions by Planck, Einstein, and Bohr to the theories of black‐body radiation, specific heats, and spectroscopy, all showing the need for drastic changes to the physics of their day, the book tackles the efforts by Sommerfeld and others to provide a new theory, now known as the old quantum theory. After some striking initial successes (explaining the fine structure of hydrogen, X‐ray spectra, and the Stark effect), the old quantum theory ran into serious difficulties (failing to provide consistent models for helium and the Zeeman effect) and eventually gave way to matrix and wave mechanics. Constructing Quantum Mechanics is based on the best and latest scholarship in the field, to which the authors have made significant contributions themselves. It breaks new ground, especially in its treatment of the work of Sommerfeld and his associates, but also offers new perspectives on classic papers by Planck, Einstein, and Bohr. Throughout the book, the authors provide detailed reconstructions (at the level of an upper‐level undergraduate physics course) of the cental arguments and derivations of the physicists involved. All in all, Constructing Quantum Mechanics promises to take the place of older books as the standard source on the genesis of quantum mechanics.

This book presents a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize for Science (Physics 1979), who was nevertheless excommunicated and branded as a heretic in his own country. His achievements are often overlooked, even besmirched. Realizing that the whole world had to be his stage, he pioneered the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, a vital focus of Third World science which remains as his monument. A staunch Muslim, he was ashamed of the decline of science in the heritage of Islam, and struggled doggedly to restore it to its former glory. Undermined by his excommunication, these valiant efforts were doomed.

The Cosmic Mystery Tour is a brief account of modern physics and astronomy presented in a broad historical and cultural context. The book is attractively illustrated and aimed at the general reader. Part I explores the laws of physics including general relativity, the structure of matter, quantum mechanics and the Standard Model of particle physics. It discusses recent discoveries such as gravitational waves and the project to construct LISA, a space-based gravitational wave detector, as well as unresolved issues such as the nature of dark matter. Part II begins by considering cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole and how we arrived at the theory of the Big Bang and the expanding universe. It looks at the remarkable objects within the universe such as red giants, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes, and considers the expected discoveries from new telescopes such as the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, and the Event Horizon Telescope, currently aiming to image the supermassive black hole at the galactic centre. Part III considers the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life, from the speculations of science fiction authors to the ongoing search for alien civilizations known as SETI. Recent developments are discussed: space probes to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn; the discovery of planets in other star systems; the citizen science project SETI@Home; Breakthrough Starshot, the project to develop technologies to send spacecraft to the stars. It also discusses the Fermi paradox which argues that we might actually be alone in the cosmos

This book takes you behind the scenes in the life of one of the most prominent scientists of the twentieth century, William Lawrence Bragg (WLB). He was an innovative genius who, together with his father, William Henry Bragg, founded and developed X-ray crystallography and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915. The main body of the book contains the hitherto unpublished autobiographies of both WLB and his wife, Alice, who was a public figure in her own right as Mayor of Cambridge and as National Chairman of Marriage Guidance, among other roles. She and WLB were as different as chalk and cheese. Together, their autobiographies give a rounded picture of the real personalities behind their public appearance. They write of their travels, their family life, their friends and their joys and sorrows; but, most of all, they write about each other. The first chapter, written by their younger daughter, uses anecdotes and vignettes to bring her parents to life and includes extracts from previously unpublished letters and from articles which Alice Bragg (née Hopkinson) wrote for national newspapers.

This book contains an edition of the Minutes of the Coffee House Philosophical Society 1780-1787, as transcribed by William Nicholson, the secretary to the society. The 1780s were exciting years for science and its applications, and experimental philosophy and industrial development were closely interwoven. This coffee house society gave a group of natural philosophers the opportunity to discuss the topics that most interested them. The minutes themselves, unique in their completeness, constitute a continuous record of the fortnightly meetings of a group of leading natural philosophers, instrument makers, physicians, and industrialist entrepreneurs. In addition to a fully edited edition of the Minute book, and brief biographies of all the members, the book includes essays by Jan Golinski on the members' discussion about phlogiston and other issues relating to the chemical revolution, and by Larry Stewart on the reforming, radical, and industrial contexts of the networks to which the members belonged. One standard criticism of English science in the late 18th century is its isolation from the rest of Europe. These minutes offer a very different picture. The members, with Irish chemist Richard Kirwan taking the most active role, discussed current issues in science and reported on scientific and industrial advances from across Europe, and even from Hudson's Bay, showing early English awareness of the latest developments. The Minute book gives a sense of history at a particular period, and is invaluable to all historians, whatever their specialism.

Drawing Physics is a collection of 51 essays each one organized around a simple, informative, line drawing that conveys a key idea in the history of physics. The essays, each approximately 1000 words long, are chronologically ordered from Thales, who around 600 BCE explained and used the principles of triangulation, to Peter Higgs, who received the Nobel Prize in 2012 for his prediction of the Higgs boson. The essays expand on the science conveyed in each drawing and place that science in a broader cultural context. The essays are grouped into five sections: Antiquity, Middle Ages, Early Modern Period, Nineteenth Century, and Twentieth Century and Beyond. Each essay stands alone and requires no background in physics or mathematics.

Energy is explained through its history. Newton missed ‘energy’, Leibniz defined kinetic energy, and potential energy emerged from ideas about stored ‘live force’, the concept of ‘work’, analyses of vibrating strings, the figure of the Earth, and so forth. The Principles of Virtual Work, Least Action, and D’Alembert underpinned Lagrange’s Analytical Mechanics. Daniel Bernoulli appreciated energy-in-the-round, and quantified the ‘live force’ in coal. Rumford’s experiments on canon-boring showed an ‘inexhaustible’ source of frictional heating, but didn’t immediately topple caloric theory. Clairaut, Laplace, and Green founded potential function theory. Hamilton brought in the ‘Hamiltonian’, and his approach led into Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. Carnot defined an ideal heat-engine (Carnot cycle) and realized temperature was the parameter. Watt’s steam engine started the Industrial Revolution, but why was it discovered in just one place, at one time? Mayer and Joule crossed the ‘category error’, merging mechanics and heat. Helmholtz invoked Kantian ‘cause equals effect’ to justify conservation of ‘energy’. Maxwell was the first to use probability theory in physics; Boltzmann posited discrete energy levels. The Maxwell–Boltzmann kinetic theory brought in a deeper understanding of energy. Clausius and Thomson (Kelvin) discovered the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. Einstein’s Principle of Relativity led to the famous E = mc². The force and energy views are compared, and difficult questions are examined: why are there two forms of energy–kinetic and potential–and is one more fundamental? Why does kinetic energy have the form 1/2mv²? What are action, temperature, and the Hamiltonian? What is energy?

This book is a snapshot of the ether qua epistemic object in the early twentieth century. It shows that the ether was not necessarily regarded as the residue of old-fashioned science, but often as one of the objects of modernity, hand in hand with the electron, radioactivity or X-rays. Instrumental in this was the emergence of wireless technologies and radio broadcasting, which brought the ether into social audiences who would otherwise have never heard about it. Following the prestige of scientists like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Eddington as popularisers of science, the ether became common currency among the general educated public. Modernism in the arts was also fond of the ether in the early twentieth century: the values of modernism found in the complexities and contradictions of modern physics provided a fertile ground for the development of new artistic languages, in literature as much as in the pictorial and performing arts. The question of what was meant by ‘ether’ (or ‘aether’) in the early twentieth century at the scientific and cultural levels is also central to this book. The chapters in this book display a complex array of meanings that will help elucidate the uses of the ether before its purported abandonment. Rather than considering ether as simply a term that remained popular in several groups, this book shows the complexities of an epistemic object that saw, in the early twentieth century, the last episode in the long tradition of stretching its meaning and uses.

Music is an international key aspect of humanity which impacts life, from love songs to religion, politics, and warfare. Changes in culture and developments in science drove musical progress from printing and distribution to instrumental improvements, innovation, and the acoustics of buildings and concert halls. Every aspect increased public demand and changed compositional styles, plus heightened the need for virtuosic star performers. Conversely, the attempts to record and distribute music inspired the growth of recording systems, microphones, and electronic amplifiers, which has resulted in the electronically dominated world as we now know it. The book maps these continuous changes and how they have influenced musical evolution, and it not only explores the past, but attempts to predict the near future in terms of the potential for new electronic instruments and the ongoing shifts between recording and broadcasting techniques (tapes, vinyl, CDs, streaming, etc.), together with their impact on, and the survival of, the music industry. Examples of changes for keyboard, string, and brass instruments, current understanding of voice production, hearing, and brain processing of music are all discussed. This book is for those interested in all aspects of music, from classical to jazz and pop. It does not require either scientific or musical backgrounds, but it will enhance enjoyment of music, and reveal the probable future of musical trends.

This book is an informal, semi-autobiographical history, from the particular viewpoint of someone who was involved, of the exploration of the Solar System using spacecraft. The author is a Northumbrian, a Liverpudlian, a Californian, and an Oxford Don with half a century of experience of devising and deploying experiments to study the Earth and the planets, moons, and small bodies of the Solar System. Along with memories and anecdotes about his experiences as a participant in the space programme from its earliest days to the present, he describes in non-technical terms the science goals that drove the projects as well as the politics, pressures, and problems that had to be addressed and overcome on the way. The theme is the scientific intent of these ambitious voyages of discovery, and the joys and hardships of working to see them achieved. The narrative gives a first-hand account of things like how Earth satellites came to revolutionize weather forecasting, starting in the 1960s; how observations from space helped politicians like Margaret Thatcher to resolve the ozone layer crisis in the 1980s; and how the threat of climate change is being addressed by scientists today. The narrative extends to deep space missions to explore other worlds, to see how conditions on places as near as our neighbours Venus and Mars, and as far away as the rainy lakelands of Saturn’s planet-sized moon Titan or the surface of a comet, relate to the origins of the Solar System and of life on Earth.

First published in 1922 and based on lectures delivered in May 1921, Albert Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity offered an overview and explanation of the then new and controversial theory of relativity. The work would go on to become a monumental classic, printed in numerous editions and translations worldwide. Now, this book introduces Einstein's masterpiece to new audiences. The volume contains Einstein's insightful text, accompanied by important historical materials and commentary looking at the origins and development of general relativity. The book provides fresh, original perspectives, placing Einstein's achievements into a broader context for all readers. It tells the rich story behind the early reception, spread, and consequences of Einstein's ideas during the formative years of general relativity in the late 1910s and 1920s. Relativity's meaning changed radically throughout the nascent years of its development, and the book describes in detail the transformation of Einstein's work from the esoteric pursuit of one individual communicating with a handful of colleagues into the preoccupation of a growing community of physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers. The book quotes extensively from Einstein's correspondence and reproduces historical documents such as newspaper articles and letters. Inserts are featured in the main text giving concise explanations of basic concepts, and short biographical notes and photographs of some of Einstein's contemporaries are included. The first-ever English translations of two of Einstein's popular Princeton lectures are featured at the book's end.

This book presents a vivid argument for the almost lost idea of a unity of all natural sciences. It starts with the "strange" physics of matter, including particle physics, atomic and quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity and their consequences (Chapter 1), and it continues by describing the properties of material systems that are best understood by statistical and phase-space concepts (Chapter 2). These lead to entropy and to the classical picture of quantitative information, initially devoid of value and meaning (Chapter 3). Finally, "information space" and dynamics within it are introduced as a basis for semantics (Chapter 4), leading to an exploration of life and thought as new problems in physics (Chapter 5). Dynamic equations – again of a strange (but very general) nature – bring about the complex familiarity of the world we live in. Surprising new results in the life sciences open our eyes to the richness of physical thought, and they show us what can and what cannot be explained by a Darwinian approach. The abstract physical approach is applicable to the origins of life, of meaningful information and even of our universe.