This biography explores the life and career of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, which is also the story of thirty years that transformed physics and forever changed our understanding of matter and the universe: nuclear physics and elementary particle physics were born, nuclear fission was discovered, the Manhattan Project was developed, the atomic bombs were dropped, and the era of “big sc…
The physics of condensed matter, in contrast to quantum physics or cosmology, is not traditionally associated with deep philosophical questions. However, as science - largely thanks to more powerful computers - becomes capable of analysing and modelling ever more complex many-body systems, basic questions of philosophical relevance arise. Questions about the emergence of structure, the nature o…
A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do. Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In…
The bubbles were swirling all around me, massaging my body. As I luxuriated in this fantastic bath, I gasped realizing that those bubbles carried with them miniature galaxies bringing the entire Cosmos into my bathtub... Alfie is back. And so are George and other characters from the author’s previous book Einstein’s Enigma or Black Holes in My Bubble Bath. While the present book, Univers…
The development of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant scientific events of the twentieth century. This revised and updated 3rd edition explores the challenges that faced the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project. It gives a clear introduction to fission weapons at the level of an upper-year undergraduate physics student by examining the detai…
This open access book examines the many contributions of Paul Lorenzen, an outstanding philosopher from the latter half of the 20th century. It features papers focused on integrating Lorenzen's original approach into the history of logic and mathematics. The papers also explore how practitioners can implement Lorenzen’s systematical ideas in today’s debates on proof-theoretic semantics, dat…
This biography provides a stimulating and coherent blend of scientific and personal narratives describing the many achievements of the theoretical physicist Herbert Fröhlich. For more than half a century, Fröhlich was an internationally renowned and much respected figure who exerted a decisive influence, often as a ‘man ahead of his time’, in fields as diverse as meson theory and biology.…
This book provides an overview of the confluence of ideas in Turing’s era and work and examines the impact of his work on mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. It combines contributions by well-known scientists on the history and philosophy of computability theory as well as on generalised Turing computability. By looking at the roots and at the philosophical and technical infl…
Over the last forty years, scientists have uncovered evidence that if the Universe had been forged with even slightly different properties, life as we know it - and life as we can imagine it - would be impossible. Join us on a journey through how we understand the Universe, from its most basic particles and forces, to planets, stars and galaxies, and back through cosmic history to the birth of …
E.F.F. Chladni’s experiments and observations with sound and vibrations profoundly influenced the development of the field of Acoustics. The famous Chladni diagrams along with other observations are contained in Die Akustik, published in German in 1802 and Traité d’Acoustique, a greatly expanded version, published in French in 1809. This is the first comprehensive translation of the expand…