This course-tested text is an ideal starting point for engineers and physicists entering the field of particle accelerators. The fundamentals are comprehensively introduced, derivations of essential results are provided and a consistent notation style used throughout the book allows readers to quickly familiarize themselves with the field, providing a solid theoretical basis for further studies…
This book focuses on the theory of the Zakharov system in the context of plasma physics. It has been over 40 years since the system was first derived by V. E. Zakharov – and in the course of those decades, many innovative achievements with major impacts on other research fields have been made. The book represents a first attempt to highlight the mathematical theories that are most importan…
The book is inspired by the second seminar in a cycle connected to the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Politecnico di Milano. "Working with the Image Description Processing Prediction" was the motto of this meeting, aiming to point out the role of Visual Language not only in describing reality, but also in supporting the thinking processes in Science (prediction), in Art (invention…
Humans have long thought that planetary systems similar to our own should exist around stars other than the Sun, yet the search for planets outside our Solar System has had a dismal history of discoveries that could not be confirmed. However, this all changed in 1995, after which astonishing progress can be seen in this field; we now know of more than 200 extrasolar planets. These findings mark…
This book explores the limits of our knowledge. The author shows how uncertainty and indefiniteness not only define the borders confining our understanding, but how they feed into the process of discovery and help to push back these borders. Starting with physics the author collects examples from economics, neurophysiology, history, ecology and philosophy. The first part shows how informatio…
This book explains how it came to be that Venus and Earth, while very similar in chemical composition, zonation, size and heliocentric distance from the Sun, are very different in surface environmental conditions. It is argued here that these differences can be accounted for by planetoid capture processes and the subsequent evolution of the planet-satellite system. Venus captured a one-half moo…
This final entry in the History of Human Space Exploration mini-series by Ben Evans continues with an in-depth look at the latter part of the 20th century and the start of the new millennium. Picking up where Partnership in Space left off, the story commemorating the evolution of manned space exploration unfolds in further detail. More than fifty years after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering journey …
Young addresses the impressive expansion across existing and developing commercial space business markets, with multiple private companies competing in the payload launch services sector. The author pinpoints the new markets, technologies, and players in the industry, as well as highlighting the overall reasons why it is important for us to develop space. NASA now relies on commercial partners …
This book provides a general introduction to the rapidly developing astrophysical frontier of stellar tidal disruption, but also details original thesis research on the subject. This work has shown that recoiling black holes can disrupt stars far outside a galactic nucleus, errors in the traditional literature have strongly overestimated the maximum luminosity of “deeply plunging” tidal di…
A collection of papers edited by four experts in the field, this book sets out to describe the way solar activity is manifested in observations of the solar interior, the photosphere, the chromosphere, the corona and the heliosphere. The 11-year solar activity cycle, more generally known as the sunspot cycle, is a fundamental property of the Sun. This phenomenon is the generation and evolution …