Longing for the Harmonies Themes and Variations From Modern Physi PDF Download

Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393305968
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
"Occasionally, there comes along a popular science book that both scientists and non-scientist can read with pleasure and profit, and this is one."—The New Yorker Devoted to sharing their own delight and awe before the fundamental mysteries of the cosmos, Frank Wilczek (winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics) and science writer Betsy Devine also have a serious purpose: to reveal to the lay reader how a heightened perception can respond to timeless themes of the physical universe. For example, they show that even the most exotic theories always confirm that physical laws are precisely the same throughout the universe, and they explain how we have learned that the most massive molten stars and the tiniest frozen particles are in physical harmony. In their descriptions of the workings of the half-known universe, Wilczek and Devine bring all of us face to face with the beauty of eternal order and the inevitability of rational ends and beginnings.

Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 981256649X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
The fantastic reality that is modern physics is open for your exploration, guided by one of its primary architects and interpreters, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek. Some jokes, some poems, and extracts from wife Betsy Devine's sparkling chronicle of what it's like to live through a Nobel Prize provide easy entertainment. There's also some history, some philosophy, some exposition of frontier science, and some frontier science, for your lasting edification. 49 pieces, including many from Wilczek's award-winning Reference Frame columns in Physics Today, and some never before published, are gathered by style and subject into a dozen chapters, each with a revealing, witty introduction. Profound ideas, presented with style: What could be better? Enjoy.

Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698195620
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this “beautiful question.” With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. In fact, every major advance in his career came from this intuition: to assume that the universe embodies beautiful forms, forms whose hallmarks are symmetry—harmony, balance, proportion—and economy. There are other meanings of “beauty,” but this is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring. Wilczek is hardly alone among great scientists in charting his course using beauty as his compass. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who was the first to argue that “all things are number,” to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentiethcentury physics. Though the ancients weren’t right about everything, their ardent belief in the music of the spheres has proved true down to the quantum level. Indeed, Wilczek explores just how intertwined our ideas about beauty and art are with our scientific understanding of the cosmos. Wilczek brings us right to the edge of knowledge today, where the core insights of even the craziest quantum ideas apply principles we all understand. The equations for atoms and light are almost literally the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries. The universe itself, suggests Wilczek, seems to want to embody beautiful and elegant forms. Perhaps this force is the pure elegance of numbers, perhaps the work of a higher being, or somewhere between. Either way, we don’t depart from the infinite and infinitesimal after all; we’re profoundly connected to them, and we connect them. When we find that our sense of beauty is realized in the physical world, we are discovering something about the world, but also something about ourselves. Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. It is a dazzling and important work from one of our best thinkers, whose humor and infectious sense of wonder animate every page. Yes: The world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.

Author: Peter Pesic
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543907
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
A wide-ranging exploration of how music has influenced science through the ages, from fifteenth-century cosmology to twentieth-century string theory. In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, “liberal education” connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science—that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right. Pesic explores a series of episodes in which music influenced science, moments in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science. He describes encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and the emergent electromagnetism. He offers lively accounts of how Newton applied the musical scale to define the colors in the spectrum; how Euler and others applied musical ideas to develop the wave theory of light; and how a harmonium prepared Max Planck to find a quantum theory that reengaged the mathematics of vibration. Taken together, these cases document the peculiar power of music—its autonomous force as a stream of experience, capable of stimulating insights different from those mediated by the verbal and the visual. An innovative e-book edition available for iOS devices will allow sound examples to be played by a touch and shows the score in a moving line.

Author: George Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307765458
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
With a New Afterword "Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way. Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.

Author: Vladimir Ginzburg
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0967143292
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book describes abstract and applied mathematics of the unique properties of 4D spiral spacetimes called toryx and helyx. There is a good reason for studying the mathematics of these two spacetimes. Their unique properties provide them with a capability to be the prime elements of nature. In that capacity their potential role in nature would be comparable with a role of the DNA double helyces discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. The DNA double helyces contain genetic codes defining the properties of both organic entities and living organisms, whereas both toryx and helyx contain generic codes defining the properties of matter and radiation entities of the Universe. Also similar are the locations of these codes. The genetic codes of DNA are located inside of cells of all organic entities and living organisms, whereas the generic codes of toryces and helyces reside inside of all elementary matter and radiation particles, the building blocks of the Universe.

Author: Vladimir Ginzburg
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0967143284
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
According to the title of this book, the toryx is a four-dimensional (4D) spiral spacetime. It means its properties are described by three space plus one time parameters. Part 1 of this book presents properties of toryces in abstract mathematical terms. Part 2 shows several applications of toryces for mathematical modeling of properties of entities of both micro- and macro-worlds. This book further confirms a main proposition of the author's Universal Space Theory (UST) that the toryx has all attributes required to be a prime element of nature.

Author: Vladimir Ginzburg
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0967143268
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The Universal Spacetime Theory (UST) is the main subject of this book. It attempts to answer some very interesting questions related to the science and philosophy: * What is the origin of the Universe? * How was the Universe created out of nothing? * What are the structure and properties of ordinary matter that makes up less than 5% of the Universe? * What are the structure and properties of dark matter that occupies about 27% of the Universe? * What are the structure and properties of the dark energy that occupies roughly 68% of the Universe? * Is the communication possible with superluminal velocity?

Author: James J Kolata
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
ISBN: 1681741644
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Cosmology is the study of the origin, size, and evolution of the entire universe. Every culture has developed a cosmology, whether it be based on religious, philosophical, or scientific principles. In this book, the evolution of the scientific understanding of the Universe in Western tradition is traced from the early Greek philosophers to the most modern 21st century view. After a brief introduction to the concept of the scientific method, the first part of the book describes the way in which detailed observations of the Universe, first with the naked eye and later with increasingly complex modern instruments, ultimately led to the development of the "Big Bang" theory. The second part of the book traces the evolution of the Big Bang including the very recent observation that the expansion of the Universe is itself accelerating with time.

Author: Lily Tuck
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802195156
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
A “captivating” portrait of a long marriage and a meditation on how chance can affect life from the National Book Award winner (The Washington Post). “His hand is growing cold, still she holds it” is how this novel that contemplates love, after a husband’s sudden death, begins. This riveting and deeply moving story unfolds over a single night, as Nina, numb with grief, sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. There, she recalls the defining moments of their forty-three-year-long union, beginning with their meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a mathematician—a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As Nina revisits select memories—real and imagined—Lily Tuck reveals the intimacies, dark secrets, and overwhelming joys that shaped the couple’s life together.