Galileo Unbound: A Path Across Life, the Universe and Everything - Hardcover

Nolte, David D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198805845 ISBN 13: 9780198805847

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Stories from the history of the science of motion, from chaos theory to black holes, from population dynamics to Einstein and entanglement, Galileo Unbound traces the history of physics that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to the view of our lives as trajectories traversing a phase space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of trajectories through spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems.

Table of Contents:

    Chapter 1: Flight of the Swallows
        - Introduction to motion and trajectories
    Chapter 2: A New Scientist
        - Galileo's beginnings
    Chapter 3: Galileo's Trajectory
        - Publication of Two New Sciences
    Chapter 4: On the Shoulders of Giants
        - 100 years from Newton to Lagrange
    Chapter 5: Geometry on my Mind
        - The beginnings of abstract spaces
    Chapter 6: The Tangled Tale of Phase Space
        - The geometry of dynamics
    Chapter 7: The Lens of Gravity
        - From Einstein to Wheeler
        - The Golden Age of General Relativity
    Chapter 8: On the Quantum Footpath
        - Quantum dynamics
    Chapter 9: From Butterflies to Hurricanes
        - Chaos theory
    Chapter 10: Darwin in the Clockworks
        - Evolutionary dynamics
    Chapter 11: The Measure of Life
        - Population dynamics

About this title

About the Author

David D. Nolte, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Dept of Physics, Purdue University, USA

David D. Nolte is the Edward M. Purcell Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. His research areas have included experimental high-energy physics, cosmology, semiconductor physics, laser physics and biophysics. He received his BA from Cornell University in 1981, his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, and a post-doctoral appointment at AT&T Bell Labs before joining the faculty at Purdue. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the AAAS. In 2005, he received the Herbert Newby McCoy Award of Purdue University. He is the inventor of the BioCD and Biodynamic Imaging and is the technical founder of two biotech companies using interferometry and holography for diagnostic screening.

From the Inside Flap

The real stories behind the physics of chaos theory and complex systems, showing how scientists struggled to find what was constant in the midst of change.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198805845
• ISBN 13: 9780198805847
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 348