This wide-ranging and accessible book serves as a fascinating guide to the strategies and concepts that help us understand the boundaries between physics, on the one hand, and sociology, economics, and biology on the other. From cooperation and criticality to flock dynamics and fractals, the author addresses many of the topics belonging to the broad theme of complexity. He chooses excellent examples (requiring no prior mathematical knowledge) to illuminate these ideas and their implications. The lively style and clear description of the relevant models will appeal both to novices and those...
This wide-ranging and accessible book serves as a fascinating guide to the strategies and concepts that help us understand the boundaries between p...
This book examines quantum mechanics, one of humanity's most remarkable intellectual achievements, through interviews with seventeen leading scientists and philosophers. They illuminate the discipline, offering valuable insight on its past, present and future.
This book examines quantum mechanics, one of humanity's most remarkable intellectual achievements, through interviews with seventeen leading scientist...
This book is a collection of essays written by those who have led, and continue to lead, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It reviews the history of the subject, details present-day science and technology, and looks ahead to the future.
This book is a collection of essays written by those who have led, and continue to lead, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It reviews t...
At what level of physical existence does "quantum behavior" begin? How does it develop from classical mechanics? This book addresses these questions and thereby sheds light on fundamental conceptual problems of quantum mechanics. It elucidates the problem of quantum-classical correspondence by developing a procedure for quantizing stochastic systems (e.g. Brownian systems) described by Fokker-Planck equations. The logical consistency of the scheme is then verified by taking the classical limit of the equations of motion and corresponding physical quantities. Perhaps equally important,...
At what level of physical existence does "quantum behavior" begin? How does it develop from classical mechanics? This book addresses these question...
It is unanimously accepted that the quantum and the classical descriptions of the physical reality are very different, although any quantum process is "mysteriously" transformed through measurement into an observable classical event. Beyond the conceptual differences, quantum and classical physics have a lot in common. And, more important, there are classical and quantum phenomena that are similar although they occur in completely different contexts. For example, the Schrodinger equation has the same mathematical form as the Helmholtz equation, there is an uncertainty relation in optics...
It is unanimously accepted that the quantum and the classical descriptions of the physical reality are very different, although any quantum process...
The fundamental question whether, or in which sense, science informs us about the real world has pervaded the history of thought since antiquity. Is what science tells us about the world determined unambiguously by facts or does the content of any scientific theory in some way depend on the human condition? "Sokals hoax" added a new dimension to this controversial debate, which very quickly came to been known as "Science Wars." "Knowledge and the World" examines and reviews the broad range of philosophical positions on this issue, stretching from realism to relativism, to expound the...
The fundamental question whether, or in which sense, science informs us about the real world has pervaded the history of thought since antiquity. I...
Each contribution is an article in itself, and great effort has been made by the authors to be lucid and not too technical. A few brief highlights of the round-table discussions are given between the chapters.
Topics include: Quantum non-locality, the measurement problem, quantum insights into relativity, cosmology and thermodynamics, and possible bearings of quantum mechanics to biology and consciousness. Authors include Yakir Aharanov and Anton Zeilinger, plus Nobel laureates Anthony J. Leggett (2003) and Gerardus t Hooft (1999).
Foreword written by Sir Roger Penrose, best-selling...
Each contribution is an article in itself, and great effort has been made by the authors to be lucid and not too technical. A few brief highlights ...
Consciousness is one of the major unsolved problems in science. How do the feelings and sensations making up conscious experience arise from the concerted actions of nerve cells and their associated synaptic and molecular processes? Can such feelings be explained by modern science, or is there an entirely different kind of explanation needed? And how can this seemingly intractable problem be approached experimentally? How do the operations of the conscious mind emerge out of the specific interactions involving billions of neurons? This multi-authored book seeks answers to these questions...
Consciousness is one of the major unsolved problems in science. How do the feelings and sensations making up conscious experience arise from the co...
Entanglement was initially thought by some to be an oddity restricted to the realm of thought experiments. However, Bell s inequality delimiting local - havior and the experimental demonstration of its violation more than 25 years ago made it entirely clear that non-local properties of pure quantum states are more than an intellectual curiosity. Entanglement and non-locality are now understood to ?gure prominently in the microphysical world, a realm into which technology is rapidly hurtling. Information theory is also increasingly recognized by physicists and philosophers as intimately...
Entanglement was initially thought by some to be an oddity restricted to the realm of thought experiments. However, Bell s inequality delimiting local...
It has been suggested that the big questions of science are answered that science has entered a twilight age where all the important knowledge is known and only the details need mopping up. And yet, the unprecedented progress in science and technology in the twentieth century has raised qu- tions that weren t conceived of a century ago. This book argues that, far from being nearlycomplete, the storyof sciencehas many morechapters, yet unwritten. With the perspective of the century s advance, it s as if we have climbed a mountain and can see just how much broader the story is. Instead of...
It has been suggested that the big questions of science are answered that science has entered a twilight age where all the important knowledge is know...
