More than to any other single individual, thermodynamics owes its creation to Nicolas-Leonard-Sadi Carnot. Sadi, the son of the "great Carnot" Lazare, was he- ily in uencedby his father. Not onlywas LazareMinister of War duringNapoleon's consulate, he was a respected mathematician and engineer in his own right. Ma- ematically, Lazare can lay claim to the de nition of the cross ratio, a projective invariant of four points. Lazare was also interested in how machines operated, - phasizing the roles of work and "vis viva," or living force, which was later to be associated with the kinetic energy....

Starting off from noneuclidean geometries, apart from the method of Einstein's equations, this book derives and describes the phenomena of gravitation and diffraction. A historical account is presented, exposing the missing link in Einstein's construction of the theory of general relativity: the uniformly rotating disc, together with his failure to realize, that the Beltrami metric of hyperbolic geometry with constant curvature describes exactly the uniform acceleration observed.This book also explores these questions:

The book points out what has gone wrong with physics since Einstein's formulation of this theory of general relativity a century ago. It points out inconsistencies and fallacies in the standard model of the big bang and the inflationary scenario which was supposed to have overcome those shortcomings, the evolution of string theory from a theory of the strong interaction to a theory of gravitation and quantum mechanics which has not produced a single verifiable prediction, and what it has accomplished is reaffirming wrong results like the entropy of a black hole, which is not an entropy at...