Thermodynamics is the much abused slave of many masters physicists who love the totally impractical Carnot process, mechanical engineers who design power stations and refrigerators, chemists who are successfully synthesizing ammonia and are puzzled by photosynthesis, meteorologists who calculate cloud bases and predict fohn, boraccia and scirocco, physico-chemists who vulcanize rubber and build fuel cells, chemical engineers who rectify natural gas and distil f- mented potato juice, metallurgists who improve steels and harden surfaces, - trition counselors who recommend a proper intake of...

Physicists firmly believe that the differential equations of nature should be hyperbolic so as to exclude action at a distance; yet the equations of irreversible thermodynamics - those of Navier-Stokes and Fourier - are parabolic. This incompatibility between the expectation of physicists and the classical laws of thermodynamics has prompted the formulation of extended thermodynamics. After describing the motifs and early evolution of this new branch of irreversible thermodynamics, the authors apply the theory to mon-atomic gases, mixtures of gases, relativistic gases, and "gases" of phonons...

Ingo Moller bietet neben allgemeinen Hilfen zur Modellbildung und Datenanalyse eine detaillierte Zusammenstellung und Einordnung der Fulle statistischer Tests und stellt mit dem Lambda-Test ein neues statistisches Verfahren zur Analyse nichtlinearer Abhangigkeiten vor.
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