Showing results for "J" in Physics

There are deep connections between stars and atoms, between the cosmos and the microworld. Just six numbers, imprinted in the "Big Bang", determine the essential features of our entire physical world. Moreover, cosmic evolution is astonishingly sensitive to the values of these numbers. If any one of them were "untuned", there could be no stars and no life. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, our place in it, and the nature of physical laws.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the iconic figures of the 20th century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress. When he proposed international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and criticized plans for a nuclear war, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup during the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s.

When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices - or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), credited as the inspiration for radio, robots, and even radar, has been called the patron saint of modern electricity. Based on original material and previously unavailable documents, this acclaimed book is the definitive biography of the man considered by many to be the founding father of modern electrical technology.

Why can't we tickle ourselves? Why do footballers who hug score more goals? Why does holding a hot coffee make us feel more positively about people? Touch is the sense that makes us human. It defines our experiences, shapes our sense of self and bonds us together. It is the first sense to start working in utero. If you are deprived of the sense of sight or hearing from birth, you will still be able to live a rich and fruitful life.

Let There Be Light presents a simple, beautiful, and elegant view of the oneness of all life, subjective and objective. It demonstrates the unity of the physical world with conscious experience of the physical world. Consciousness is not inside space and time, space and time are within consciousness; they are a special structure of the perceptual portion of consciousness.

Mind Openers 2.0 is the second installment in a two-part set. It takes a fresh look at relativity, cosmology, and quantum theory by imagining a "sandbox universe," in which space and time are treated as tangible and visualizable phenomena. In addition to providing an intuitive feel for the physics, the model makes a number of acutely unexpected predictions. The author is a geophysicist (M.Sc., Fellow of Geoscientists, Canada) and educator, who specializes in translating scientific material for the non-expert.

Vier Forscher und ein unablässiges Hin und Her der Ideen – vor hundert Jahren entstand eine neue Wissenschaft, die die Grenzen der Vorstellungskraft sprengte: die Quantenphysik. Ihre Protagonisten: Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr und Werner Heisenberg. Sie ergründeten das Innere der Atome und rangen mit einer scheinbar einfachen Frage: Was ist Licht? – zu einer Zeit, in der Elektrizität erstmals die Städte erhellte und Kino und Fotografie ihren Siegeszug antraten. Thomas de Padova lässt die fieberhafte Suche nach Antworten anhand der Begegnungen der Forscher lebendig werden.

A Brief Welcome to the Universe offers a breathtaking tour of the cosmos, from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes and time loops. Best-selling authors and acclaimed astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott take listeners on an unforgettable journey of exploration to reveal how our universe actually works. Propelling you from our home solar system to the outermost frontiers of space, this book builds your cosmic insight and perspective through a marvelously entertaining narrative.

When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s 35-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter - one that raises the possibility of new materials with never-before-seen properties but that violates laws set in stone for centuries.

Is it possible for something or someone to be made invisible? This question, which has intrigued authors of science fiction for over a century, has become a headline-grabbing topic of scientific research. In this book, science writer and optical physicist Gregory J. Gbur traces the science of invisibility from its sci-fi origins in the nineteenth-century writings of authors such as H. G. Wells and Fitz James O'Brien to modern stealth technology, invisibility cloaks, and metamaterials. He explores the history of invisibility and its science and technology connections.

They're everywhere around us, but usually we choose to ignore them. They happen in space. They happen in time. They're little moments of discontinuity in our experience, but they can become portals to the greater experience of our world as illusion, as the veil, as Maya, as the collective dream; and the experience of ourselves as the dreamers. If we choose not to ignore them, but to follow them, like Alice down a cosmic rabbit hole, we might just begin to understand how it was that we got here in the first place.

David J. Helfand reconstructs the history of the universe—back to its first microsecond 13.8 billion years ago—with the help of atoms. He shows how, by using detectors and reactors, microscopes and telescopes, we can decode the tales these infinitesimal particles tell.

Mind Openers 1.0 is the first of a two-part set. It chronicles how the astounding discoveries of modern physics have fundamentally changed our understanding of reality. Using a mix of historical narrative, intuitive analogies, and graphics, the book explores, explains, and ponders at meaning of our deepest theories. The author is a geophysicist and educator who specializes in translating scientific material for the non-expert.

Undercover Scientist Peter Bentley is fascinated by the science of the everyday, and in this eye-opening book, organised in the form of one of those days when everything falls apart, he probes into the reasons why mishaps occur, from sleeping through the alarm to making the bathwater overflow. As he does so he explains exactly what happens when you put metal in a microwave (the electric field inside the oven causes the metal to heat up like a light bulb filament).

This audiobook contains a broad overview of time travel in science fiction, along with a detailed examination of the philosophical implications of time travel. The emphasis of this book is now on the philosophical and on science fiction, rather than on physics, as in the author’s earlier books on the subject. In that spirit there are, for example, no tech notes filled with algebra, integrals, and differential equations, as there are in the first and second editions of Time Machines.

In this Very Short Introduction, John Heilbron draws on sources never before presented in English to cover the life and work of one of the most creative physicists of the 20th century. In addition to his role as a scientist, Heilbron considers Bohr as a statesman and Danish cultural icon, who built scientific institutions and pushed for the extension of international cooperation in science to all nation states. As a humanist he was concerned with the cultivation of all sides of the individual, and with the complementary contributions of all peoples to the sum of human culture.

Superconductivity is one of the most exciting areas of research in physics today. Outlining the history of its discovery and the race to understand its many mysterious and counterintuitive phenomena, this Very Short Introduction audiobook explains in accessible terms the theories that have been developed and how they have influenced other areas of science, including the Higgs boson of particle physics and ideas about the early universe.

By the end of World War I, Albert Einstein had become the face of the new science of theoretical physics and had made some powerful enemies. One of those enemies, Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard, spent a career trying to discredit him. Their story of conflict, pitting Germany's most widely celebrated Jew against the Nazi scientist who was to become Hitler's chief advisor on physics, had an impact far exceeding what the scientific community felt at the time.

Is Stonehenge a stone hinge? As early as 10,000 years ago, early man knew of parallel universes. Not from quantum theoretical models but from face-to-face interaction with their denizens. Over the last 30 years, television series and movies focused on the public's thirst for inexplicable phenomena. The growing number of books devoted to works explaining everything from UFOs to Stonehenge are testaments of continuing and increasing interest.