Total Number of Books in Collection Library : 127

 

Page number: 25
 

The Constants of Nature : From Alpha to Omega--the Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

Author: John Barrow
ISBN: 0375422218
Publisher: Pantheon         Place:
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Format: Hardcover         # Pages: 368
Reader Rating: 3.0 (17 votes)
Release: 2003
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Summary: A major contribution to our understanding of the basic laws of the universe -- from the author of The Book of Nothing.

The constants of nature are the fundamental laws of physics that apply throughout the universe: gravity, velocity of light, electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. They encode the deepest secrets of the universe, and express at once our greatest knowledge and our greatest ignorance about the cosmos.

Their existence has taught us the profound truth that nature abounds with unseen regularities. Yet while we have become skilled at measuring the values of these constants, our frustrating inability to explain or predict their values shows how much we have still to learn about inner workings of the universe.

What is the ultimate status of these constants of nature? Are they truly constant? And are there other universes where they are different?

John D. Barrow, one of our foremost mathematicians and cosmologists, discusses the latest thinking about these and many more dramatic issues in this accessible and thought-provoking book.


 

The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought

Author: Thomas S. Kuhn
ISBN: 0674171039
Publisher: Harvard University Press         Place:
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Format: Paperback         # Pages: 320
Reader Rating: 5.0 (9 votes)
Release: 1957
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Summary: The Sun and the planets and all the stars revolve around the Earth, which is itself at the center of the universe. Beyond the sphere of the fixed stars is nothing; there is no void or matter or anything, as voids cannot exist in nature. All these celestial bodies that do exist revolve in nice perfect circles. All these statements were once common knowledge to anyone with a smattering of education, even though astronomers were known to make slight variations on the concepts of circular motion. But today every single one of these concepts is demolished, and only fools believe in the Earth centered universe. Why was there a change? It certainly wasn't because of a mass of new information. The old geocentric universe was rejected long before anyone put up satellites and space probes to go zipping around the solar system. Even the invention of the telescope only provided the final blow to the old system. It was a fundamental change in thinking that made up the subject of The Copernican Revolution, Thomas Kuhn's look at the break between ancient and modern thinking on the subject.



Copernicus himself made no observations. He worked only with acquired data and ancient texts. What system did he start out with? This is important, as we can't understand what changed without knowing what was. Kuhn traces the nature of the Ptolemaic system with diagrams but virtually no equations (until the technical appendix at the end) to give the reader an understanding of what sorts of phenomena caught the eyes of ancient astronomers. The Sun and Moon and stars move in their own peculiar manners, and the planets, the wandering stars, behaved in the most peculiar manner of all. The ancients developed rather sophisticated methods to track and predict these movements using their own location as a reasonable starting point. Yet Copernicus had the idea that this starting point was not properly speaking the actual center of the universe. He developed a Sun centered system that qualitatively explained many phenomena (such as retrograde motion of the planets, a notable improvement) without some of the mathematical oddities of the old system, but required so many of its own modifications for accuracy that the final system was no neater than the original.



Yet some astronomers preferred the new to the old. This was, all myth busting aside, still a dangerous idea to advocate in the midst of the Reformation. There was a subtle distinction between advocating a mathematical model and advocating a statement of physical reality. There were many reasons to reject Copernicus, and Kuhn covers them here. There are two main themes: the first is that ancient astronomy was bound up with ancient physics and with theology, and rejecting one introduced many awkward questions about the rest that intellectually honest scholars couldn't ignore. The second is political. Most people know something of the story of Galileo and his confrontations with the Inquisition. It didn't help him that he was arrogant, that he mocked powerful people he called friends, and that politically it was a bad time to make waves. This is also touched upon briefly in Kuhn, but the focus remains on the intellectual revolution, and there Galileo had much to contribute in his new observations. Ultimately, the revolution was as much about insight and vision as about calculations and observations.



Readers more familiar with Kuhn from his later The Structure of Scientific Revolutions will find some of his discussion taking a familiar tone. Indeed, the Copernican revolution fits well with that model; it was a revolutionary idea that marked a turning point in Western science, straddling both the ancient and modern viewpoints. For the reader who is willing to visualize the issues and absorb the history, Kuhn has provided the most succinct and clear explanation of Copernicus's contribution to the Western world likely to be found anywhere.


 

Einstein's German World

Author: Fritz Stern
ISBN: 0691074585
Publisher: Princeton University Press         Place:
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Format: Paperback         # Pages: 271
Reader Rating: 4.0 (4 votes)
Release: 2001
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Summary: Albert Einstein was, it has seemed to some scholars, a genius "sui generis", a man who transcended his own time and native country to become a citizen of the world. Fritz Stern is not among their ranks. A retired professor of history at Columbia University, Stern here offers a set of essays on the cultural milieu of late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany, and more specifically of the brilliant culture of German Jews, many of whom had, like Einstein, been largely assimilated into the surrounding culture in what Stern calls "an astounding ascendancy" but who were forced by separatist laws to accept second-class status. Chaim Weizmann, a chemist of Einstein's generation who founded modern Zionism, knew this well; when one of his teachers assured him that Germans would give up their anti-Semitism once they realized how much Jews had contributed to their prosperity and their rich culture, Weizmann replied, ""Herr Doktor", if a man has a piece of something in his eye, he doesn't want to know whether it's a piece of mud or a piece of gold. He just wants to get it out."
The intellectuals of Albert Einstein's generation spun gold, Stern shows. Their number included Paul Ehrlich, the inventor of chemotherapy; Walther Rathenau, a captain of industry with an informed love of literature and music; and Fritz Haber, a physicist who discovered a means of fixing nitrogen from the air. All were swept away, murdered or sent into exile, by the events of the 1920s and '30s. Surveying the ruins of World War II, the French philosopher Raymond Aron remarked to Stern, "It could have been Germany's century"--if only, that is, Germany had not succumbed to the madness of national socialism. Fritz Stern's careful essays show just how much Germany, and the world, lost when it did. "--Gregory McNamee"


 

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