Physics and Astronomy (R0)

This book explores and explains scientific mysteries and principles, leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor and an abundance of illustrations. Chapters are short, but give an understanding of technology and science not available elsewhere. Questions include:

• What holds a satellite up while it goes around the Earth?

• Why is the sky (made out of clear air!) blue instead of green, or just black as night like the sky that high altitude jumper Felix Baumgartner saw?

• How is laser light different from “normal” light?

• Which one invention will assuredly survive our civilization?

• Why can’t you travel back in time? 

If you often feel embarrassed because you don’t have a clue about lasers, the difference between volts, amps and watts, or how jet planes really work – but you would like to understand the physical principles of our modern world, whether you’re a teen or a parent –this book is for you!

Advance praise for No Wonder You Wonder!: 

“From beginning to end, and with laugh after laugh, I enjoyed every single word of this remarkable book. Phipps is a hell of a good writer, and the kind of physics teacher that I would have loved as a young student. No Wonder You Wonder can be engrossing for anyone with a bit of curiosity, not just the scientific minded.” – Christophe Bonnal, Chief Engineer, CNES (French Space Agency) 

“No Wonder You Wonder is a fa

This book presents a novel mathematical formalism, based on the tetrad formulation of differential geometry, for describing cosmological observables exactly and conveniently. It covers all the standard observables, i.e. distances, weak lensing, number counts and cosmic microwave background, and also includes a detailed derivation of general-relativistic matrix kinetic theory. All the fully nonlinear equations are derived in detail and the mathematical content is self-contained, so that readers require only a basic knowledge of general relativity. Moreover, the authors discuss several subtle issues that are usually overlooked in the literature and, in particular, issues that distinguish this formalism from the more approximative standard practice.

This book presents fused deposition modeling (FDM) which is an additive manufacturing (AM) process to fabricate 3D parts from a build-up of 2D layers. The chapters present an experimental analysis of fatigue characteristics of FDM-processed PLA samples. The results indicate that the concentric build orientation provides highest cycles of fatigue, ultimate strength, and impact energy. The effect of layer orientation on the fatigue behavior of 3D-printed PLA samples is investigated in this case study.

What do the movements of molecules and the migration of humans have in common? How does the functionality of our brain tissue resemble the flow of traffic in New York City? How can understanding the spread of ideas, rumors, and languages help us tackle the spread a pandemic? This book provides an illuminating look into these seemingly disparate topics by exploring and expertly communicating the fundamental laws that govern the spreading and diffusion of objects. A collection of leading scientists in disciplines as diverse as epidemiology, linguistics, mathematics, and physics discuss various spreading phenomena relevant to their own fields, revealing astonishing similarities and correlations between the objects of study—be they people, particles, or pandemics.

This updated and expanded second edition of an award-winning book introduces timely coverage of a subject with the greatest societal impact in recent memory—the global fight against COVID-19. Winner of the 2019Literature Prize of the German Chemical Industry Fund and brainchild of the international and long-running Diffusion Fundamentals conference series, this book targets an interdisciplinary readership, featuring an introductory chapter that sets the stage for the topics discussed throughout. Each chapter provides ample opportunity to whet the appetite of those readers seeking a more in-depth treatment, making the book also useful as supplementary reading in appropriate courses dealing with complex systems, mass transfer, and network theory.

Chapter “Neolithic Transitions: Diffusion of People or Diffusion of Culture?” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This open access book is authored by a rich mix of contributors from across the landscape of research, academia, LEAs, civil protection, and other first responders, practitioners, public and private organizations and industry to address some of the most contemporary challenges within global security domain. The authors cover topics such as protection of critical infrastructures (CI), serious and organized crime, counter (cyber) terrorism, border management, cybercrime, cybersecurity, management of disasters and crises, big data analytics, the application of AI and the legal and ethical dimensions of the implementation of cutting-edge technologies. The book benefits from research actions and lessons learned from more than 35 EU R&D projects within the security domain. The book not only addresses theoretical narratives pertinent to the subject but also identifies current challenges and emerging security threats, provides analysis of operational capability gaps, real world applied solutions, methodologies, and case studies within security domain.

This is an open access book.

This book presents a comprehensive exploration of unresolved mysteries in particle physics, delving into cutting-edge research aimed at unraveling the enigmatic facets of the Standard Model (SM). It tackles fundamental questions surrounding neutrino masses, flavor physics, and the strong CP problem, shedding light on the universe's underlying structure. The insightful analysis takes readers on a journey that begins with probing the mechanisms behind neutrino mass generation, including the existence of heavy neutral leptons and their implications for collider experiments. The book then navigates the intricate landscape of flavor physics, elucidating rare B-meson decays and their role as a window to new physics beyond the SM. Additionally, it investigates axions as potential hot dark matter candidates, offering valuable insights into their interactions with pions and cosmological implications. This work not only addresses current theoretical puzzles but also paves the way for future advancements in particle physics. Aimed at researchers, graduate students, and professionals in the field, this book serves as an indispensable resource for those seeking to delve deeper into the forefront of particle physics research. 

This textbook offers an introduction to statistical mechanics, special relativity, and quantum physics, developed from lecture notes for the "Quantum Physics" course at the University of Padua. Beginning with a brief review of classical statistical mechanics in the first chapter, the book explores special and general relativity in the second chapter. The third chapter delves into the historical analysis of light quantization, while the fourth chapter discusses Niels Bohr's quantization of energy levels and electromagnetic transitions. The Schrödinger equation is investigated in the fifth chapter. Chapter Six covers applications of quantum mechanics, including the quantum particle in a box, quantum particle in harmonic potential, quantum tunneling, stationary perturbation theory, and time-dependent perturbation theory. Chapter Seven outlines the basic axioms of quantum mechanics. Chapter Eight focuses on quantum atomic physics, emphasizing electron spin and utilizing the Dirac equation for theoretical justification. The ninth chapter explains quantum mechanics principles for identical particles at zero temperature, while Chapter Ten extends the discussion to quantum particles at finite temperature. Chapter Eleven provides insights into quantum information and entanglement, and the twelfth chapter explains the path integral approach to quantum mechanics.

This textbook provides a compendium of numerical methods to assist physics students and researchers in their daily work. It carefully considers error estimates, stability and convergence issues, the choice of optimal methods, and techniques to increase program execution speeds. The book supplies numerous examples throughout the chapters that are concluded by more comprehensive problems with a strong physics background. Instead of uncritically employing modern black-box tools, the readers are encouraged to develop a more ponderous and skeptical approach.

This revised and expanded edition now includes a new chapter on numerical integration and stable differentiation, as well as fresh material on optimal filtering, integration of gravitational many-body problems, computation of Poincaré maps, regularization of orbits, singular Sturm-Liouville problems, techniques for time evolution and spatial treatment of (semi)infinite domains in spectral methods, and phase retrieval. It also brings updated discussions of algebraic problems involving sparse matrices and of high-resolution schemes for partial differential equations.

This book proposes innovative and timely modeling, as well as simulation strategies based on tensor networks, to tackle the difficult problem of describing the dynamics of open quantum systems at the molecular or nanometer scale beyond a Markovian treatment. Among the many insights it delivers, the work includes calculations of the dynamics of a quantum system coupled to a bosonic environment that can be potentially structured and/or possess spatial correlations. The relevance of these strategies is exemplified with the analysis of complex bio-inspired nanodevices. Researchers in the field will find here a clear and reliable contribution to the understanding of open quantum systems in a still little-explored regime where the reservoirs are no longer considered as simple baths but as sub-systems treated on an equal footing with the reduced system of interest. Moreover, the author discusses how to handle the situation of a system coupled to multiple baths. This is a very important and generic scenario, crucial, for instance, when discussing non-equilibrium steady states.

Ball lightning is an enigma. These luminous objects that appear occasionally during thunderstorms and can reach several meters in diameter have been a mystery to science for about 200 years. Despite several thousands of reported observations, their nature is still unknown. In this book, well documented cases of ball lightning are described and used to unravel some aspects of this mysterious form of atmospheric electricity. Throughout the book, the author discusses the various facets of the problem in an accessible but rigorous style, delivering a readable and informative text that will captivate the curious reader. Now in an updated and expanded second edition, the author reports on groundbreaking new data on conditions under which ball lightning may form and its implications. These new discoveries are elucidated with new figures, additional case descriptions, new material on the interaction of ball lightning with humans, and a discussion of the reliability of ball lightning observations. This book presents the most up-to-date summary of the state of knowledge surrounding ball lightning.

A foreword by Earle Williams, leading lightning researcher at MIT, introduces the book.

This book is in honor of the late Professor Wolfgang Dreyer from the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS) in Berlin.

This book reflects on 8 decades of research on one of the longest-standing unsolved problems in modern astrophysics: why does the Sun form a hot corona? The authors give a critical overview of the field and offer suggestions on how to bridge the chasm between what we can measure, and what we can calculate. They go back to basics to explain why the problem is difficult, where we have made progress and where we have not, to help the next generation of scientists devise novel techniques to crack such a long-lasting problem. A way forward is formulated centered around refutation, using Bayesian methods to propose and to try to reject hypotheses and models, and avoiding seduction by ``confirmation bias’’.

This book is aimed at physicists, students and researchers interested in understanding, learning from and solving the coronal heating problem, in an era of new dedicated facilities such as the Parker Solar Probe and the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope.   

Thebook will appeal to those interested in understanding research methods and how they are changing in the modern academic environment, particular in astrophysics and Earth sciences where remote sensing is essential.