A Broad Perspective on the Theory of General Relativity and Its Observable ImplicationsGeneral Relativity: Basics and Beyond familiarizes students and beginning researchers with the basic features of the theory of general relativity as well as some of its more advanced aspects. Employing the pedagogical style of a textbook, it includes essential ideas and just enough background material needed for readers to appreciate the issues and current research. BasicsThe first five chapters form the core of an introductory course on general relativity. The author traces Einstein's arguments and presents examples of space-times corresponding to different types of gravitational fields. He discusses the adaptation of dynamics in a Riemannian geometry framework, the Einstein equation and its elementary properties, and different phenomena predicted or influenced by general relativity. BeyondMoving on to more sophisticated features of general relativity, the book presents the physical requirements of a well-defined deterministic framework for non-gravitational dynamics and describes the characterization of asymptotic space-times. After covering black holes, gravitational waves, and cosmological space-times, the book examines the evolutionary interpretation for the class of globally hyperbolic space-times, explores numerical relativity, and discusses approaches that address the challenges of general relativity.

This volume is to facilitate undergraduate and graduate students in theory of relativity and help them in their studies of High Energy Physics and Cosmology. The presentation has been kept simple and sufficient details have been provided in order to facilitate the understanding of the subject. The problems have also been selected to clarify the presentation and solutions of selected problems are given for better understanding of the contents.

Essential Dynamics & Relativity provides students with an introduction to the core aspects of dynamics and special relativity. The author reiterates important ideas and terms throughout and covers concepts that are often missing from other textbooks at this level. He also places each topic within the wider constructs of the theory, without jumping from topic to topic to illustrate a point. The first section of the book focuses on dynamics, discussing the basic aspects of single particle motion and analyzing the motion of multi-particle systems. The book also explains the dynamical behavior of both composite bodies (rigid bodies) and objects in non-inertial frames of reference (rotating reference frames). The second section concentrates on relativity. The author describes the ideas leading to the inception of special relativity. He also formulates fundamental aspects, such as time dilation, length contraction, Lorentz transformations, and the visual aids of Minkowski diagrams, necessary to develop more sophisticated ideas. He then develops the concepts within the context of relativistic mechanics. With many examples throughout and exercises at the end of each chapter, this text makes the often daunting and confusing ideas of dynamics and special relativity accessible to undergraduate students studying the subjects for the first time.

In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary volume, former NASA Chief Historian Steven Dick reflects on the exploration of space, astrobiology and its implications, cosmic evolution, astronomical institutions, discovering and classifying the cosmos, and the philosophy of astronomy. The unifying theme of the book is the connection between cosmos and culture, or what Carl Sagan many years ago called the "cosmic connection." As both an astronomer and historian of science, Dr. Dick has been both a witness to and a participant in many of the astronomical events of the last half century. This collection of papers presents his reflections over the last forty years in a way accessible to historians, philosophers, and scientists alike. From the search for alien life to ongoing space exploration efforts, readers will find this volume full of engaging topics relevant to science, society, and our collective future on planet Earth and beyond.

This thesis is devoted to the systematic study of non-local theories that respect Lorentz invariance and are devoid of new, unphysical degrees of freedom. Such theories are attractive for phenomenological applications since they are mostly unconstrained by current experiments. Non-locality has played an increasingly important role in the physics of the last decades, appearing in effective actions in quantum field theory, and arising naturally in string theory and non-commutative geometry. It may even be a necessary ingredient for quantum theories of gravity. It is a feature of quantum entanglement, and may even solve the long-standing black hole information loss problem. "Non-locality" is a broad concept with many promising and fruitful applications in theoretical and mathematical physics. After a historical and pedagogical introduction into the concept of non-locality the author develops the notion of non-local Green functions to study various non-local weak-field problems in quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, gravity, and quantum field theory in curved spacetime. This thesis fills a gap in the literature by providing a self-contained exploration of weak-field effects in non-local theories, thereby establishing a "non-local intuition" which may serve as a stepping stone for studies of the full, non-linear problem of non-locality.

This volume deals with the fundamental concepts of space, time and matter. It presents a novel reformulation of both the special and general theory of relativity, in which time does not constitute the fourth dimension in a conventional 4-dimensional space-time. Instead, the role of time is played by the flow of a vector field on a 3-dimensional space. The standard models of de Sitter, Schwarzschild and Kerr space-times are reformulated in a purely 3-dimensional manifold.The volume also presents a theory of matter in which the fundamental particles, such as baryons and leptons, appear as a result of an interaction between left-handed and right-handed 2-component Weyl neutrinos. The Appendices contain a comprehensive treatment of classical mechanics in terms of Hamiltonian vector fields on symplectic manifolds. Graduate students of mathematical physics or theoretical physics, as well as academics, will find this volume of interest.

Despite the rapidly expanding ambit of physical research and the continual appearance of new branches of physics, the main thrust in its development has been the attempt at a theoretical synthesis of the entire body of physical knowledge. Vladimir Vizgin's work presents perhaps the first systematic historico-scientific study of the formation and development of the unified field theories in the general context of 20th century physics. Concentrating on the first three decades of the century and drawing extensively on Russian sources, the author analyses the first successes, failures and paths of further development of the unified field theories. He presents the evolution of these theories as a process of interaction/competition between the geometric field and quantum research programs, and ascertains the relevance of these theories for fundamental concepts in modern field theory.

'Outstanding Academic Title for 2014' by CHOICEEinstein Relatively Simple brings together for the first time an exceptionally clear explanation of both special and general relativity. It is for people who always wanted to understand Einstein's ideas but never thought they could.Told with humor, enthusiasm, and rare clarity, this entertaining book reveals how a former high school drop-out revolutionized our understanding of space and time. From E=mc2 and everyday time travel to black holes and the big bang, Einstein Relatively Simple takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on a mind-boggling journey through the depths of Einstein's universe. Along the way, we track Einstein through the perils and triumphs of his life - follow his thinking, his logic, and his insights - and chronicle the audacity, imagination, and sheer genius of the man recognized as the greatest scientist of the modern era.In Part I on special relativity we learn how time slows and space shrinks with motion, and how mass and energy are equivalent. Part II on general relativity reveals a cosmos where black holes trap light and stop time, where wormholes form gravitational time machines, where space itself is continually expanding, and where some 13.7 billion years ago our universe was born in the ultimate cosmic event - the Big Bang.

'Outstanding Academic Title for 2014' by CHOICEEinstein Relatively Simple brings together for the first time an exceptionally clear explanation of both special and general relativity. It is for people who always wanted to understand Einstein's ideas but never thought they could.Told with humor, enthusiasm, and rare clarity, this entertaining book reveals how a former high school drop-out revolutionized our understanding of space and time. From E=mc2 and everyday time travel to black holes and the big bang, Einstein Relatively Simple takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on a mind-boggling journey through the depths of Einstein's universe. Along the way, we track Einstein through the perils and triumphs of his life - follow his thinking, his logic, and his insights - and chronicle the audacity, imagination, and sheer genius of the man recognized as the greatest scientist of the modern era.In Part I on special relativity we learn how time slows and space shrinks with motion, and how mass and energy are equivalent. Part II on general relativity reveals a cosmos where black holes trap light and stop time, where wormholes form gravitational time machines, where space itself is continually expanding, and where some 13.7 billion years ago our universe was born in the ultimate cosmic event - the Big Bang.

This book contains the Proceedings of the Sixth Meeting on CPT and Lorentz Symmetry, held at Indiana University in Bloomington on June 17-21, 2013. The Meeting focused on tests of these fundamental symmetries and on related theoretical issues, including scenarios for possible violations.Topics covered at the meeting include searches for CPT and Lorentz violations involving: accelerator and collider experiments; atomic, nuclear, and particle decays; birefringence, dispersion, and anisotropy in cosmological sources; clock-comparison measurements; electromagnetic resonant cavities and lasers; tests of the equivalence principle; gauge and Higgs particles; high-energy astrophysical observations; laboratory tests of gravity; matter interferometry; neutrino oscillations and propagation; oscillations and decays of neutral mesons; particle-antiparticle comparisons; post-newtonian gravity in the solar system and beyond; second- and third-generation particles; space-based missions; spectroscopy of hydrogen and antihydrogen; spin-polarized matter; and time-of-flight measurements. Theoretical discussions include physical effects at the level of the Standard Model, General Relativity, and beyond; the possible origins and mechanisms for Lorentz and CPT violations; classical and quantum issues in field theory, particle physics, gravity, and string theory; and mathematical foundations including Finsler geometry.

A truly Galilean-class volume, this book introduces a new method in theory formation, completing the tools of epistemology. It covers a broad spectrum of theoretical and mathematical physics by researchers from over 20 nations from four continents. Like Vigier himself, the Vigier symposia are noted for addressing avant-garde, cutting-edge topics in contemporary physics. Among the six proceedings honoring J.-P. Vigier, this is perhaps the most exciting one as several important breakthroughs are introduced for the first time. The most interesting breakthrough in view of the recent NIST experimental violations of QED is a continuation of the pioneering work by Vigier on tight bound states in hydrogen. The new experimental protocol described not only promises empirical proof of large-scale extra dimensions in conjunction with avenues for testing string theory, but also implies the birth of the field of unified field mechanics, ushering in a new age of discovery. Work on quantum computing redefines the qubit in a manner that the uncertainty principle may be routinely violated. Other breakthroughs occur in the utility of quaternion algebra in extending our understanding of the nature of the fermionic singularity or point particle. There are several other discoveries of equal magnitude, making this volume a must-have acquisition for the library of any serious forward-looking researchers.

Expanding on the concept of the authors' previous book "Electroweak Processes in External Electromagnetic Fields," this new book systematically describes the investigation methods for the effects of external active media, both strong electromagnetic fields and hot dense plasma, in quantum processes. Solving the solar neutrino puzzle in a unique experiment conducted with the help of the heavy-water detector at the Sudbery Neutrino Observatory, along with another neutrino experiments, brings to the fore electroweak physics in an active external medium. It is effectively demonstrated that processes of neutrino interactions with active media of astrophysical objects may lead, under some physical conditions, to such interesting effects as neutrino-driven shockwave revival in a supernova explosion, a "cherry stone shooting" mechanism for pulsar natal kick, and a neutrino pulsar. It is also shown how poor estimates of particle dispersion in external active media sometimes lead to confusion. The book will appeal to graduate and post-graduate students of theoretical physics with a prior understanding of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) and the Standard Model of Electroweak Interactions, as well as to specialists in QFT who want to know more about the problems of quantum phenomena in hot dense plasma and external electromagnetic fields.

This volume offers a selection of the best contributions by Russian scholars--historians and philosophers of science--to the Einstein Studies industry, broadly construed. Most of the papers included here were first published in Russian in the 'Einshteinovskiy Sbornik' series (Einstein Studies), the first of its kind, and initiated in 1966 by Nobel Prize winner Igor Tamm. From 1966-1990, fourteen volumes of the 'Sbornik' were published by Nauka, the chief academic publisher in the former Soviet Union. The book explores such topics as the historical and foundational issues in general relativity and relativistic cosmology, Einstein's contributions to quantum theory of radiation, and the rise of Dirac's quantum electrodynamics. The volume also includes a detailed description of the physics colloquium Einstein established and coordinated in 1912-1914 in Zurich. The contributors draw extensively on documentation previously unavailable to most scholars. Thus the materials from various Russian archives shed new light on the famous exchange (regarding the first evolutionary cosmological models) between Einstein and Aleksandr Friedmann in the early 1920s and on the role of Boris Podolsky and Vladimir Fock in the emergence of quantum electrodynamics. The little- known correspondence between Einstein and a famous German pilot Paul Ehrhardt suggests that, during World War I, Einstein was involved with aero- and hydrodynamics and thought about ways of improving airfoil design. Other articles discuss new approaches to important questions in the foundations of general relativity and cosmology. Historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science should be prepared to find much new and unexpected material in this engaging volume presenting the best of the recent Russian scholarship in the field. The book will be accessible to the general reader as well.

This book is a new edition of "Tensors and Manifolds: With Applications to Mechanics and Relativity" which was published in 1992. It is based on courses taken by advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in mathematics and physics, giving an introduction to the expanse of modern mathematics and its application in modern physics. It aims to fill the gap between the basic courses and the highly technical and specialised courses which both mathematics and physics students require in their advanced training, while simultaneously trying to promote, at an early stage, a better appreciation and understanding of each other's discipline. The book sets forth the basic principles of tensors and manifolds, describing how the mathematics underlies elegant geometrical models of classical mechanics, relativity and elementary particle physics. The existing material from the first edition has been reworked and extended in some sections to provide extra clarity, as well as additional problems. Four new chapters on Lie groups and fibre bundles have been included, leading to an exposition of gauge theory and the standard model of elementary particle physics. Mathematical rigour combined with an informal style makes this a very accessible book and will provide the reader with an enjoyable panorama of interesting mathematics and physics.

In this compendium of essays, some of the world's leading thinkers discuss their conceptions of space and time, as viewed through the lens of their own discipline. With an epilogue on the limits of human understanding, this volume hosts contributions from six or more diverse fields. It presumes only rudimentary background knowledge on the part of the reader. Time and again, through the prism of intellect, humans have tried to diffract reality into various distinct, yet seamless, atomic, yet holistic, independent, yet interrelated disciplines and have attempted to study it contextually. Philosophers debate the paradoxes, or engage in meditations, dialogues and reflections on the content and nature of space and time. Physicists, too, have been trying to mold space and time to fit their notions concerning micro- and macro-worlds. Mathematicians focus on the abstract aspects of space, time and measurement. While cognitive scientists ponder over the perceptual and experiential facets of our consciousness of space and time, computer scientists theoretically and practically try to optimize the space-time complexities in storing and retrieving data/information. The list is never-ending. Linguists, logicians, artists, evolutionary biologists, geographers etc., all are trying to weave a web of understanding around the same duo. However, our endeavour into a world of such endless imagination is restrained by intellectual dilemmas such as: Can humans comprehend everything? Are there any limits? Can finite thought fathom infinity? We have sought far and wide among the best minds to furnish articles that provide an overview of the above topics. We hope that, through this journey, a symphony of patterns and tapestry of intuitions will emerge, providing the reader with insights into the questions: What is Space? What is Time? Chapter [15] of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

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:

* How does time bend?

* Why should gravity propagate at the speed of light?

* How does the expansion function of the universe relate to the absolute constant of the noneuclidean geometries?

* Why was the Sagnac effect ignored?

* Can Maxwell's equations accommodate mass?

* Is there an inertia due solely to polarization?

* Can objects expand in elliptic geometry like they contract in hyperbolic geometry?

This book focuses on the development and implementation of the longitudinal, angular and frequency controls of the Advanced Virgo detector, both from the simulation and experimental point of view, which contributed to Virgo reaching a sensitivity that enabled it to join the LIGO-Virgo O2 run in August 2017. This data taking was very successful, with the first direct detection of a binary black hole merger (GW170814) using the full network of three interferometers, and the first detection and localization of a binary neutron star merger (GW170817). The second generation of gravitational wave detector, Advanced Virgo, is capable of detecting differential displacements of the order of 10-21m. This means that it is highly sensitive to any disturbance, including the seismic movement of the Earth. For this reason an active control is necessary to keep the detector in place with sufficient accuracy.

The composition of the most remote objects brought into view by the Hubble telescope can no longer be reconciled with the nucleogenesis of standard cosmology and the alternative explanation, in terms of the Λ-Cold-Dark-Matter model, has no recognizable chemical basis. A more rational scheme, based on the chemistry and periodicity of atomic matter, opens up an exciting new interpretation of the cosmos in terms of projective geometry and general relativity.

The response of atomic structure to environmental pressure predicts non-Doppler cosmical redshifts and equilibrium nucleogenesis by α--particle addition, in accord with observed periodic variation of nuclear abundance.

Inferred cosmic self similarity elucidates the Bode -Titius law, general commensurability in the solar system and the occurrence of quantum phenomena on a cosmic scale.

The generalized periodic function involves both matter and anti-matter in an involuted mapping to a closed projective plane. This topology ensures the same symmetrical balance in a chiral universe, wrapped around an achiral vacuum interface, without singularities.

A new cosmology emerges, based on the theory of projective relativ-ity, presented here as a translation of Veblen's original German text. Not only does it provide a unification of gravity, electromagnetism and quantum theory, through gauge invariance, but also supports the solution of the gravitational field equations, obtained by Godel for a rotating universe.

The appearance of an Einstein-Rosen bridge as outlet from a black hole, into conjugate anti-space, accounts for globular clusters, quasars, cosmic radiation, γ-ray bursters, pulsars, radio sources and other re-gions of plasma activity.

The effects of a multiply-connected space-time manifold on observa-tions in an Euclidean tangent space are unpredictable and a complete re-assessment of the size and structure of the universe is indicated.

The target readership includes scientists, as well as non-scientists - everybody with a scientific or philosophical interest in cosmology and, especially those cosmologists and mathematicians with the ability to recast the crude ideas presented here into appropriate mathematical models.

Jayme Tiomno (1920-2011) was one of the most influential Brazilian physicists of the 20th century, interacting with many of the renowned physicists of his time, including John Wheeler and Richard Feynman, Eugene Wigner, Chen Ning Yang, David Bohm, Murray Gell-Mann, Remo Ruffini, Abdus Salam, and many others. This biography tells the sometimes romantic, often discouraging but finally optimistic story of a dedicated scientist and educator from a developing country who made important contributions to particle physics, gravitation, cosmology and field theory, and to the advancement of science and of scientific education, in many institutions in Brazil and elsewhere. Drawing on unpublished documents from archives in Brazil and the US as well as private sources, the book traces Tiomno's long life, following his role in the establishment of various research facilities and his tribulations during the Brazilian military dictatorship. It presents a story of progress and setbacks in advancing science in Brazil and beyond, and of the persistence and dedication of a talented physicist who spent his life in search of scientific truth.

This monograph presents the geoscientific context arising in decorrelative gravitational exploration to determine the mass density distribution inside the Earth. First, an insight into the current state of research is given by reducing gravimetry to mathematically accessible, and thus calculable, decorrelated models. In this way, the various unresolved questions and problems of gravimetry are made available to a broad scientific audience and the exploration industry. New theoretical developments will be given, and innovative ways of modeling geologic layers and faults by mollifier regularization techniques are shown. This book is dedicated to surface as well as volume geology with potential data primarily of terrestrial origin. For deep geology, the geomathematical decorrelation methods are to be designed in such a way that depth information (e.g., in boreholes) may be canonically entered. Bridging several different geo-disciplines, this book leads in a cycle from the potential measurements made by geoengineers, to the cleansing of data by geophysicists and geoengineers, to the subsequent theory and model formation, computer-based implementation, and numerical calculation and simulations made by geomathematicians, to interpretation by geologists, and, if necessary, back. It therefore spans the spectrum from geoengineering, especially geodesy, via geophysics to geomathematics and geology, and back. Using the German Saarland area for methodological tests, important new fields of application are opened, particularly for regions with mining-related cavities or dense development in today's geo-exploration.

This book provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in the development of the theory of scale relativity and fractal space-time. It suggests an original solution to the disunified nature of the classical-quantum transition in physical systems, enabling quantum mechanics to be based on the principle of relativity provided this principle is extended to scale transformations of the reference system. In the framework of such a newly-generalized relativity theory (including position, orientation, motion and now scale transformations), the fundamental laws of physics may be given a general form that goes beyond and integrates the classical and the quantum regimes. A related concern of this book is the geometry of space-time, which is described as being fractal and nondifferentiable. It collects and organizes theoretical developments and applications in many fields, including physics, mathematics, astrophysics, cosmology and life sciences.

This is one of the very few books focusing on relativistic statistical mechanics, and is written by a leading expert in this special field. It started from the notion of relativistic kinetic theory, half a century ago, exploding into relativistic statistical mechanics. This will interest specialists of various fields, especially the (classical and quantum) plasma physics. However, quantum physics - to which a major part is devoted - will be of more interest since, not only it applies to quantum plasma physics, but also to nuclear matter and to strong magnetic field, cosmology, etc. Although the domain of gauge theory is not covered in this book, the topic is not completely forgotten, in particular in the domain of plasma physics. This book is particularly readable for graduate students and a fortiori to young researchers for whom it offers methods and also appropriate schemes to deal with the current problems encountered in astrophysics, in strong magnetic, in nuclear or even in high energy physics.

This book provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the notion of fractal time, starting from scratch with a philosophical and perceptual puzzle. How subjective duration varies, depending on the way we embed current content into contexts, is explained.The complexity of our temporal perspective depends on the number of nestings performed, i.e. on the number of contexts taken into account. This temporal contextualization is described against the background of the notion of fractal time. Our temporal interface, the Now, is portrayed as a fractal structure which arises from the distribution of content and contexts in two dimensions: the length and the depth of time. The leitmotif of the book is the notion of simultaneity, which determines the temporal structure of our interfaces. Recent research results are described which present and discuss a number of distorted temporal perspectives. It is suggested that dynamical diseases arise from unsuccessful nesting attempts, i.e. from failed contextualization. Successful nesting, by contrast, manifests itself in a "win-win handshake" between the observer-participant and his chosen context. The answer as to why a watched kettle never boils has repercussions in many a discipline. It would be of immense interest to anyone who works in the fields of cognitive and complexity sciences, psychology and the neurosciences, social medicine, philosophy and the arts.

The nature of time has long puzzled physicists and philosophers. Time potentially has very fundamental yet unknown properties. In 1993 a new model of multi-dimensional time was found to relate closely to properties of the cosmological redshift. An international conference was subsequently convened in April 1996 to examine past, current and new concepts of time as they relate to physics and cosmology. These proceedings incorporate 34 reviews and contributed papers from the conference. The major reviews include observational properties of the redshift, alternative cosmologies, critical problems in cosmology, alternative viewpoints and problems in gravitation theory and particle physics, and new approaches to mathematical models of time. Professionals and students with an interest in cosmology and the structure of the universe should find that this book raises critical problems and explores challenging alternatives to classical viewpoints.

New Edition: Introductory Quantum Physics and Relativity (2nd Edition)This book is based on the lecture courses taught by Dunningham and Vedral at the University of Leeds. The book contains all the necessary material for quantum physics and relativity in the first two years of a typical physics degree course. The choice of topics complies fully with the Institute of Physics guidelines, but the coverage also includes more interesting and up-to-date applications, such as Bose condensation and quantum teleportation.