Despite its long history and stunning experimental successes, the mathematical foundation of perturbative quantum field theory is still a subject of ongoing research. This book aims at presenting some of the most recent advances in the field, and at reflecting the diversity of approaches and tools invented and currently employed. Both leading experts and comparative newcomers to the field present their latest findings, helping readers to gain a better understanding of not only quantum but also classical field theories. Though the book offers a valuable resource for mathematicians and physicists alike, the focus is more on mathematical developments. This volume consists of four parts: The first Part covers local aspects of perturbative quantum field theory, with an emphasis on the axiomatization of the algebra behind the operator product expansion. The second Part highlights Chern-Simons gauge theories, while the third examines (semi-)classical field theories. In closing, Part 4 addresses factorization homology and factorization algebras.

Eclipses have long been seen as important celestial phenomena, whether as omens affecting the future of kingdoms, or as useful astronomical events to help in deriving essential parameters for theories of the motion of the moon and sun. This is the first book to collect together all presently known records of timed eclipse observations and predictions from antiquity to the time of the invention of the telescope. In addition to cataloguing and assessing the accuracy of the various records, which come from regions as diverse as Ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Europe, the sources in which they are found are described in detail. Related questions such as what type of clocks were used to time the observations, how the eclipse predictions were made, and how these prediction schemes were derived from the available observations are also considered. The results of this investigation have important consequences for how we understand the relationship between observation and theory in early science and the role of astronomy in early cultures, and will be of interest to historians of science, astronomers, and ancient and medieval historians.

Gregor Johann Mendel continues to fascinate the general public as well as scholars, the former for his life and the latter for his achievements. "Solitude of a Humble Genius" is a two-volume biography presenting Mendel in the context of the history of biology and philosophy, and in the context of the setting in which he lived and worked. In this first volume the authors set the stage for a new interpretation of Mendel s achievements and personality. The period of Mendel s life covered by this volume is critical to understanding why he saw what other biologists, including Charles Darwin, for example, didn t. In searching for clues to Mendel s thinking, the authors discuss at length the origin of his genes; the history of the region of his birth; they also spend a day and then the four seasons of the year with his family; and finally they examine the schooling he received, as well as the cultural and political influences he was exposed to.

An indispensible part of the work is Norman Klein s artwork. In this first volume alone, it comprises nearly 80 original drawings and includes cartoons that enliven the narration, scenes from Mendel s life, portraits, and plans and drawings of the cities and buildings in which he lived, studied, and worked."

This book provides readers with the results of recent research from some of the world's leading historians of astronomy on aspects of Arabic, Australian, Chinese, Japanese, and North and South American astronomy and astrophysics. It contains peer-reviewed papers gathered from the International Conferences on Oriental Astronomy 6 (ICO-6) with the chosen theme of "Highlighting the History of Astronomy in the Asia-Pacific Region." Of particular note are the sections on Arabic astronomy, Asian applied astronomy and the history of Australian radio astronomy, and the chapter on Peruvian astronomy. This title is a valuable complement for those with research interests in applied historical astronomy; archaeoastronomy; calendars, manuscripts, and star charts; historical instruments and observatories, and the history of radio astronomy.

This reference work describes the trial-and-error experiments, discoveries, and inventions of early humans who lived from before recorded history to the Middle Ages. Krebs travels through the ancient periods of Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica, to the classical Greek and Roman periods, and finally to the Christian era, providing students with the link between science and history, while revealing information about many cultures around the world. Each entry provides the who, when, and where of each discovery, invention, or experiment. Entries include calendars, gunpowder, anesthesia, contraception, spontaneous generation, the Arctic Circle, language, and tides. Part of the Groundbreaking Experiments, Inventions, and Discoveries through the Ages series, this book provides readers with a detailed look early humans' relation to world around them and the scientific advancements they made. It will be useful to high school and college students, teachers, and the general public interested in the history and science behind ancient civilizations.

Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge and Keats, were deeply interested in how perception and sensory experience operate, and in the connections between sense-perception and aesthetic experience. Noel Jackson tracks this preoccupation through the Romantic period and beyond, both in relation to late eighteenth-century human sciences, and in the context of momentous social transformations in the period of the French Revolution. Combining close readings of the poems with interdisciplinary research into the history of the human sciences, Noel Jackson sheds new light on Romantic efforts to define how art is experienced in relation to the newly emerging sciences of the mind and shows the continued relevance of these ideas to our own habits of cultural and historical criticism today. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Romanticism, but also to those interested in the intellectual interrelations between literature and science.

Here is a history of the development of military missiles and space travel from World War II to the American visits to the Moon in 1969-1972. It stresses the relationship between the early stages of space exploration and the arms race, and that a dual path led to space flight. One was the development of unmanned long-range war rockets, the other, less often noted, was the rocket-powered research plane. The first path led through the intercontinental ballistic missile to the first artificial satellites and space capsule; the latter, more uniquely American, through the X-series and Skyrocket rocket planes to the X-15, and ultimately to the Space Shuttle. The early part of the book focuses on the Soviet-American race to develop the ICBM in the 1950s, and the first satellites, with particular attention paid to the events and reactions that followed the flight of Sputnik I in 1957 and the subsequent missile gap era.

Mature sciences have been long been characterized in terms of the "successfulness", "reliability" or "trustworthiness" of their theoretical, experimental or technical accomplishments. Today many philosophers of science talk of "robustness", often without specifying in a precise way the meaning of this term. This lack of clarity is the cause of frequent misunderstandings, since all these notions, and that of robustness in particular, are connected to fundamental issues, which concern nothing less than the very nature of science and its specificity with respect to other human practices, the nature of rationality and of scientific progress; and science's claim to be a truth-conducive activity. This book offers for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the problem of robustness, and in general, that of the reliability of science, based on several detailed case studies and on philosophical essays inspired by the so-called practical turn in philosophy of science.

Hardbound. The EMU and the Euro are transforming European banking institutions, regulations, performance, and bank-state relationships. This book analyzes these dynamic challenges and processes. It presents contemporary and historical perspectives to guide an informed understanding of European banks, banking culture, and the role of the banking sector in the EMU's new financial and competitive environment.

The eighteenth century has long been considered critical for the development of modern chemistry, yet many crucial features of the period remain largely unknown or unexplored, for general accounts - often built around Lavoisier - have remained quite selective. This volume presents new approaches and topics in an attempt to build a richer, fuller, more complex view of chemical work during the period. Themes include late-phase alchemy, professionalization, chemical education, and the links and relations between chemistry and pharmacy, medicine, agriculture, and geology.

This lively and fascinating text traces the key developments in computation - from 3000 B.C. to the present day - in an easy-to-follow and concise manner. Topics and features: ideal for self-study, offering many pedagogical features such as chapter-opening key topics, chapter introductions and summaries, exercises, and a glossary; presents detailed information on major figures in computing, such as Boole, Babbage, Shannon, Turing, Zuse and Von Neumann; reviews the history of software engineering and of programming languages, including syntax and semantics; discusses the progress of artificial intelligence, with extension to such key disciplines as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neural networks and cybernetics; examines the impact on society of the introduction of the personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the development of mobile phone technology; follows the evolution of a number of major technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft and Apple.

This volume presents the work of leading scientists from Russia, Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania, Israel and the USA, revealing major insights long unknown to the scientific community. Without any doubt their work will provide a springboard for further research in anticipation. Until recently, Robert Rosen (Anticipatory Systems) and Mihai Nadin (MIND - Anticipation and Chaos) were deemed forerunners in this still new knowledge domain. The distinguished neurobiologist, Steven Rose, pointed to the fact that Soviet neuropsychological theories have not on the whole been well received by Western science. These earlier insights as presented in this volume make an important contribution to the foundation of the science of anticipation. It is shown that the daring hypotheses and rich experimental evidence produced by Bernstein, Beritashvili, Ukhtomsky, Anokhin and Uznadze, among others-extend foundational work to aspects of neuroscience, physiology, motorics, education.

This book shows how the study of multi-hadron production phenomena in the years after the founding of CERN culminated in Hagedorn's pioneering idea of limiting temperature, leading on to the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma -- announced, in February 2000 at CERN. Following the foreword by Herwig Schopper -- the Director General (1981-1988) of CERN at the key historical juncture -- the first part is a tribute to Rolf Hagedorn (1919-2003) and includes contributions by contemporary friends and colleagues, and those who were most touched by Hagedorn: Tamas Biro, Igor Dremin, Torleif Ericson, Marek Gazdzicki, Mark Gorenstein, Hans Gutbrod, Maurice Jacob, Istvan Montvay, Berndt Muller, Grazyna Odyniec, Emanuele Quercigh, Krzysztof Redlich, Helmut Satz, Luigi Sertorio, Ludwik Turko, and Gabriele Veneziano. The second and third parts retrace 20 years of developments that after discovery of the Hagedorn temperature in 1964 led to its recognition as the melting point of hadrons into boiling quarks, and to the rise of the experimental relativistic heavy ion collision program. These parts contain previously unpublished material authored by Hagedorn and Rafelski: conference retrospectives, research notes, workshop reports, in some instances abbreviated to avoid duplication of material, and rounded off with the editor's explanatory notes. About the editor: Johann Rafelski is a theoretical physicist working at The University of Arizona in Tucson, USA. Bor n in 1950 in Krakow, Poland, he received his Ph.D. with Walter Greiner in Frankfurt, Germany in 1973. Rafelski arrived at CERN in 1977, where in a joint effort with Hagedorn he contributed greatly to the establishment of the relativistic heavy ion collision, and quark-gluon plasma research fields. Moving on, with stops in Frankfurt and Cape Town, to Arizona, he invented and developed the strangeness quark flavor as the signature of quark-gluon plasma.

Time is fundamental to our experience, but remains mysterious. This book shows how philosophers and scientists have tried to grapple with this most extraordinary of ordinary phenomena. From the attempts of early astronomers to reconcile solar and lunar and terrestrial reckonings, to the huge expansions and contractions of time consciousness brought on by scientists as diverse as Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, this book shows how time is as much a matter of human choice as it is a matter of scientific precision.

Pythagoras (c. 570 - c. 495 BC), arguably the most influential thinker among the Presocratics, emerges in ancient tradition as a wise teacher, an outstanding mathematician, an influential politician, and as a religious and ethical reformer. He claimed to possess supernatural powers and was the kind of personality who attracted legends. In contrast to his controversial and elusive nature, the early Pythagoreans, such as the doctors Democedes and Alcmaeon, the Olympic victors Milon and Iccus, the botanist Menestor, the natural philosopher Hippon, and the mathematicians Hippasus and Theodorus, all appear in our sources as 'rational' as they can possibly be. It was this 'normality' that ensured the continued existence of Pythagoreanism as a philosophical and scientific school till c. 350 BC. This volume offers a comprehensive study of Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans through an analysis of the many representations of the Teacher and his followers, allowing the representations to complement and critique each other. Relying predominantly on sources dating back to before 300 BC, Zhmud portrays a more historical picture of Pythagoras, of the society founded by him, and of its religion than is known from the late antique biographies. In chapters devoted to mathematical and natural sciences cultivated by the Pythagoreans and to their philosophies, a critical distinction is made between the theories of individual figures and a generalized 'all-Pythagorean teaching', which is known from Aristotle.

In the last years, it was observed an increasing interest of computer scientists in the structure of biological molecules and the way how they can be manipulated in vitro in order to define theoretical models of computation based on genetic engineering tools. Along the same lines, a parallel interest is growing regarding the process of evolution of living organisms. Much of the current data for genomes are expressed in the form of maps which are now becoming available and permit the study of the evolution of organisms at the scale of genome for the first time. On the other hand, there is an active trend nowadays throughout the field of computational biology toward abstracted, hierarchical views of biological sequences, which is very much in the spirit of computational linguistics. In the last decades, results and methods in the field of formal language theory that might be applied to the description of biological sequences were pointed out.

This set of 10 volumes, originally published between 1900 and 1994, amalgamates a wide breadth of research on Science and Technology in the Nineteenth Century, including studies on notable figures such as Gregor Johann Mendel, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sir Humphry Davy. This collection of books from some of the leading scholars in the field provides a comprehensive overview of the subject how it has evolved over time, and will be of particular interest to students of history and the sciences.

This book describes the development of what we would now regard as a class of statistical fitting procedures between 1750 and 1900. The book contains detailed algebraic descriptions of the fitting of linear relationships by the method of least squares and the closely related least absolute deviations and minimax absolute deviations procedures. The prerequisite is a basic course in mathematical statistics. The primary audience for this book will be statisticians concerned with the fitting of linear models. However, it will also be of interest to engineers and scientists concerned with the empirical determination of linear relationships.

The articles included in this Volume represent a broad and highly qualified view on the present state of general relativity, quantum gravity, and their cosmological and astrophysical implications. As such, it may serve as a valuable source of knowledge and inspiration for experts in these fields, as well as an advanced source of information for young researchers.
The occasion to gather together so many leading experts in the field was to celebrate the centenary of Einstein's stay in Prague in 1911-1912. It was in fact during his stay in Prague that Einstein started in earnest to develop his ideas about general relativity that fully developed in his paper in 1915.
Approaching soon the centenary of his famous paper, this volume offers a precious overview of the path done by the scientific community in this intriguing and vibrant field in the last century, defining the challenges of the next 100 years.
The content is divided into four broad parts: (i) Gravity and Prague, (ii) Classical General Relativity, (iii) Cosmology and Quantum Gravity, and (iv) Numerical Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics.

This book analyzes scientific problems within the history of physics, engineering, chemistry, astronomy and medicine, correlated with technological applications in the social context. When and how is tension between disciplines explicitly practised? What is the conceptual bridge between science researches and the organization of technological researches in the development of industrial applications? The authors explain various ways in which the sciences allowed advanced modelling on the one hand, and the development of new technological ideas on the other hand. An emphasis on the role played by mechanisms, production methods and instruments bestows a benefit on historical and scientific discourse: theories, institutions, universities, schools for engineers, social implications as well. Scholars from different traditions discuss the emergency style of thinking in methodology and, in theoretical perspective, aim to gather and re-evaluate the current thinking on this subject. It brings together contributions from leading experts in the field, and gives much-needed insight into the subject from a historical point of view. The volume composition makes for absorbing reading for historians, philosophers and scientists.

This book is for physicists, historians and philosophers of physics as well as students seeking an introduction to ongoing debates in relativistic and quantum physics. This title covers the recent debates on the emergence of relativity and quantum theory. It includes chapters with an introductory character, comprehensible to students and science teachers. It strengthens the bonds between the communities of scientists, historians, and philosophers.