This monograph provides a new account of justified inference as a cognitive process. In contrast to the prevailing tradition in epistemology, the focus is on low-level inferences, i.e., those inferences that we are usually not consciously aware of and that we share with the cat nearby which infers that the bird which she sees picking grains from the dirt, is able to fly. Presumably, such inferences are not generated by explicit logical reasoning, but logical methods can be used to describe and analyze such inferences.

Part 1 gives a purely system-theoretic explication of belief and inference. Part 2 adds a reliabilist theory of justification for inference, with a qualitative notion of reliability being employed. Part 3 recalls and extends various systems of deductive and nonmonotonic logic and thereby explains the semantics of absolute and high reliability. In Part 4 it is proven that qualitative neural networks are able to draw justified deductive and nonmonotonic inferences on the basis of distributed representations. This is derived from a soundness/completeness theorem with regard to cognitive semantics of nonmonotonic reasoning. The appendix extends the theory both logically and ontologically, and relates it to A. Goldman's reliability account of justified belief.

This text will be of interest to epistemologists and logicians, to all computer scientists who work on nonmonotonic reasoning and neural networks, and to cognitive scientists.

Critical phenomena is one of the most exciting areas of modern physics. This book provides a thorough but economic introduction into the principles and techniques of the theory of critical phenomena and the renormalization group, from the perspective of modern condensed matter physics. Assuming basic knowledge of quantum and statistical mechanics, the book discusses phase transitions in magnets, superfluids, superconductors, and gauge field theories. Particular attention is given to modern topics such as gauge field fluctuations in superconductors, the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, duality transformations, and quantum phase transitions - all of which are at the forefront of today's physics research. This book contains numerous problems of varying degrees of difficulty, with solutions. These problems provide readers with a wealth of material to test their understanding of the subject. It is ideal for graduate students and more experienced researchers in the fields of condensed matter physics, statistical physics, and many-body physics.

This book provides a comprehensive presentation of the basics of statistical physics. The first part explains the essence of statistical physics and how it provides a bridge between microscopic and macroscopic phenomena, allowing one to derive quantities such as entropy. Here the author avoids going into details such as Liouville's theorem or the ergodic theorem, which are difficult for beginners and unnecessary for the actual application of the statistical mechanics. In the second part, statistical mechanics is applied to various systems which, although they look different, share the same mathematical structure. In this way readers can deepen their understanding of statistical physics. The book also features applications to quantum dynamics, thermodynamics, the Ising model and the statistical dynamics of free spins.

The study of phase transitions is among the most fascinating fields in physics. Originally limited to transition phenomena in equilibrium systems, this field has outgrown its classical confines during the last two decades. The behavior of far from equilibrium systems has received more and more attention and has been an extremely active and productive subject of research for physicists, chemists and biologists. Their studies have brought about a more unified vision of the laws which govern self-organization processes of physico-chemical and biological sys tems. A major achievement has been the extension of the notion of phase transi tion to instabilities which occur only in open nonlinear systems. The notion of phase transition has been proven fruitful in apphcation to nonequilibrium ins- bihties known for about eight decades, like certain hydrodynamic instabilities, as well as in the case of the more recently discovered instabilities in quantum optical systems such as the laser, in chemical systems such as the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction and in biological systems. Even outside the realm of natural sciences, this notion is now used in economics and sociology. In this monograph we show that the notion of phase transition can be extend ed even further. It apphes also to a new class of transition phenomena which occur only in nonequilibrium systems subjected to a randomly fluctuating en vironment."

The 1960s were perhaps a decade of confusion, when scientists faced d- culties in dealing with imprecise information and complex dynamics. A new set theory and then an in?nite-valued logic of Lot? A. Zadeh were so c- fusing that they were called fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic; a deterministic system found by E. N. Lorenz to have random behaviours was so unusual that it was lately named a chaotic system. Just like irrational and imaginary numbers, negative energy, anti-matter, etc., fuzzy logic and chaos were gr- ually and eventually accepted by many, if not all, scientists and engineers as fundamental concepts, theories, as well as technologies. In particular, fuzzy systems technology has achieved its maturity with widespread applications in many industrial, commercial, and technical ?elds, ranging from control, automation, and arti?cial intelligence to image/signal processing, patternrecognition, andelectroniccommerce.Chaos, ontheother hand, wasconsideredoneofthethreemonumentaldiscoveriesofthetwentieth century together with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. As a very special nonlinear dynamical phenomenon, chaos has reached its current outstanding status from being merely a scienti?c curiosity in the mid-1960s to an applicable technology in the late 1990s. Finding the intrinsic relation between fuzzy logic and chaos theory is certainlyofsigni?cantinterestandofpotentialimportance.Thepast20years have indeed witnessed some serious explorations of the interactions between fuzzylogicandchaostheory, leadingtosuchresearchtopicsasfuzzymodeling of chaotic systems using Takagi-Sugeno models, linguistic descriptions of chaotic systems, fuzzy control of chaos, and a combination of fuzzy control technology and chaos theory for various engineering pract

"Nonlinear Oscillations in Mechanical Engineering" explores the effects of nonlinearities encountered in applications in that field. Since the nonlinearities are caused, first of all, by contacts between different mechanical parts, the main part of this book is devoted to oscillations in mechanical systems with discontinuities caused by dry friction and collisions. Another important source of nonlinearity which is covered is that caused by rotating unbalanced parts common in various machines as well as variable inertias occurring in all kinds of crank mechanisms. This book is written for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, but it may be also helpful and interesting for both theoreticians and practitioners working in the area of mechanical engineering at universities, in research labs or institutes and especially in the R and D departments within industrial firms.

The three well known revolutions of the past centuries - the Copernican, the Darwinian and the Freudian - each in their own way had a deflating and mechanizing effect on the position of humans in nature. They opened up a richness of disillusion: earth acquired a more modest place in the universe, the human body and mind became products of a long material evolutionary history, and human reason, instead of being the central, immaterial, locus of understanding, was admitted into the theater of discourse only as a materialized and frequently out-of-control actor. Is there something objectionable to this picture? Formulated as such, probably not. Why should we resist the idea that we are in certain ways, and to some degree, physically, biologically or psychically determined? Why refuse to acknowledge the fact that we are materially situated in an ever evolving world? Why deny that the ways of inscription (traces of past events and processes) are co-determinative of further "evolutionary pathways"? Why minimize the idea that each intervention, of each natural being, is temporally and materially situated, and has, as such, the inevitable consequence of changing the world? The point is, however, that there are many, more or less radically different, ways to consider the "mechanization" of man and nature. There are, in particular, many ways to get the message of "material and evolutionary determination," as well as many levels at which this determination can be thought of as relevant or irrelevant.

Provides a new and more realistic framework for describing the dynamics of non-linear systems. A number of issues arising in applied dynamical systems from the viewpoint of problems of phase space transport are raised in this monograph. Illustrating phase space transport problems arising in a variety of applications that can be modeled as time-periodic perturbations of planar Hamiltonian systems, the book begins with the study of transport in the associated two-dimensional Poincare Map. This serves as a starting point for the further motivation of the transport issues through the development of ideas in a non-perturbative framework with generalizations to higher dimensions as well as more general time dependence. A timely and important contribution to those concerned with the applications of mathematics.

Quantum maps are presented with special emphasis on their physical origin. They represent a testing ground for understanding concepts in quantized chaotic systems. The book teaches the modern mathematical methods from analytic and algebraic number theory as applied to quantum maps. It gives a broad and in-depth overview of the mathematical problems arising in this area. Also treated are the numerical aspects in quantum chaos such as eigenvalue and eigenfunctions computations for chaotic quantum systems. The book addresses scientists and advanced students in mathematics and mathematical physics.

This book brings together scientists from all over the world who have defined and developed the field of Coordination Dynamics. Grounded in the concepts of self-organization and the tools of nonlinear dynamics, appropriately extended to handle informational aspects of living things, Coordination Dynamics aims to understand the coordinated functioning of a variety of different systems at multiple levels of description. The book addresses the themes of Coordination Dynamics and Dynamic Patterns in the context of the following topics: Coordination of Brain and Behavior, Perception-Action Coupling, Control, Posture, Learning, Intention, Attention, and Cognition.

This thoroughly revised 5th edition of Zeh's classic text investigates irreversible phenomena and their foundation in classical, quantum and cosmological settings. It includes new sections on the meaning of probabilities in a cosmological context, irreversible aspects of quantum computers, and various consequences of the expansion of the Universe. In particular, the book offers an analysis of the physical concept of time.

This fascinating work is devoted to the fundamental phenomenon in physics - synchronization that occurs in coupled non-linear dissipative oscillators. Examples of such systems range from mechanical clocks to population dynamics, from the human heart to neural networks. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that the complexity of synchronous patterns of real oscillating systems can be described in the framework of the general approach, and the authors study this phenomenon as applied to oscillations of different types, such as those with periodic, chaotic, noisy and noise-induced nature.

2 But already he had done important work on thermal equilibrium which helped generalize Maxwell's distribution law. Indeed, there is part of a letter by James Clerk Maxwell to Loschmidt from this period which runs: "I am very pleased over the outstanding work of your student; in England experi mental physics is much neglected. Sir William Thomson has done the most in this connection, but you in Austria] are ahead of us with your good example. "2 But while praise was fine, Boltzmann lusted after further travel. He wanted to know what other physicists were doing first hand. In 1870 he attended lectures by Bunsen and Konigsberger in Heid elberg, and in the same year went to Berlin only to scurry back to Vienna with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, but Boltzmann was back in Berlin the next year attending lectures, visiting laboratories, and working on dielectricity more or less under the direction of Kirchhhoff and Helmholtz."

In spite of the impressive predictive power and strong mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, the theory has always suffered from important conceptual problems. Some of these have never been solved. Motivated by this state of affairs, a number of physicists have worked together for over thirty years to develop stochastic electrodynamics, a physical theory aimed at finding a conceptually satisfactory, realistic explanation of quantum phenomena. This is the first book to present a comprehensive review of stochastic electrodynamics, from its origins to present-day developments. After a general introduction for the non-specialist, a critical discussion is presented of the main results of the theory as well as of the major problems encountered. A chapter on stochastic optics and some interesting consequences for local realism and the Bell inequalities is included. In the final chapters the authors propose and develop a new version of the theory that brings it in closer correspondence with quantum mechanics and sheds some light on the wave aspects of matter and the linkage with quantum electrodynamics. Audience: The volume will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students of theoretical and mathematical physics, foundations and philosophy of physics, and teachers of theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, electromagnetic theory, and statistical physics (stochastic processes).

People have always asked what distinguishes the living from the inanimate world and what uni?es the two. The ?elds of biology and physics have a long history of exchange. Milestones at the molecular level were the discoveries of the structure ofDNA, RNA, andproteins. It is not by coincidence that this exchange has intensi?ed in recent years. Laboratory experiments reach down to the level of single molecules. Moreover, thereisnowavastamountofgenomicinformation, whichisstillgrowingex- nentially due to the various sequencing projects. Biologists increasingly feel the need for theoretical models to interpret these data in a quantitative way. At the sametime, theoreticalphysicshasmadesigni?cantprogressinareaslikelyto be relevant for the understanding of biological systems. Some important ex- plesarecooperativephenomena, statisticsfarfromthermodynamicequilibrium, systemswithquencheddisorder, andsoftmatter. Some forms of biological matter have indeed become established areas of - searchwithinphysics, suchasbiomembranes, heteropolymers, molecularmotors, microtubules, neuralsystemsetc.Thisvolumeisfocusedonadi?erentaspect of the living world that can be calledbiologicalinformation, itscoding, rep- duction, andevolution.Biologicalinformationistranslatedintostructuresand patternsoveranenormousrangeofscales, fromsinglebiomoleculestospecies networks coupled over entire continents. Thestatisticaltheory of biological information lives not only in three-dim- sional space. It involves various abstract spaces in which this information is encodedandevolves, suchasnucleotidesequences, genenetworks, ortopologies of the 'tree of life'. The articles collected highlight a few directions of research that may become important parts of this emerging ?eld. The ?rst part of the book, MolecularInformationandEvolution, startswith twoarticlesonsequencesimilarityanalysis, acentralthemeinbioinformatics which has surprisingly deep connections to statistical physics. The genetic code, RNA, andproteinsarethreeexamplesoftheintricateinterplayofsequence, structure, andfunction

This book contains the proceedings of a meeting that brought together friends and colleagues of Guy Rideau at the Universite Denis Diderot (Paris, France) in January 1995. It contains original results as well as review papers covering important domains of mathematical physics, such as modern statistical mechanics, field theory, and quantum groups. The emphasis is on geometrical approaches. Several papers are devoted to the study of symmetry groups, including applications to nonlinear differential equations, and deformation of structures, in particular deformation-quantization and quantum groups. The richness of the field of mathematical physics is demonstrated with topics ranging from pure mathematics to up-to-date applications such as imaging and neuronal models. Audience: Researchers in mathematical physics. "

This EMS volume, the first edition of which was published as Dynamical Systems II, EMS 2, familiarizes the reader with the fundamental ideas and results of modern ergodic theory and its applications to dynamical systems and statistical mechanics. The enlarged and revised second edition adds two new contributions on ergodic theory of flows on homogeneous manifolds and on methods of algebraic geometry in the theory of interval exchange transformations.

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena. The great majority of physicists continue to subscribe to this view, despite the fact that just such a deterministic theory, accounting for all of the phe nomena of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, was proposed by David Bohm more than four decades ago and has arguably been around almost since the inception of quantum mechanics itself. Our purpose in asking colleagues to write the essays for this volume has not been to produce a Festschrift in honor of David Bohm (worthy an undertaking as that would have been) or to gather together a collection of papers simply stating uncritically Bohm's views on quantum mechanics. The central theme around which the essays in this volume are arranged is David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. It has by now become fairly standard practice to refer to his theory as Bohmian mechanics and to the larger conceptual framework within which this is located as the causal quantum theory program. While it is true that one can have reservations about the appropriateness of these specific labels, both do elicit distinc tive images characteristic of the key concepts of these approaches and such terminology does serve effectively to contrast this class of theories with more standard formulations of quantum theory."

Neural networks have become a well-established methodology as exempli?ed by their applications to identi?cation and control of general nonlinear and complex systems; the use of high order neural networks for modeling and learning has recently increased. Usingneuralnetworks, controlalgorithmscanbedevelopedtoberobustto uncertainties and modeling errors. The most used NN structures are Feedf- ward networks and Recurrent networks. The latter type o?ers a better suited tool to model and control of nonlinear systems. There exist di?erent training algorithms for neural networks, which, h- ever, normally encounter some technical problems such as local minima, slow learning, and high sensitivity to initial conditions, among others. As a viable alternative, new training algorithms, for example, those based on Kalman ?ltering, have been proposed. There already exists publications about trajectory tracking using neural networks; however, most of those works were developed for continuous-time systems. On the other hand, while extensive literature is available for linear discrete-timecontrolsystem, nonlineardiscrete-timecontroldesigntechniques have not been discussed to the same degree. Besides, discrete-time neural networks are better ?tted for real-time implementation

Functional integration successfully entered physics as path integrals in the 1942 Ph.D. dissertation of Richard P. Feynman, but it made no sense at all as a mathematical definition. Cartier and DeWitt-Morette have created, in this book, a new approach to functional integration. The book is self-contained: mathematical ideas are introduced, developed generalised and applied. In the authors' hands, functional integration is shown to be a robust, user-friendly and multi-purpose tool that can be applied to a great variety of situations, for example: systems of indistinguishable particles; Aharanov-Bohm systems; supersymmetry; non-gaussian integrals. Problems in quantum field theory are also considered. In the final part the authors outline topics that can be profitably pursued using material already presented.

This book shows how the concept of geometrical frustration can be used to elucidate the structure and properties of non-periodic materials such as metallic glasses, quasicrystals, amorphous semiconductors and complex liquid crystals. Geometric frustration is introduced through examples and idealized models, leading to a consideration of how the concept can be used to identify ordered and defective regions in real materials. Then it is shown how these principles can also be used to model physical properties of materials, in particular specific volume, melting, the structure factor and the glass transition. Final chapters consider geometric frustration in periodic structures with large cells and quasiperiodic order. Appendices give all necessary background on geometry, symmetry and tilings. The text considers geometrical frustration at different scales in many types of materials and structures, including metals, amorphous solids, liquid crystals, amphiphiles, cholisteric systems, polymers, phospholipid membranes, atomic clusters, and quasicrystals. Of interest to researchers in condensed matter physics, materials science and structural chemistry, as well as mathematics and structural biology.

The state-of-the-art of quantum transport and quantum kinetics in semiconductors, plus the latest applications, are covered in this monograph. Since the publishing of the first edition in 1996, the nonequilibrium Green function technique has been applied to a large number of new research topics, and the revised edition introduces the reader to many of these areas. This book is both a reference work for researchers and a self-tutorial for graduate students.

This monograph is devoted to nonlinear dynamics of thin plates and shells with thermosensitive excitation. Because of the variety of sizes and types of mathematical models in current use, there is no prospect of solving them analytically. However, the book emphasizes a rigorous mathematical treatment of the obtained differential equations, since it helps efficiently in further developing of various suitable numerical algorithms to solve the stated problems.

Quantum Networks is focused on density matrix theory cast into a product operator representation, particularly adapted to describing networks of finite state subsystems. This approach is important for understanding non-classical aspects such as single subsystem and multi-subsystem entanglement. An intuitive picture evolves of how these features are generated and destroyed by interactions with the environment. This second edition has been revised and enlarged. For better clarity the text has been partly reorganized and figures and formulae are presented in a more attractive way.

Selected modern aspects of artificially layered structures and bulk materials involving antiferromagnetic long-range order are the main themes of this book. Special emphasis is laid on the prototypical behavior of Ising-type model systems. They play a crucial role in the field of statistical physics and, in addition, contribute to the basic understanding of the exchange bias phenomenon in MBE-grown magnetic heterosystems. Throughout the book, particular attention is given to the interplay between experimental results and their theoretical description, ranging from the famous Lee-Yang theory of phase transitions to novel mechanisms of exchange bias.