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Freeman Dyson's life experiences made him a wise, kindly
grandfather figure to two generations of students enrolled in an
undergraduate university course 'Science, Technology, &
Society.' Near the end of each semester, the class sent him written
questions, on reading Professor Dyson's memoir Disturbing the
Universe. The letter exchanges occurred regularly from April 1993
through December 2019.'Yours Ever, Freeman' is devoted to this
correspondence between Professor Dyson and the students. His
responses went beyond answering questions, as he enlarged the scope
of the questions by sharing stories from his experiences. While
others have written of Professor Dyson's accomplishments and
awards; the class came to know him through his discussions about
life, science, and society. Topics ranged from the existential to
headlines of the day, from national policies to personal values.
Over three thousand students have been blessed to count Freeman
Dyson as a mentor and consider him as a friend.'Yours Ever,
Freeman' supplements Dear Professor Dyson published earlier. While
the 2016 book included in-depth reviews of the STS course contents
from which the correspondence emerged, besides including the
2016-2019 correspondence, the present book maintains a tight focus
on the correspondence itself, annotated as necessary for context.
The book's title comes from the way Professor Dyson signed his
letters.
Freeman Dyson's life experiences made him a wise, kindly
grandfather figure to two generations of students enrolled in an
undergraduate university course 'Science, Technology, &
Society.' Near the end of each semester, the class sent him written
questions, on reading Professor Dyson's memoir Disturbing the
Universe. The letter exchanges occurred regularly from April 1993
through December 2019.'Yours Ever, Freeman' is devoted to this
correspondence between Professor Dyson and the students. His
responses went beyond answering questions, as he enlarged the scope
of the questions by sharing stories from his experiences. While
others have written of Professor Dyson's accomplishments and
awards; the class came to know him through his discussions about
life, science, and society. Topics ranged from the existential to
headlines of the day, from national policies to personal values.
Over three thousand students have been blessed to count Freeman
Dyson as a mentor and consider him as a friend.'Yours Ever,
Freeman' supplements Dear Professor Dyson published earlier. While
the 2016 book included in-depth reviews of the STS course contents
from which the correspondence emerged, besides including the
2016-2019 correspondence, the present book maintains a tight focus
on the correspondence itself, annotated as necessary for context.
The book's title comes from the way Professor Dyson signed his
letters.
Freeman Dyson has designed nuclear reactors and bomb-powered
spacecraft; he has studied the origins of life and the
possibilities for the long-term future; he showed quantum mechanics
to be consistent with electrodynamics and started cosmological
eschatology; he has won international recognition for his work in
science and for his work in reconciling science to religion; he has
advised generals and congressional committees. An STS (Science,
Technology, Society) curriculum or discussion group that engages
topics such as nuclear policies, genetic technologies,
environmental sustainability, the role of religion in a scientific
society, and a hard look towards the future, would count itself
privileged to include Professor Dyson as a class participant and
mentor. In this book, STS topics are not discussed as objectified
abstractions, but through personal stories.The reader is invited to
observe Dyson's influence on a generation of young people as they
wrestle with issues of science, technology, society, life in
general and our place in the universe. The book is filled with
personal anecdotes, student questions and responses, honest doubts
and passions.
"In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians,
Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical
genius thus far produced since the higher education of women
began."-Albert Einstein The year was 1915, and the young
mathematician Emmy Noether had just settled into Gottingen
University when Albert Einstein visited to lecture on his nearly
finished general theory of relativity. Two leading mathematicians
of the day, David Hilbert and Felix Klein, dug into the new theory
with gusto, but had difficulty reconciling it with what was known
about the conservation of energy. Knowing of her expertise in
invariance theory, they requested Noether's help. To solve the
problem, she developed a novel theorem, applicable across all of
physics, which relates conservation laws to continuous
symmetries-one of the most important pieces of mathematical
reasoning ever developed. Noether's "first" and "second" theorem
was published in 1918. The first theorem relates symmetries under
global spacetime transformations to the conservation of energy and
momentum, and symmetry under global gauge transformations to charge
conservation. In continuum mechanics and field theories, these
conservation laws are expressed as equations of continuity. The
second theorem, an extension of the first, allows transformations
with local gauge invariance, and the equations of continuity
acquire the covariant derivative characteristic of coupled
matter-field systems. General relativity, it turns out, exhibits
local gauge invariance. Noether's theorem also laid the foundation
for later generations to apply local gauge invariance to theories
of elementary particle interactions. In Dwight E. Neuenschwander's
new edition of Emmy Noether's Wonderful Theorem, readers will
encounter an updated explanation of Noether's "first" theorem. The
discussion of local gauge invariance has been expanded into a
detailed presentation of the motivation, proof, and applications of
the "second" theorem, including Noether's resolution of concerns
about general relativity. Other refinements in the new edition
include an enlarged biography of Emmy Noether's life and work,
parallels drawn between the present approach and Noether's original
1918 paper, and a summary of the logic behind Noether's theorem.
Understanding tensors is essential for any physics student dealing
with phenomena where causes and effects have different directions.
A horizontal electric field producing vertical polarization in
dielectrics; an unbalanced car wheel wobbling in the vertical plane
while spinning about a horizontal axis; an electrostatic field on
Earth observed to be a magnetic field by orbiting astronauts-these
are some situations where physicists employ tensors. But the true
beauty of tensors lies in this fact: When coordinates are
transformed from one system to another, tensors change according to
the same rules as the coordinates. Tensors, therefore, allow for
the convenience of coordinates while also transcending them. This
makes tensors the gold standard for expressing physical
relationships in physics and geometry. Undergraduate physics majors
are typically introduced to tensors in special-case applications.
For example, in a classical mechanics course, they meet the
"inertia tensor," and in electricity and magnetism, they encounter
the "polarization tensor." However, this piecemeal approach can set
students up for misconceptions when they have to learn about
tensors in more advanced physics and mathematics studies (e.g.,
while enrolled in a graduate-level general relativity course or
when studying non-Euclidean geometries in a higher mathematics
class). Dwight E. Neuenschwander's Tensor Calculus for Physics is a
bottom-up approach that emphasizes motivations before providing
definitions. Using a clear, step-by-step approach, the book strives
to embed the logic of tensors in contexts that demonstrate why that
logic is worth pursuing. It is an ideal companion for courses such
as mathematical methods of physics, classical mechanics,
electricity and magnetism, and relativity.
Freeman Dyson has designed nuclear reactors and bomb-powered
spacecraft; he has studied the origins of life and the
possibilities for the long-term future; he showed quantum mechanics
to be consistent with electrodynamics and started cosmological
eschatology; he has won international recognition for his work in
science and for his work in reconciling science to religion; he has
advised generals and congressional committees. An STS (Science,
Technology, Society) curriculum or discussion group that engages
topics such as nuclear policies, genetic technologies,
environmental sustainability, the role of religion in a scientific
society, and a hard look towards the future, would count itself
privileged to include Professor Dyson as a class participant and
mentor. In this book, STS topics are not discussed as objectified
abstractions, but through personal stories.The reader is invited to
observe Dyson's influence on a generation of young people as they
wrestle with issues of science, technology, society, life in
general and our place in the universe. The book is filled with
personal anecdotes, student questions and responses, honest doubts
and passions.
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