This is an account of the author's investigation, on behalf of the Canadian government, into the life and ideas of the eccentric genius Nikola Tesla. This is a completely revised and redesigned edition, with a new introduction by the former head of the Tesla Museum, a new chapter and a selection of photographs of Tesla and his work in search of the holy grail of electricity - the transmission of power without loss. As a student in Prague in the 1870s, Tesla "saw" the electric induction motor and patented his discovery, -the first of many inventions whose plans seem to have come to him fully fledged. He worked for the Edison company in Paris before emigrating to the US and battling with Thomas Edison himself to ensure that alternating, rather than direct current, became the standard. He sold his patent in the induction motor for $1 million dollars to George Westinghouse, who used this system for the Niagara Falls Power Project. Moving to Colorado Springs, Tesla worked on resonance, building enormous oscillating towers in experiments which still intrigue today. In later life Tesla became a recluse, bombarding newspapers with eccentric claims, including energy transmissions to other planets. Though he died alone and virtually forgotten, rumours gradually grew that Tesla had made further remarkable discoveries. In an attempt to replicate his experiments, people still build Tesla towers and puzzle over the possible link with low-frequency broadcasts which can supposedly disrupt the weather and affect the human mind.

The metaphor of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) tries to picture a vision of the future where all of us will be surrounded by 'intelligent' electronic environments, and this ambient has claims to being sensitive and responsive to our needs. Ambient Intelligence without invasion of privacy represents a long-term vision for the EU Information Society Technologies Research programme. A strong multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach is a key requirement for large-scale technology innovation and the development of effective applications. Up to now, most of the books and papers related to AmI focus their analysis on the technology potential only. An important feature of this volume is the link between the technology - through the concepts of ubiquitous computing and intelligent interface - and the human experience of interacting in the world - through a neuro-psychological vision centred on the concept of 'presence'. Presence - the sense of being there - is the experience of projecting one's mind through media to other places, people and designed environments.The combination of recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience - which make it possible to acquire a better understanding of the human aspects of presence, and the breakthroughs at the level of the enabling technologies make it increasingly possible to build novel systems based on this understanding. The goal of this volume is to assess the technologies and processes that are behind the AmI vision, in order to help the development of state-of-the-art applications. More in detail, this volume aims at supporting researchers and scientists, interested in the understanding and exploiting the potential of AmI.

In the first years after the discovery of radioactivity it became clear that nuclear physics was, by excellence, the science of small quantum systems. Between the fifties and the eighties nuclear physics and elementary particles physics lived their own lives, without much interaction. During this period the basic concepts were defined. Recently, contrary to the specialization law often observed in science, the overlap between nuclear and elementary particle physics has become somewhat blurred.

This Les Houches Summer School was set up with the aim of fighting off the excessive specialization evident in many international meetings, and return to the roots. The twofold challenge of setting up a fruitful exchange between experimentalists and theorists in the first place, and between nuclear and hadronic matter physicists in the second place was successfully met.

The volume presents high quality, up-to-date reviews starting with an account of the birth and first developments of nuclear physics. Further chapters discuss the description of the nuclear structure, the physics of nuclei at very high spin, the existence of super-heavy nuclei as a consequence of shell structure, liquid-gas transition, including both a description and a review of the experimental situation.

Other topics dealt with include the interactions between moderately relativistic heavy ions, the concept of a nucleon dressed by a cloud of pions, the presence of pions in the nucleus, the subnucleonic phenomena in nuclei and quark-gluons deconfinement transition, both theoretical and experimental aspects. Nuclear physics continues to influence many other fields, such as astrophysics, and is also inspired by these same fields. This cross-fertilisation is illustrated by the treatment of neutron stars in one of the final chapters. The last chapter provides an overview of a recent development in which particle and nuclear physicists have cooperated to revitalize an alternative method for nuclear energy production associating high energy production accelerators and sub-critical neutron multiplying assemblies.

In these lectures, I have discussed a number of basic concepts that provide the necessary background to the current studies of star formation. A ?rst partwas dedicatedto illustrate the conceptofa protostar, discussing con- tions and propertiesof the collapseof a molecular core. A secondpart deals with circumstellardisks. Disks areimportantnot only to the processofstar formation itself, but also because they are in all probability the site where planets form. The age range of pre-main-sequence stars coincides with the timescales for the formation of very large planetesimals, the building blocks of planets. Studies ofdisk properties in pre-main-sequencestars ofdi?erent age, located in star-forming regions of di?erent properties, may shed light on the characteristics of planet formation processes. ISO observations can provide important (in some cases, unique) inf- mation on the various stages of the star and planet formation. I have illustrated in detail some examples, when, to my knowledge, ISO data had been reduced and analyzed. Many other programs exist, and will certainly contribute to our understanding of star formation in the near future

This book is written for researchers as well as engineers in an industrial environment. Following a longstanding tradition of the Les Houches Summer Schools, all chapters are pedagogically presented and accessible for graduate students. The book treats 2D and 3D turbulence from the experimental, theoretical and computational points of view. The reader will find, for example, comprehensive accounts of fully developed turbulence experiments, simulating deterministically coherent vortices formation, and statistical prediction of industrial flows, and a very complete review of 2D turbulence. Fundamental concepts like topological fluid dynamics in MHD flows or finite-time singularities of the Burgers, Euler and Navier--Stokes equations complete the volume.

This book, devoted to the study of quantum effects in atomic systems, reviews the state of the art in the fields of Bose--Einstein condensation, quantum information processing, and the problems of propagation of matter waves in complex media. The specific topics include: theory and experiments in Bose--Einstein condensation, theory and experiments on decoherence phenomena in simple quantum systems and the connection to quantum measurement, atom interferometry, quantum computing, multiple scattering problems in atomic physics, quantum and nonlinear optics in a photonic band gap and quantum chaos and atomic physics. Pedagogical in style, the articles address PhD students as well as researchers.

This book reviews the interconnection of cosmology and particle physics over the last decade. It provides introductory courses in supersymmetry, superstring and M-theory, responding to an increasing interest to evaluate the cosmological consequences of these theories. Based on a series of extended courses providing an introduction to the physics of the very early universe, in the light of the most recent advances in our understanding of the fundamental interactions, it reviews all the classical issues (inflation, primordial fluctuations, dark matter, baryogenesis), but also introduces the most recent ideas about what happened at the Big Bang, and before.

Originally published in 1979. This reprints the revised and expanded edition of 1996. In this volume, physicists, biologists and chemists, who have been involved in some of the most exciting discoveries in modern scientific thought explore issues which have shaped modern physics and which hint at what may form the next scientific revolution. The major issues discussed are the understanding of time and space, quantum and relativity theories and recent attempts to unite them and related questions in theoretical biology.

The use of concepts borrowed from topology has led to major athances in t,heorctical physics in recent years. hl quailt,uni field theory. the pionvering work \>?. Skyrme and follow ups on classical solut,ions of Yalig AIills Higgs t,heories has lead to the discovery of t,he lion peturbati~e sectors of gauge theory. Topology has also found its way into colidensed matter physics. Clas sification of defects in ordered media bg 11oinotop~ theorg is a well known example (see e.g. Kleman and Toulouse. Les Kouches XXXV, 1980). More recent,ly. topology and condensed matter physics have again met in t,hc realm of the fract,ioiial cluantml Hall effect. Experimental progress in molecular beam epitaxy techniques leading to high mohilit? samples al lowed the disco\;ery of this reniarkablc and now1 phenomelloii. Th~se cle veloprnents lead also to the at,t,rib~~tion of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics to Laughlin, Storrner and Tsui. The rlotions of fractional charge as well as fractional statistics ran be interpreted by a topological interaction of infinite rauge. So it is natural to find in the Les Houclles series a school devoted to quantum Hall physics. intcrinediate st,atistics and Chem Sirnons theory. This session also included some one dimensional physics topics like t,he Ca,logero Sutkerland model and some Lut,t,inger liquid physics. Polymer physics is also related to topology. 111 this field topological const,rairlts may be described by concept,^ from knot theory and statist'ical physics. Hence this session also included Brownian motion theory related to knot theory.

This book focusses on basic science, but it also addresses engineers interested in new materials. Experiments on metal clusters are reviewed in two long pedagogically written articles. The theoretical courses cover three main domains: (1) electronic properties of metallic clusters and nanostructures, (2) phases and phase changes of small systems, and (3) chemical processes in nanoscale systems. Furthermore, interested readers, researchers as well as graduate students will find articles on density functional theory, magnetic properties of clusters, and computer simulations of cluster dynamics. In addition, the book addresses chemical processes, pairing correlation effects and also biological systems.

"Presence", the sense of "being there" in a mediated environment, has been applied to describe the user experience when interacting with advanced media interfaces such as virtual environments. Why examine the concept of presence? There are compelling practical and theoretical reasons. The definition of the construct of presence is of particular interest today because it has the potential relevance for the design and evaluation of a broad range of interactive and non-interactive media and applications in several areas such as medicine, entertainment, education and training. An enhanced sense of presence plays an important role in technologies such as the video telephone, high definition television (HDTV), 3G portable phones, home and arcade video games, the World Wide Web, and more. The book examines the different facets of the concept of presence. It begins by noting practical and theoretical reasons for studying this concept. Different theories of presence are identified and a detailed description of the concepts included in these conceptualizations is presented. Existing research and about the factors that encourage or discourage a sense of presence in media users as well as the physiological and psychological effects of presence are then outlined. Finally, suggestions concerning possible evolutions of this concept allowed by the diffusion of ambient intelligence and 3G portable communication are presented.

David Bohm is one of the foremost scientific thinkers of today and one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation. His challenge to the conventional understanding of quantum theory has led scientists to reexamine what it is they are going and his ideas have been an inspiration across a wide range of disciplines. Quantum Implications is a collection of original contributions by many of the world' s leading scholars and is dedicated to David Bohm, his work and the issues raised by his ideas. The contributors range across physics, philosophy, biology, art, psychology, and include some of the most distinguished scientists of the day. There is an excellent introduction by the editors, putting Bohm's work in context and setting right some of the misconceptions that have persisted about the work of David Bohm