The Dictionary of Geophysics, Astrophysics, and Astronomy provides a lexicon of terminology covering fields such as astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, relativity, geophysics, meteorology, Newtonian physics, and oceanography. Authors and editors often assume - incorrectly - that readers are familiar with all the terms in professional literature. With over 4,000 definitions and 50 contributing authors, this unique comprehensive dictionary helps scientists to use terminology correctly and to understand papers, articles, and books in which physics-related terms appear.

The Dictionary of Geophysics, Astrophysics, and Astronomy provides a lexicon of terminology covering fields such as astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, relativity, geophysics, meteorology, Newtonian physics, and oceanography. Authors and editors often assume - incorrectly - that readers are familiar with all the terms in professional literature. With over 4,000 definitions and 50 contributing authors, this unique comprehensive dictionary helps scientists to use terminology correctly and to understand papers, articles, and books in which physics-related terms appear.

Observational and experimental data pertaining to gravity and cosmology are changing our view of the Universe. General relativity is a fundamental key for the understanding of these observations and its theory is undergoing a continuing enhancement of its intersection with observational and experimental data. These data include direct observations and experiments carried out in our solar system, among which there are direct gravitational wave astronomy, frame dragging and tests of gravitational theories from solar system and spacecraft observations. This book explores John Archibald Wheeler's seminal and enduring contributions in relativistic astrophysics and includes: the General Theory of Relativity and Wheeler's influence; recent developments in the confrontation of relativity with experiments; the theory describing gravitational radiation, and its detection in Earth-based and space-based interferometer detectors as well as in Earth-based bar detectors; the mathematical description of the initial value problem in relativity and applications to modeling gravitational wave sources via computational relativity; the phenomenon of frame dragging and its measurement by satellite observations. All of these areas were of direct interest to Professor John A. Wheeler and were seminally influenced by his ideas.

These reports, at the forefront of relativity theory when they were written, in particular the geometrical aspects of spacetime theory, were the result of the Alfred Schild Memorial Lecture Series presented at the University of Texas at Austin beginning in 1977. Each article is a self-contained summary of an important area of contemporary gravitational physics, while the book as a whole provides an overview of a wide variety of the problems of general relativity and gravitation.