Seller
Galileo Unbound
A Path Across Life, the Universe and Everything
Genres:
Biography: science, technology & engineering,
History of science,
Popular science,
Physics,
Cybernetics & systems theory,
Chaos theory,
Philosophy of science,
Quantum physics (quantum mechanics & quantum field theory),
Relativity physics,
Dynamics & vibration
Synopsis
Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of
spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems.
Galileo published the first modern law of motion, the Law of Fall, that was ideal and simple, laying the foundation upon which Newton built the first theory of dynamics. Early in the twentieth century, geometry became the cause of motion rather than the result when Einstein envisioned the fabric of space-time warped by mass and energy, forcing light rays to bend past the Sun. Possibly more radical was Feynman's dilemma of quantum particles taking all paths at once - setting the stage for the
modern fields of quantum field theory and quantum computing. Yet as concepts of motion have evolved, one thing has remained constant, the need to track ever more complex changes and to capture their essence, to find patterns in the chaos as we try to predict and control our world.
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What Reviewers Are Saying
the richness of the story-telling of the present book, which is able to let even the non-erudite reader to appreciate what the erudite scholar (probably) takes for granted * Salvatore Esposito, Contemporary Physics Journal * Highly Recommended. * CHOICE * Using very few equations, Nolte looks at nearly every area of physics and even includes chapters on chaos and Darwinian evolution. Some of the phase space illustrations are complicated, but Nolte does an excellent job of developing these from the basic ideas of a trajectory through physical space. There is an unexpressed argument here that it may be better for the uninitiated to learn about the sciences through phase space concepts. By learning about the sciences in
this way, one gains an appreciation for the symmetry and beauty of the theories without having to learn the advanced mathematics. * Professor Eric Kincanon, Gonzaga University * David Nolte, in Galileo Unbound draws a continuous line starting from Galileo, to Newton, Lagrange and Poincare, all the way to Darwin and beyond. * Nature Astronomy *