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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.
List of contents
- 1: Flight of the Swallows
- Introduction to motion and trajectories
- 2: A New Scientist
- Galileo's beginnings
- 3: Galileo's Trajectory
- Publication of Two New Sciences
- 4: On the Shoulders of Giants
- 100 years from Newton to Lagrange
- 5: Geometry on my Mind
- The beginnings of abstract spaces
- 6: The Tangled Tale of Phase Space
- The geometry of dynamics
- 7: The Lens of Gravity
- From Einstein to Wheeler
- The Golden Age of General Relativity
- 8: On the Quantum Footpath
- Quantum dynamics
- 9: From Butterflies to Hurricanes
- Chaos theory
- 10: Darwin in the Clockworks
- Evolutionary dynamics
- 11: The Measure of Life
- Population dynamics
About the author
David D. Nolte is the Edward M. Purcell Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. His research areas have included experimental high-energy physics, cosmology, semiconductor physics, laser physics and biophysics. He received his BA from Cornell University in 1981, his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, and a post-doctoral appointment at AT&T Bell Labs before joining the faculty at Purdue. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the AAAS. In 2005, he received the Herbert Newby McCoy Award of Purdue University. He is the inventor of the BioCD and Biodynamic Imaging and is the technical founder of two biotech companies using interferometry and holography for diagnostic screening.
Summary
This book traces the history of physics and the science of motion from Galileo to modern times. The ideas of motion have become increasingly abstract. Today, researchers in modern dynamics study diverse problems. This book explains the ideas behind the science and how they were developed by driven, and sometimes conflicted, individuals.
Additional text
David Nolte, in Galileo Unbound draws a continuous line starting from Galileo, to Newton, Lagrange and Poincaré, all the way to Darwin and beyond.
Report
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
