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This book is a personal account of some aspects of the emergence of modern science, mostly from the viewpoint of those branches of physics which provided the much needed paradigm shift of "more is different" that heralded the advent of complexity science as an antidote to the purely reductionist approach in fundamental physics. It is also about the humans that have helped to shape these developments, including personal reminiscences and the realization that the so-called exact sciences are inevitably also a social endeavour with all its facets.
Served by the razor-sharp wit of the author, this erudite ramble is meant to be neither comprehensive nor systematic, but its generous insights will give the inquisitive academically trained mind a better understanding of what science, and physics in particular, could or should be about.
List of contents
Swings Through the Ages.- Continuum Mechanics.- Continuum Beyond Mechanics.- From Continuum to Atoms.- Condensed Matter.- Quantum Matter.- Broken symmetry.- Complexity Simplified.- Complexity Strikes Back.- Quo Vadis?
About the author
Len Pismen is professor emeritus at Israel Institute of Technology where he held the Julius M. and Bernice Naiman Chair in Fluid Mechanics.
He has published two monographs - Vortices in Nonlinear Fields: From liquid crystals to superfluids, From non-equilibrium patterns to cosmic strings (Oxford University Press, 1999), Patterns and Interfaces in Dissipative Dynamics (Springer, 2006) - and is member of the editorial board of The European Physical Journal Special Topics .
Summary
This book is a personal account of some aspects of the emergence of modern science, mostly from the viewpoint of those branches of physics which provided the much needed paradigm shift of "more is different" that heralded the advent of complexity science as an antidote to the purely reductionist approach in fundamental physics. It is also about the humans that have helped to shape these developments, including personal reminiscences and the realization that the so-called exact sciences are inevitably also a social endeavour with all its facets. Served by the razor-sharp wit of the author, this erudite ramble is meant to be neither comprehensive nor systematic, but its generous insights will give the inquisitive academically trained mind a better understanding of what science, and physics in particular, could or should be about.
