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ANALOGIES IN PHYSICS AND LIFE
A Scientific Autobiography
by Richard M Weiner (Université Paris-Sud, France & University of Marburg, Germany)
Analogies play a fundamental role in science. To understand how and why, at a given moment, a certain analogy was used, one has to know the specific, historical circumstances under which the new idea was developed. This historical background is never presented in scientific articles and quite rarely in books. For the general reader, the undergraduate or graduate student who learns the subject for the first time, but also for the practitioner who looks for inspiration or who wants to understand what his colleague working in another field does, these historical circumstances can be fascinating and useful.
This book discusses a series of analogy effects in subatomic physics, the prediction and theory of which the author has contributed to in the last 50 years. These phenomena are presented at a level accessible to the non-specialist, without formulae but with emphasis on the personal and historical background: memoirs of meetings, discussions and correspondence with collaborators and colleagues. As such, besides its scientific aspects, the book constitutes an absorbing witness account of a holocaust survivor who subsequently illegally crossed the Iron Curtain to escape communist persecution.
Contents:
- The Wandering Years (1930–1945):
- Childhood
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Politics — Premonition of War
- War — The Ghetto
- High School and University
- The Isomeric Shift on Spectral Lines
- Persona Non Grata
- Challenging Conventional Wisdom in Particle Physics
- Nazi-Communist Analogy
- CERN
- Statistical Concepts in High-Energy Physics, Phase Transitions
- Bonn
- USA
- London, Imperial College
- Settling Years (1974–present):
- Professor at the Philipps University of Marburg
- Hot Spots in “Elementary” Particles and in Nuclei
- Rewriting History
- From Superfluids to Fluids, The Hydrodynamical Analogy Applied to Multiparticle Production in Strong Interactions
- Einstein Criticized in a Marburg Colloquium
- From Hot Spots to Solitons — On Revient Toujours au Vieil Amour
- Caught Up Again by the Past
- Quantum Optical Analogies and Methods in Strong Interactions High-Energy Physics
- Bose-Einstein Correlations
- Order and Chaos
- Traveling to the East
- Moving to Paris
- France Versus Germany, Personal Impressions
- Quark-Gluon Plasma, Another Old Love
- Evidence for Quark-Gluon Plasma from Particle Physics
- Evidence for Quark-Gluon Plasma from Heavy Ion Reactions
- A Literary Intermezzo: The Mini-Atom Project
- Reflections
Readership: Physicists, undergraduate and graduate students, historians of
science, high school students, and general readers interested in the history of the 20th century.
| 436pp |
Pub. date: Apr 2008 |
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