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A Jubilee Volume in Honor of Nathan Rosen

Edited by F I Cooperstock, Victoria, Canada, L P Horwitz, and J Rosen, Tel Aviv, Israel

The currents of interest and deep discussion that stemmed from a paper published in 1935 of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen and which continue unabated to this day are very much in evidence in this volume. Along with the great works of Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Born and others, it stands at the foundations of our thinking on the quantum theory and poses a serious challenge to its claim to completeness.

Readership: those working in research in astrophysics; applied and mathematical physicists

Contents: Foundations: In honour of Professor Nathan Rosen (J L Synge). Conceptual Aspects of General Relativity and the Einstein Rosen Bridge (P G Bergamann). Self-Generating Universe (J Rosen). General Relativity: Grand-Scale Steady State Universe Gernerated by Inflationary Core (Y Ne'eman and G Tauber). Electrovac space-times containing colliding null wave fronts (A H Taub). Thoughts and speculations on the question: is space time turbulent? (J Frauendiener and E T Newman). Bianchi cosmologies: a new description (A Ashtekar and J Pullin). Bimetric gravity revisited. (Quantum Conformal Cosmology (J V Narlikar). Special Relativistic Classical Mechanics in a Riemannian Spacetime (R I Arshansky, L P Horwitz and D Zerzion). Some Anti-de Sitter and de Sitter supergravity Chern-Simons Theories in three dimensions. Energy-momentum tensors in special and general relativity (P Havas). Astrophysics: Non-Newtonian gravitation and causality (J D Beckenstein). Quasar pairs and quasars' peculiar velocity (Fang Li Zhi). Consequences of fast pulsar observations (L Parket). Correlation among gravitational wave and neutrino detectors data during SN1987A (G Pizzella). Age, primordial helium and metal enrichment of globular clusters, dwarf spheroidal and elliptical galaxies (L Angeletti and P Giannone). Quantum mechanics, particles, fields, and stochastic equations: Eddington's tables, quantum mechanics and realism (F Rohrlich). The grammar and syntax of quantum theory (A Peres). Causal Interpretation of the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen experiment (D Bohm). Quantum Mechanics and Classical Physics (N Rosen). Field Theory of Elementary Particles (F I Cooperstock). Applications of the EPR effect in particle physics correlated Kaon and B-Meson decays with CP violation (H K Lipkin). Electrodynamics on RxS3 Topology (M Carmeli and S Malin). Classical solitons and extended particles in quantum field theory (R J Finkelstein). Kac's solution of the Telegrapher equation (part 1) (C Dewitt-Morette and See Kit Foong). Kac's solution of the Telegrapher Equation (part 2).

ISBN: 0 7503 0053 1

Hardcover Price: £77.00/US$139.00

Pages: 386

Format: 240 x 179mm

Date: 1990

Not available from the Institute of Physics Publishing in Israel. Please contact Israel Physical Society.

 

Universality in Chaos

2nd edition

 

Compiled and introduced by P Cvitanovic, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark

This second edition brings together a unique collection of articles providing an introduction to the chaotic behaviour of deterministic systems. It contains some of the most significant and representative papers to offer a broader perspective of the subject to researchers and graduate students.

 

 

"essential reading for the expert, while the mathematically sophisticated outsider should enjoy dipping into it."

Ian Stewart, New Scientist, April 1990

 

 

Readership: Research and graduate students in theoretical and experimental physics, mathematics, dynamics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, meteorology and electrical and mechanical engineering. Also suitable for use in postgraduate level courses.

Contents: Introduction. Part 1: Introductory articles: Strange attractors (D Ruelle). Universal behaviour in nonlinear systems (M J Feigenbaum). Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics (R M May). Roads to turbulence in dissipative dynamical systems (J P Eckmann). Part 2: Experiments: Fluid mechanics. A Rayleigh Benard experiment: helium in a small box (A Libchaber and J Maurer). Period doubling cascade in mercury, a quantitative measurement (A Libchader et al). Onset of turbulence in a rotating fluid (J P Gollub and H L Swinney). Transition to chaotic behaviour via a reproducible sequence of period-doubling bifurcations (M Giglio et al). Intermittency in Rayleigh-Benard convection (P Berge et al). Chemical systems: Representation of a strange attractor fron an experimental study of chemical turbulence (J C Roux et al). Chaos in the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction (J L Hudson and J C Mankin) One-dimensional dynamics in a multicomponent chemical reaction (R H Simoyi et al). Intermittent behaviour in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction (Y Pomeau et al). Optical experiments: Experimental evidence of subharmonic bifurcations, multistability and turbulence in a Q-switched gas laser (F T Arecchi et al). Electronic experiments: Evidence for universal chaotic behaviour of a driven nonlinear oscillator (J Testa et al). Biological experiments: Phase locking, period-doubling bifurcations, and irregular dynamics in periodically stimulated cardiac cells (M R Guevara et al). Part 3: Theory: Qualitative universality in one dimension. On finite limit sets for transformations on the unit interval (M Metropolis et al). Quantitative universality for one-dimensional period-doublings. The universal metric properties of nonlinear transformations (M J Feigenbaum) A computer-assisted proof of the Feigenbaum conjectures (O E Landford III). Subharmonic spectrum. The transition to aperiodic behaviour in turbulent systems (M J Feigenbaum). Universality and the power spectrum at the onset of chaos (M Nauenberg and J Rudnick). Part 4: Noise: Deterministic noise. Invariant distributions and stationary correlation functions of one-dimensional discrete processes (S Grossmann and S Thomae). Noisy periodicity and reverse bifurcation (E N Lorenz). Scaling behaviour of chaotic flows (B A Huberman and J Rudnick). Universal power spectra for the reverse bifurcation sequence (A Wolf and J Swift). Power spectra of strange attractor (B A Huberman and A B Zisook). Spectral broadening of period-doubling bifurcation sequences (J D Farmer). External noise: Fluctuations and the onset of chaos (J P Crutchfield and B A Huberman). Scaling theory for noisy period-doubling transitions to chaos (B Shraiman et al). Scaling for external noise at the onset of chaos (J Crutchfield et al). Part 5: Intermittency: Intermittent transition to turbulence in dissipative dynamical systsm (Y Pomeaur and P Manneville). Intermittency in the presence of noise: a renormalization group formulation (J Hirsch et al). Part 6: Period-doubling in higher dimensions: A two-dimensional mapping with a strange attractor (M Henon). Universal effects of dissipation in two-dimensional mappings (A B Zisook). Period doubling bifurcations for families of maps on R (P Colletee et al). Deterministic nonperiodic flow (E N Lorenz). Sequences of infinite bifurcations and turbulence in a five-mode truncation of the Navier-Stokes equations (V Franceschini and C Tebaldi). Power spectral analysis of a dynamical system (J Crutchfield et al). Part 7: Beyond the one-dimensional theory. Scaling behaviour in a map of a circle onto itself: empirical results (S J Shenker). Period doubling as a universal route to stocasticity (R S MacKay). Self-generated chaotic behaviour in nonlinear mechanics (R H G Helleman). Part 8: Recent developments. Feigenbaum universality and the thermodynamic formalism (E B Vui et al.) Mode-locking and the transition to chaos in dissipative systems (P Bak et al). Fractal measures and their singularities: the characterization of strange sets (T C Halsey et al). Presentation functions, fixed points, and a theory of scaling function dynamics (M J Feigenbaum). Fixed points of composition operators II (H Epstein). Bounded structure of infinitely renormalizable mappings (D Sullivan). References. Indexes.

ISBN: 0 85274 260 6

Paperback Price: £28.00/US$56.00

Pages: 648

Format: 234 x 156mm

Date: 1989

 

 

 

Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (Wiley, 1996).

        Bernstein holds that modern times and the past are separated by one simple idea: the mastery of risk. A wonderful history of probabilistic thinking and some of the main players: Pascal, Bernoulli, Bayes, Keynes, Arrow, Galton, and von Neumann.

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Frans de Waal, Frans Lanting, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (University of California Press 1997).

As The Atlantic Monthly said:

        What Professor de Waal describes is a society of mamma's boys, permanently subject to female control. It is also an erotic society, with sexual contacts conducted steadily, ingeniously, and with no discernible concern for sex or age. One of Mr. Lanting's many photographs sums up these apes rather well. It is of a male bonobo, standing straight as a palace sentry, well prepared for sexual action, and offering handfuls of sugarcane. Bonobo may lie at the root of civilized behavior. UBS Amazon Powell's

 

Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (W. W. Norton, August 1997).

As I said in The New York Times Book Review (10 August 1997):

        In our evolutionary ascent from an ape-like ancestor, we gained our most prized possession, the mental abilities that underlie language. We're still trying to figure out what language is (from monkey cries to structured syntax), how it works (the short-term processes in the brain that construct and deconstruct utterances), and why it evolved (the Darwinian processes that bootstrapped it over the long run).

        That's what Terrence W. Deacon's book, "The Symbolic Species," is about. His first section is on symbols and language, the next tackles the brain's language specializations, and the last addresses the coevolution of language and the human brain, ending up with Darwinian views of consciousness. It's a work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts. Continued....

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Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: Fates of Human Societies (W. W. Norton, 1997).

The author of The Third Chimpanzee writes here about the cultural evolution of the last 13,000 years:

    "Until we have some convincing, detailed, agree-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history [why Eurasians did so much better than Africans, Americans, and Australians], most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book."

    "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences in peoples' environments, not cause of biological differences among the peoples themselves."

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Ernst Mayr, This is Biology: The Science of the Living World (Harvard University Press, March 1997).

From p.189:

    "From the Greeks to the nineteenth century there was a great controversy over the question whether changes in the world are due to chance or necessity. It was Darwin who found a brilliant solution to this old conundrum: they are due to both. In the production of variation chance dominates, while selection itself operates largely by necessity. Yet Darwin's choice of the term "selection" was unfortunate, because it suggests that there is some agent in nature who deliberately selects. Actually the "selected" individuals are simply those who remain alive after all the less well adapted or less fortunate individuals have been removed from the population."

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        "[We] can understand neither ourselves nor our world until we have fully understood what language is and what it has done for our species. For although language made our species and made the world we inhabit, the powers it unleashed drove us to understand and control our environment, rather than explore the mainspring of our own being. We have followed that path of control and domination until even the most daring among us have begun to fear where it may lead. Now the engine of our quest for power and knowledge should itself become the object that we seek to know."

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Derek Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior (University of Washington Press, 1995).

To quote the book review by George Johnson in the New York Times Book Review of December 10, 1995: "Midway through his book, Mr. Bickerton asks us to consider how truly wonderful are mundane activities like a boxer pummeling a punching bag or a dancer stretching in front of a mirror. 'Look at how alien these behaviors are to any species but our own,' he writes. 'Try to imagine a tiger practicing its killing technique in the absence of any prey, or a gazelle practicing its latest escape maneuver in the absence of any predator. . . . Doing a special, individualized thing simply to be able to do it better on some future occasion is uniquely human behavior.' The same could be said for theory building, this marvelous ability to spin engaging scientific tales."

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Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason (Simon and Schuster 1988).

        "We are evidently unique among species in our symbolic ability, and we are certainly unique in our modest ability to control the conditions of our existence by using these symbols. Our ability to represent and simulate reality implies that we can approximate the order of existence and bring it to serve human purposes. A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over our experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it oneís own. But with this approximation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion."

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Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (Morrow, 1994).

Danny Yee writes: "If human language is innate, then why is there such a variety of languages? Pinker devotes a chapter to exploring the ways in which languages vary, the ways in which they change with time, and some of the attempts at reconstruction of human linguistic history (including a reasonably even-handed appraisal of Greenbergian lumping). Separate chapters are devoted to language acquisition by infants, to the biological (genetic and ontogenetic) underpinnings of language, and to the evolution of language. Here Pinker disagrees with Chomsky, seeing no problems with a selective explanation for the evolution of language. The final chapter touches on other aspects of the human mind which seem likely candidates for innate "modules" and examines their relationship to linguistic competence." The non-Chomskian side of the story is in Michael Tomasello's book review in Cognitive Development 10:131-156 (1995).

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