General Physics category: 2746 books

"The material is superbly chosen and brilliantly written … the language is clear, direct and rigorous … a superb addition to the library of any physicist." — Physics Today. This lucidly written text emphasizes optics and acoustics, with considerable emphasis placed on establishing a...

**Asked to name a great physicist, most people would mention Newton or Einstein, Feynman or Hawking. But ask a physicist and there’s no doubt that James Clerk Maxwell will be near the top of the list.  ** Maxwell, an unassuming Victorian Scotsman, explained how we perceive colour. He uncovered...

Plasma physics is the fascinating science behind lightning bolts, fluorescent lights, solar flares, ultra-bright TV screens, fusion reactors, cosmic jets and black hole radiation, to name but a few examples. Research into this could lead to a source of unlimited, non-polluting energy. Yet plasmas obey...

How does your opponent put that tricky spin on the ball? Why are some serves easier to return than others? The mysteries behind the winning strokes, equipment, and surfaces of the game of tennis are accessibly explained by Howard Brody through the laws of physics. And he gives practical pointers to...

No branch of classical physics is older in its origins yet more modern in its applications than acoustics. Courses on acoustics very naturally begin with a study of vibrations, as a preliminary to the introduction of the wave equations. Both vibrations and waves, of course, are vastly important to all...

Understanding non-equilibrium properties of classical and quantum many-particle systems is one of the goals of contemporary statistical mechanics. Besides its own interest for the theoretical foundations of irreversible thermodynamics(e.g. of the  Fourier's law of heat conduction), this topic is...

Geared toward advanced undergraduates and graduate students, this text systematically develops the concepts of electrical acceleration of gases for propulsion. Author Robert G. Jahn, Professor of Aerospace Sciences at Princeton University, starts his presentation with primary physical principles and...

In order to compete in a modern global market, companies rely on mechatronics, or the fusion of several engineering and scientific disciplines from across mechanical, computer and electrical engineering in developing innovative products and systems. Mechatronics offers new solutions and unprecedented...

Creating Materials with a Desired Refraction Coefficient' provides a recipe for creating materials with a desired refraction coefficient, and the many-body wave scattering problem for many small impedance bodies is solved. The physical assumptions make the multiple scattering effects essential. On...

The main pacemakers of scienti?c research are curiosity, ingenuity, and a pinch of persistence. Equipped with these characteristics a young researcher will be s- cessful in pushing scienti?c discoveries. And there is still a lot to discover and to understand. In the course of understanding the origin...

Quantum computing and quantum information are two of the fastest growing and most exciting research fields in physics. Entanglement, teleportation and the possibility of using the non-local behavior of quantum mechanics to factor integers in random polynomial time have also added to this new interest. This...

It has been argued that science fiction (SF) gives a kind of weather forecast – not the telling of a fortune but rather the rough feeling of what the future might be like. The intention in this book is to consider some of these bygone forecasts made by SF and to use this as a prism through which...

The process of realizing the ground state of some typical (frustrated) quantum many-body systems, starting from the ‘disordered’ or excited states, can be formally mapped to the search of solutions for computationally hard problems. The dynamics through the critical point, in between, are therefore...

This book aims to provide an overview of several topics in advanced differential geometry and Lie group theory, all of them stemming from mathematical problems in supersymmetric physical theories. It presents a mathematical illustration of the main development in geometry and symmetry theory that...