The problems of physics

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T.H.K. Barron, G.K. White

This monograph is for the physicist, engineer, material scientist and graduate student concerned with solids (and fluids) at low temperatures. The authors, respectively a theorist and an experimentalist with many years of cryogenic experience, have collaborated to cover the closely related areas of heat capacity, thermal expansion and elastic stiffness. They include chapters on the fundamental principles, the observed behavior of representative materials - cubic crystals, anisotropic solids, glasses, polymers, magnetic materials, superconductors, composites, etc., measurement techniques and tables of data on technical and reference materials.

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Maurizio Gasperini

<p>This reference textbook is an up-to-date and self-contained introduction to the theory of gravitational interactions. The first part of the book follows the traditional presentation of general relativity as a geometric theory of the macroscopic gravitational field. A second, advanced part then discusses the deep analogies (and differences) between a geometric theory of gravity and the gauge theories of the other fundamental interactions. This fills a gap which is present in the context of the traditional approach to general relativity, and which usually makes students puzzled about the role of gravity. The necessary notions of differential geometry are reduced to the minimum, leaving more room for those aspects of gravitational physics of current phenomenological and theoretical interest, such as the properties of gravitational waves, the gravitational interactions of spinors, and the supersymmetric and higher-dimensional generalization of the Einstein equations. Theory of Gravitational Interactions will be of particular value to undergraduate students pursuing a theoretical or astroparticle curriculum. It can also be used by those teaching related subjects, by PhD students and young researchers working in different scientific sectors but wishing to enlarge their spectrum of interests, and, in general, by all scholars interested in the modern aspects and problems of gravitational interaction.</p>

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Joseph Silk

"Archeology is the science that probes the past few thousand years. Geology takes us back two or even three billion years. Beyond that is the realm of cosmology: the study of the beginnings of the Universe around us.". So begins a journey deep into the origins of time, the birth of galaxies, and all the way to the farthest realm, beyond the end of it all. The tour starts at the beginning, the very early Universe - with Silk's masterful account of the Big Bang Theory, culminating in the 1965 discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. "This whisper of creation is the greatly faded relic of the primordial fireball..."

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Lewis H. Ryder

This book is a modern pedagogic introduction to the ideas and techniques of quantum field theory. After a brief overview of particle physics and a survey of relativistic wave equations and Lagrangian methods, the quantum theory of scalar and spinor fields, and then of gauge fields, is developed. The emphasis throughout is on functional methods, which have played a large part in modern field theory. The book concludes with a brief survey of 'topological' objects in field theory and, new to this edition, a chapter devoted to supersymmetry.