Galileo Unbound: A Path Across Life, the Universe and Everything

ISBN: 0198805845

Author: Nolte, David D.

Condition: New

Stories from the history of the science of motion, from chaos theory to black holes, from population dynamics to Einstein and entanglement, Galileo Unbound traces the history of physics that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to the view of our lives as trajectories traversing a phase space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of trajectories through spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems.Table of Contents:Chapter 1: Flight of the Swallows- Introduction to motion and trajectoriesChapter 2: A New Scientist- Galileo's beginningsChapter 3: Galileo's Trajectory- Publication of Two New SciencesChapter 4: On the Shoulders of Giants- 100 years from Newton to LagrangeChapter 5: Geometry on my Mind- The beginnings of abstract spacesChapter 6: The Tangled Tale of Phase Space- The geometry of dynamicsChapter 7: The Lens of Gravity- From Einstein to Wheeler- The Golden Age of General RelativityChapter 8: On the Quantum Footpath- Quantum dynamicsChapter 9: From Butterflies to Hurricanes- Chaos theoryChapter 10: Darwin in the Clockworks- Evolutionary dynamicsChapter 11: The Measure of Life- Population dynamics