Permeated by the author's delightful humor, this little book explains, with nearly no mathematics, the main conceptual issues associated with quantum mechanics: The issue of determinism. Does quantum mechanics signify the end of a deterministic word-view? The role of the human subject or of the "observer" in science. Since Copernicus, science has increasingly tended to dethrone Man from his formerly held special position in the Universe. But quantum mechanics, with its emphasis on the notion of observation, may once more have given a central role to the human subject. The issue of locality. Does quantum mechanics imply that instantaneous actions at a distance exist in Nature? In these pages the author offers a variety of views and answers - bad as well as good - to these questions. The reader will be both entertained and enlightened by Jean Bricmont's clear and incisive arguments.
This book explains, in simple terms, with a minimum of mathematics, why things can appear to be in two places at the same time, why correlations between simultaneous events occurring far apart cannot be explained by local mechanisms, and why, nevertheless, the quantum theory can be understood in terms of matter in motion. No need to worry, as some people do, whether a cat can be both dead and alive, whether the moon is there when nobody looks at it, or whether quantum systems need an observer to acquire definite properties. The author’s inimitable and even humorous style makes the book a pleasure to read while bringing a new clarity to many of the longstanding puzzles of quantum physics.
Many people, including physicists, are confused about what the Second Law of thermodynamics really means, about how it relates to the arrow of time, and about whether it can be derived from classical mechanics. They also wonder what entropy really is: Is it all about information? But, if so, then, what is its relation to fluxes of heat? One might ask similar questions about probabilities: Do they express subjective judgments by us, humans, or do they reflect facts about the world, i.e. frequencies. And what notion of probability is used in the natural sciences, in particular statistical mechanics? This book addresses all of these questions in the clear and pedagogical style for which the author is known. Although valuable as accompaniment to an undergraduate course on statistical mechanics or thermodynamics, it is not a standard course book. Instead it addresses both the essentials and the many subtle questions that are usually brushed under the carpet in such courses. As one of the most lucid accounts of the above questions, it provides enlightening reading for all those seeking answers, including students, lecturers, researchers and philosophers of science.
In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy. Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and his fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a delightfully witty and clear voice, the two thoughtfully and thoroughly dismantle the pseudo-scientific writings of some of the most fashionable French and American intellectuals. More generally, they challenge the widespread notion that scientific theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions.
Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers—above all, the United States—in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks. The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention—discovering new “Hitlers” as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938. Jean Bricmont’s Humanitarian Imperialism is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique. It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights. It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO. It outlines an alternative approach to the question of human rights, based on the genuine recognition of the equal rights of people in poor and wealthy countries. Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont’s book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight.
When Intellectual Impostures was published in France, it sent shock waves through the Left Bank establishment. When it was published in Britain, it provoked impassioned debate. Sokal and Bricmont examine the canon of French postmodernists - Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Latour, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari - and systematically expose their abuse of science. This edition contains a new preface analysing the reactions to the book and answering some of the attacks.
Excerpts from the novels, plays, and poems of the French convict, prostitute, and literary artist join notes from his film, The Penal Colony, letters, essays, and a rare interview, all edited by a contemporary biographer.
Permeated by the author's delightful humor, this little book explains, with nearly no mathematics, the main conceptual issues associated with quantum mechanics: The issue of determinism. Does quantum mechanics signify the end of a deterministic word-view? The role of the human subject or of the "observer" in science. Since Copernicus, science has increasingly tended to dethrone Man from his formerly held special position in the Universe. But quantum mechanics, with its emphasis on the notion of observation, may once more have given a central role to the human subject. The issue of locality. Does quantum mechanics imply that instantaneous actions at a distance exist in Nature? In these pages the author offers a variety of views and answers - bad as well as good - to these questions. The reader will be both entertained and enlightened by Jean Bricmont's clear and incisive arguments.
Many people, including physicists, are confused about what the Second Law of thermodynamics really means, about how it relates to the arrow of time, and about whether it can be derived from classical mechanics. They also wonder what entropy really is: Is it all about information? But, if so, then, what is its relation to fluxes of heat? One might ask similar questions about probabilities: Do they express subjective judgments by us, humans, or do they reflect facts about the world, i.e. frequencies. And what notion of probability is used in the natural sciences, in particular statistical mechanics? This book addresses all of these questions in the clear and pedagogical style for which the author is known. Although valuable as accompaniment to an undergraduate course on statistical mechanics or thermodynamics, it is not a standard course book. Instead it addresses both the essentials and the many subtle questions that are usually brushed under the carpet in such courses. As one of the most lucid accounts of the above questions, it provides enlightening reading for all those seeking answers, including students, lecturers, researchers and philosophers of science.
Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers--above all, the United States--in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks. The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive. Jean Bricmont's Humanitarian imperialism is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique. It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights. It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO. Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont's book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight"--Back cover.
This book explains, in simple terms, with a minimum of mathematics, why things can appear to be in two places at the same time, why correlations between simultaneous events occurring far apart cannot be explained by local mechanisms, and why, nevertheless, the quantum theory can be understood in terms of matter in motion. No need to worry, as some people do, whether a cat can be both dead and alive, whether the moon is there when nobody looks at it, or whether quantum systems need an observer to acquire definite properties. The author’s inimitable and even humorous style makes the book a pleasure to read while bringing a new clarity to many of the longstanding puzzles of quantum physics.
This interdisciplinary compilation of essays is a welcome tonic for the “jet lag” or cultural gap between Lacanian discourse's warm reception in Latin countries and the resistance Lacanian clinical applications have met with in the Anglophone world. Lacan in America illuminates important and dynamic debates within a cultural context that Lacan himself has modified. Rather than a made-simple approach, this dynamic collection invokes some of the hesitations, contradictions, and evolutions that appear to be the most exciting part of his legacy, in “polylogical” discussions by “Lacanians” who are not averse to a critical reexamination of major concepts or textual and political issues. Topics include: a regressive sexual science and a “postmodern condition,” technological mediation through seduction and resistance, the partisan issues beneath some of the resistances met by Lacanian discourse, and Lacan's revelations as responses to Freudian riddles. Demonstrating the vitality of Lacanian thought and its impact on disciplines, from mathematics to gay/lesbian studies, Lacan in America works to edify the fruit of Lacan's endless revision, an infinitely propagated transfiguration of his search for the meanings of truth. “Lucid and nonpartisan?[this collection] successfully takes the ideas and issues at the heart of Lacan's work and legacy and reinspects them through the lens offered by their transportation across the Atlantic, illustrating what has happened to them in their translation--and mistranslation--into and through American intellectual and cultural life.” -Daniel Gunn, Department of Comparative Literature and English, The American University of Paris
In 2003 the XIV International Congress on Mathematical Physics (ICMP) was held in Lisbon with more than 500 participants. Twelve plenary talks were given in various fields of Mathematical Physics: E Carlen On the relation between the Master equation and the Boltzmann Equation in Kinetic Theory; A Chenciner Symmetries and "simple" solutions of the classical n-body problem; M J Esteban Relativistic models in atomic and molecular physics; K Fredenhagen Locally covariant quantum field theory; K Gawedzki Simple models of turbulent transport; I Krichever Algebraic versus Liouville integrability of the soliton systems; R V Moody Long-range order and diffraction in mathematical quasicrystals; S Smirnov Critical percolation and conformal invariance; J P Solovej The energy of charged matter; V Schomerus Strings through the microscope; C Villani Entropy production and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation; D Voiculescu Aspects of free probability. ICMP 2003 also included invited talks by: H Eliasson, W Schlag, M Shub, P Dorey, J M Maillet, K McLaughlin, A Nakayashiki, A Okounkov, G M Graf, R Seiringer, S Teufel, J Imbrie, D Ioffe, H Knoerrer, D Bernard, J Dimock, C J Fewster, T Thiemann, F Benatti, D Evans, Y Kawahigashi, C King, B Julia, N Nekrasov, P Townsend, D Bambusi, M Hairer, V Kaloshin, G Schneider, A Shirikyan, P Bizon, H Bray, H Ringstrom, L Barreira, L Rey-Bellet, C Forster, P Gaspard, F Golse, T Chen, P Exner, T Ichinose, V Kostrykin, E Skibsted, G Stolz, D Yafaev, V A Zagrebnov, R Leandre, T Levy, S Mazzuchi, H Owhadi, M Roeckner and A Sengupta. Key Features Provides a list of the most recent progress in all fields of Mathematical Physics; Written by the best international experts in these fields; Indicates the "hot" directions of research in Mathematical Physics for years to come; Readership: Mathematical physicists, mathematicians and theoretical physicists.
This volume contains the Proceedings of'the International Workshop "Lattice Gauge Theory 1986", held at Brookhaven National Laboratory, September 15 - 19, 1986. The meeting was the sequel to the one held at Wuppertal in 1985, the Proceedings of which have appeared in the same Plenum series. During the past few years, a considerable number of meetings on lat tice gauge theory have been held, on both sides of the Atlantic. With our workshop, through early planning and coordination with other prospective organizers, we tried to channel this activity into one major yearly meeting. For 1986, these efforts were successful, and it is our hope that a pattern has been set for the coming years. One result, however, was that the number of participants considerably exceeded that normally found at NATO Advanced Research Workshops. This year, a "nucleus" of NATO-supported experts induced a large number of further interested specialists to obtain their own funds - thus greatly amplifying the impact of the event. The topics covered at the workshop ranged from hadron spectra to strong interaction thermo dynamics; they included spontaneous symmetry breaking and Higgs models, renormalization group methods, as well as many contributions on various possible schemes for the simulation of dynamical quarks. First systematic applications of finite size scaling to lattice gauge theory were discussed, and the approach to the continuum limit was considered in detail.
What shape is the universe? Is it curved and closed in on itself? Is it expanding? Where is it headed? Could space be wrapped around itself, such that it produces ghost images of faraway galaxies? Such are the questions posed by Jean-Pierre Luminet in The Wraparound Universe, which he then addresses in clear and accessible language. An expert in bl
The book's premise is that the theories taught in management schools are based on unacknowledged philosophical perspectives that are significant not so much for what they explain, but for what they assume. Rarely made explicit, these perspectives cannot be reconciled, with the result that the study of management has been dominated by contradictions and internecine intellectual warfare. However, the ability critically to analyze these diverse perspectives is essential to practicing and aspiring managers if they are to evaluate expert opinion. Moreover, since management is primarily an exercise in communication, managing is impossible in the darkness of an imprecise language, in the absence of moral references, or in the senseless outline of a world without intellectual foundations. Managing is a prime example of applied philosophy.
International Conference in Honor of Jean-Michel Combes on Transport and Spectral Problems in Quantum Mechanics, September 4-6, 2006, Université de Cergy-Pointoise, Cergy-Pointoise, France
International Conference in Honor of Jean-Michel Combes on Transport and Spectral Problems in Quantum Mechanics, September 4-6, 2006, Université de Cergy-Pointoise, Cergy-Pointoise, France
This volume consists of refereed research articles written by some of the speakers at this international conference in honor of the sixty-fifth birthday of Jean-Michel Combes. The topics span modern mathematical physics with contributions on state-of-the-art results in the theory of random operators, including localization for random Schrodinger operators with general probability measures, random magnetic Schrodinger operators, and interacting multiparticle operators with random potentials; transport properties of Schrodinger operators and classical Hamiltonian systems; equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of open quantum systems; semiclassical methods for multiparticle systems and long-time evolution of wave packets; modeling of nanostructures; properties of eigenfunctions for first-order systems and solutions to the Ginzburg-Landau system; effective Hamiltonians for quantum resonances; quantum graphs, including scattering theory and trace formulas; random matrix theory; and quantum information theory. Graduate students and researchers will benefit from the accessibility of these articles and their current bibliographies.
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