This book delves into the foundations of physics and discusses our capability of describing and interpreting the universe, covering areas which border history and philosophy, such as: cosmology and origin myths, late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the universe after Copernicus, the beginnings of scientific Cosmology, relativity and space-time, the expanding universe, interweaving general relativity and quantum mechanics, missing mass, cosmic radiation, accelerated expansion, cosmological constant and dark energy. The discussion of these topics takes place in a didactic way, combining intuition and rigor, and manifesting the intent to bring out what is still not clear or remains controversial: open problems and unsolved puzzles that inevitably intertwine physics, astrophysics and philosophy.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
'Angelo Tartaglia, in this volume, writes an essay on general relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as their applications in cosmology, which combines intuition with rigor, which appeals to logic and math-ematics, and which presents the many achievements alongside the many open problems. It is work that was prepared with all possible readers in mind, i.e., not aimed at initiates, scientists or professionals. At each step, Tartaglia reasons primarily to convince himself, and in this journey he is accompanied by the reader, who can no longer limit himself to the feeling of having understood, but must make the same effort as the editor, accepting for example the fact that some concepts of physics cannot be fully captured without the support of at least a minimal mathematical language. The result is a portrait of great depth of the hitherto unsound dichoto-mies of fundamental physics, starting from the most fundamental one of all, the incommunicability between the discrete world of quantum and the continuous world of Einsteinian space-time. Some of the most intriguing aspects of modern cosmology are there-fore explored: from the cosmological constant to the era of inflation; from the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum to the hypothesis (di-rectly investigated by the author in recent years) of an elastic space-time; from the varied hypotheses on the existence of multiverses to string and membrane theories; and from the wave function of the Uni-verse to its Lagrangian and to quintessence. It is not a first-class trip taken in the company of Tartaglia, but a trek on the most rugged paths of modern physics.'Andrea PossentiFormer Director of the Cagliari Astronomical Observatory, Italy
Auflage
Sprache
Verlagsort
Newcastle upon Tyne
Großbritannien
Zielgruppe
Editions-Typ
Produkt-Hinweis
Maße
Höhe: 212 mm
Breite: 148 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-5275-1956-5 (9781527519565)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Angelo Tartaglia is a former professor of the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy. He attained a degree in nuclear engineering at the Politecnico, and a degree in physics at the University of Turin. He is now a member of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). He taught basic physics in the engineering faculty and relativity and tensor calculus for the PhD students of physics at the Politec-nico. His main research topics are space-time structure and cosmology, gravito-magnetic phenomena, and relativistic global positioning systems. He is a member of the collaboration implementing the Galileo for Science (G4S) project of the Italian Space Agency (ASI). Angelo has also dealt with problems connected with complex systems and the compatibility between the present human way of producing and consuming and the global equilibrium of the Earth's ecosphere. Tartaglia is the author of more than 150 scientific publications.
