Galileo Unbound A Path Across Life, the Universe and Everything

by Nolte, David D.

• ISBN13: 9780198805847
• ISBN10: 0198805845
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-09-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health 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 spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems.

Galileo published the first modern law of motion, the Law of Fall, that was ideal and simple, laying the foundation upon which Newton built the first theory of dynamics. Early in the twentieth century, geometry became the cause of motion rather than the result when Einstein envisioned the fabric of space-time warped by mass and energy, forcing light rays to bend past the Sun. Possibly more radical was Feynman's dilemma of quantum particles taking all paths at once -- setting the stage for the modern fields of quantum field theory and quantum computing. Yet as concepts of motion have evolved, one thing has remained constant, the need to track ever more complex changes and to capture their essence, to find patterns in the chaos as we try to predict and control our world.

Author Biography

David D. Nolte, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Dept of Physics, Purdue University, USA

David D. Nolte is the Edward M. Purcell Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. His research areas have included experimental high-energy physics, cosmology, semiconductor physics, laser physics and biophysics. He received his BA from Cornell University in 1981, his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, and a post-doctoral appointment at AT&T Bell Labs before joining the faculty at Purdue. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the AAAS. In 2005, he received the Herbert Newby McCoy Award of Purdue University. He is the inventor of the BioCD and Biodynamic Imaging and is the technical founder of two biotech companies using interferometry and holography for diagnostic screening.

Table of Contents

1: Flight of the Swallows

Introduction to motion and trajectories

2: A New Scientist

Galileo's beginnings

3: Galileo's Trajectory

Publication of Two New Sciences

4: On the Shoulders of Giants

100 years from Newton to Lagrange

5: Geometry on my Mind

The beginnings of abstract spaces

6: The Tangled Tale of Phase Space

The geometry of dynamics

7: The Lens of Gravity

From Einstein to Wheeler

The Golden Age of General Relativity

8: On the Quantum Footpath

Quantum dynamics

9: From Butterflies to Hurricanes

Chaos theory

10: Darwin in the Clockworks

Evolutionary dynamics

11: The Measure of Life

Population dynamics