Each of this book's 32 essays discusses a chosen topic, at a level that is generally within that of a four-year degree course in Physics. The essays supplement (indeed sometimes correct) treatments usually given, or supplies reasoning that tends to fall through the cracks. The author uses his life long experience of tutorial teaching at Oxford to know what topics often need such discussion, for clarification, or for avoidance of common confusions. The book contains accounts of even-standard topics, accounts that offer an unusual emphasis, or a fresh insight, or more than customary rigour, or a cross-link to apparently unrelated material. The student (and their teachers) who really wants to understand physics will find this book indispensable. Often the outcome of tutorial discussion has been an understanding that lies a little to the side of what is presented in standard texts. Such understanding is presented here in the essays. The topics covered are diverse and have something useful to say across most areas of a physics degree.

The first few months of the universe, the MIT bag model, and grand unified theories are among the chief concerns of these essays and articles honoring MIT theoretical physicist Francis Low. The book opens with a cluster of dedicatory pieces by Murray Gell-Mann, Marvin L. Goldberger, Jeremy Bernstein, and Val L. Fitch. The remainder of the book consists of twenty technical essays by a small galaxy of distinguished scientists: Steven Weinberg; Kenneth A. Johnson; Sidney Drell; Geoffrey F. Chew; Mitchell J. Feigenbaum; Victor F. Weisskopf; Herman Feshbach; Carleton DeTar; John F. Donoghue; D. Danckaert, P. DeCausmaecker, R. Gastmans, W. Troost, and Tai Tsun Wu, writing jointly; Roman Jackiw; William I. Weisberger; Adrian Patrascioiu; Gino Segre; So-Young Î Asim Yildiz; Jogesh C. Pati, Abdus Salam, and J. Strathdee, in another collaborative contribution; and the three editors. Among the other topics are &"Why the Renormalization Group Is a Good Thing&" - the physics of asymptotic freedom - the topological bootstrap &"The Fixed Point of Classical Dynamical Evolution and Chaos&" - compound bags and hadron-hadron interactions - &"Gauge Invariance and Mass&" - Gribov ambiguities - &"The Simple Facts about the Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe&" - preons and supersymmetry - some speculations on the origin of the matter, energy, and entropy of the universe - the Chew-Low theory and the quark model - &"From Gell-Mann-Low to Unification.&" The editors are all affiliated with the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT.

Mark Wilson explores our strategies for understanding the world. We frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must use alternative thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout ways; and philosophy must find better descriptive tools to reflect this.

In Basic Structures of Reality, Colin McGinn deals with questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind from the vantage point of physics. Combining general philosophy with physics, he covers such topics as the definition of matter, the nature of space, motion, gravity, electromagnetic fields, the character of physical knowledge, and consciousness and meaning. Throughout, McGinn maintains an historical perspective and seeks to determine how much we really know of the world described by physics. He defends a version of "structuralism": the thesis that our knowledge is partial and merely abstract, leaving a large epistemological gap at the center of physics. McGinn then connects this element of mystery to parallel mysteries in relation to the mind. Consciousness emerges as just one more mystery of physics. A theory of matter and space is developed, according to which the impenetrability of matter is explained as the deletion of volumes of space. McGinn proposes a philosophy of science that distinguishes physics from both psychology and biology, explores the ontology of energy, and considers the relevance of physics to seemingly remote fields such as the theory of meaning. In the form of a series of aphorisms, the author presents a metaphysical system that takes laws of nature as fundamental. With its broad scope and deep study of the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophy of physics, this book is not intended primarily for specialists, but for the general philosophical reader interested in how physics and philosophy intersect.

Essays in Theoretical Physics: In Honour of Dirk ter Haar is devoted to Dirk ter Haar, detailing the breadth of Dirk's interest in physics. The book contains 15 chapters, with some chapters elucidating stellar dynamics with non-classical integrals; a mean-field treatment of charge density waves in a strong magnetic field; electrodynamics of two-dimensional (surface) superconductors; and the Bethe Ansatz and exact solutions of the Kondo and related magnetic impurity models. Other chapters focus on probing the interiors of neutron stars; macroscopic quantum tunneling; unitary transformation methods in intense fields atomic physics; stochastic parameters in quantum mechanical systems; and correlation effects in atomic diffusion. The book also describes the densely packed magnetic insulator glasses, nuclei in dense matter, solar neutrinos, comets, cosmic rays, the Gibbs paradox, and wave packets.

Space, Time, Matter, and Form collects ten of David Bostock's essays on themes from Aristotle's Physics, four of them published here for the first time. The first five papers look at issues raised in the first two books of the Physics, centred on notions of matter and form, and the idea of substance as what persists through change. They also range over other of Aristotle's scientific works, such as his biology and psychology and the account of change in his De Generatione et Corruptione. The volume's remaining essays examine themes in later books of the Physics, including infinity, place, time, and continuity. Bostock argues that Aristotle's views on these topics are of real interest in their own right, independent of his notions of substance, form, and matter; they also raise some pressing problems of interpretation, which these essays seek to resolve.

To celebrate Adolf Griinbaum's sixtieth birthday by offering him this bouquet of essays written for this purpose was the happy task of an autonomous Editorial Committee: Wesley C. Salmon, Nicholas Rescher, Larry Laudan, Carl G. Hempel, and Robert S. Cohen. To present the book within the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science was altogether fitting and natural, for Griinbaum has' been friend and supporter of philosophy of science at Boston University for twenty-five years, and unofficial godfather to the Boston Colloquium. To regret that we could not include contributions from all his well-wishers, critical admirers and admiring critics, is only to regret that we did not have an encyclopedic space at the committee's disposal. But we, and all involved in this book, speak for all the others in the philo sophical, scientific, and personal worlds of Adolf Griinbaum in greeting him on May 15, 1983, with our wishes for his health, his scholarship, his happiness. Our gratitude is due to Carolyn Fawcett for her care and accuracy in editing this book, and for the preparation of the Index; and to Elizabeth McMunn for her help again and again, especially in preparation of the Bibliography of the Published Writings of Adolf Griinbaum; and to Thelma Griinbaum for encouraging, planning, and cheering. Boston University R.S.C. Center for the Philosophy and History of Science M.W.W.

The Physics is one of Aristotle's masterpieces--a work of extraordinary intellectual power which has had a profound influence on the development of metaphysics and the philosophy of science, as well as on the development of physics itself. This collection of ten new essays by leading Aristotelian scholars examines a wide range of issues in the Physics and related works, including method, causation and explanation, chance, teleology, the infinite, the nature of time, the critique of atomism, the role of mathematics in Aristotle's physics, and the concept of self-motion. The essays offer fresh approaches to Aristotle's work in these areas, and important new interpretations of his thought.

The next wave of science writing is here. Editor Max Brockman has talent-spotted 19 young scientists, working on leading-edge research across a wide range of fields. Nearly half of them are women, and all of them are great communicators: their passion and excitement makes this collection a wonderfully invigorating read. We hear from an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the solar system (and the universe); from the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory about why we keep making the same mistakes; from a Cambridge lab about DNA synthesis; from the Tanzanian savannah about what lies behind attractiveness; we hear about how to breed plants to withstand disease, about ways to extract significance from the Interne's enormous datasets, about oceanography, neuroscience, microbiology, and evolutionary psychology.