'The Majorana Case is beautifully written, with a pleasant style, and concatenates a great deal of material. A text that could only be written by those who know the life and work of Ettore Majorana very well, as Prof Recami. The book traces the extraordinary life of Ettore Majorana — through his letters, documents and several testimonies from his friends and family members. What makes it more fascinating is that the author presented it also as a detective-story, by exploring his mysterious disappearance at young age. The personal testimonies also give to the book a welcome surplus. The Majorana Case, therefore, is both a pleasant biography and a mystery book.'Contemporary PhysicsEttore Majorana was born in the Sicilian city of Catania. He joined Enrico Fermi's 'Via Panisperna boys' at an early age and was part of the team who first discovered the slow neutrons (the research that would lead to the nuclear reactor and eventually, the atomic bomb). Enrico Fermi considered him one of brightest scientists, comparable to Galileo and Newton.On March 25, 1938, Ettore Majorana mysteriously disappeared at 31. When the author moved to the University of Catania, Sicily, from Milan University back in 1968, he soon discovered important documents pertaining to Majorana's life and works. Together with his own investigative materials and full cooperation from Majorana's family members, he published a book on his disappearance in Italian (after having helped the famous Italian writer, Leonardo Sciascia, to write down his known Essay, by supplying him with copy of some of the discovered documents). Recami's book was entitled Il Caso Majorana — Epistolario, Documenti, Testimonianze and when it first appeared in Italy, it drew interest from all the major newspapers, publications and TVs & broadcast media.Even after his disappearance, Ettore Majorana's name appeared in many areas of frontier physics research, ranging from elementary particle physics to applied condensed matter, to mathematical physics, and more. His long lasting contributions is a testimony of his brilliance and farsightedness and has continued to draw interest from scientists not only in Italy, but from all over world until today.An English version of the original is very appropriate at this juncture, when more and more scholars in the world are getting convinced that he was really a genius 'like Galileo and Newton'. This book traces the extraordinary life of Ettore Majorana — through his letters, documents and testimonies from his friends and family members. What makes this book more fascinating (as a detective-story too) is his mysterious disappearance at young age. This book, therefore, is both a biography and a mystery book.

The fascinating story of science in pursuit of the ghostly, ubiquitous subatomic particle—the neutrino. Isaac Asimov is said to have observed of the neutrino: “The only reason scientists suggested its existence was their need to make calculations come out even. And yet the nothing-particle was not a nothing at all.” In fact, as one of the most enigmatic and most populous particles in the universe—about 100 trillion are flying through you every second—the neutrino may hold the clues to some of our deepest cosmic mysteries. In Ghost Particle, Alan Chodos and James Riordon recount the dramatic history of the neutrino—from the initial suggestion that the particle was merely a desperate solution to a puzzle that threatened to undermine the burgeoning field of particle physics to its modern role in illuminating the universe via neutrino telescopes. Alan Chodos and James Riordon are deft and engaging guides as they conduct readers through the experiences of intrepid scientists and the challenges they faced, and continue to face, in their search for the ghostly neutrino. Along the way, the authors provide expert insight into the significance of neutrino research from the particle’s first, momentous discovery to recent, revolutionary advances in neutrino detection and astronomy. Chodos and Riordon describe how neutrinos may soon provide clues to some of the biggest questions we encounter today, including how to understand the dark matter that makes up most of the universe—and why anything exists in the universe at all.

In this XVII Course of the International School of Cosmology and Gravitation devoted to "ADVANCES IN THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN QUANTUM AND GRAVITY PHYSICS" we have considered different aspects of the influence of gravity on quantum systems. In order to achieve this aim, in many lectures, seminars and discussions we have strengthened the interplay between gravity and quantum systems starting from the situation in the early universe based on astrophysical observations, up to the earthly based experiments with atom interferometry for probing the structure of space-time. Thus we have had timely lectures on the quantum field and horizon of a black hole including reviews of the problem of black holes thermodynamics and entropy, quantum information, quantum black holes, quantum evaporation and Hawking radiation, recent advances in stockastic gravity. We have also discussed quantum fluctuations in inflationary universe, quantum effects and reheating after inflation, and superplanckian energies in Hawking radiation. In this regard the subject of spinors in purely affine space-time and Dirac matter according to Weyl in the generalized theory of gravitation were developed . The dualism between space-time and matter has been deeply analyzed in order to see why, for general relativity, this is an obstacle for quantization of the theory. Also canonical Gravity and Mach's principle, torsion and curvature as commutator for Quantum Gravity and Dirac Geometry of real space-time were analysed, together with the problem of 5-Dimensional Projective Unified Field theory and Multidimensional Gravity and Cosmology.

Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander explores the overlooked position of the bystander in the Nuclear Age by focusing on the Italian situation as a paradigmatic case. Host to hundreds of American atomic weapons while lacking a nuclear arsenal of its own, Italy's status was an ambiguous one: that of an unwilling—and in many ways passive—accomplice. Inspired by Seamus Heaney's dictum that "there is no such thing as innocent by-standing," the book frames Italy's fraught mix of implication and powerlessness not only as a geopolitical question, but as a way to rethink the role of the sidelined intellectual in the face of mass extinction. Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age includes discrete chapters on the major Italian intellectuals of the time: Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Leonardo Sciascia. Conscious of their own political marginalization, these authors address the atomic question through a wide range of experimental forms, approaching the nearly unthinkable theme in allusive and oblique ways. Often dismissed as disengaged, inconsistent, or merely playful, these works demand instead a political reading capable of recognizing their confrontation with the paradoxes of the nuclear age.

String theory is one of the most exciting and challenging areas of modern theoretical physics. This book guides the reader from the basics of string theory to recent developments. It introduces the basics of perturbative string theory, world-sheet supersymmetry, space-time supersymmetry, conformal field theory and the heterotic string, before describing modern developments, including D-branes, string dualities and M-theory. It then covers string geometry and flux compactifications, applications to cosmology and particle physics, black holes in string theory and M-theory, and the microscopic origin of black-hole entropy. It concludes with Matrix theory, the AdS/CFT duality and its generalizations. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in modern string theory, and will make an excellent textbook for a one-year course on string theory. It contains over 120 exercises with solutions, and over 200 homework problems with solutions available on a password protected website for lecturers at www.cambridge.org/9780521860697.

This journey into the past probes nearly 100 mysteries, offering new approaches to some of the world's most puzzling questions.

This compelling account of the author's experience with a chronic pain disorder and subsequent interaction with the American health care system goes to the heart of the workings of power and culture in the biomedical domain. It is a medical whodunit full of mysterious misdiagnosis, subtle power plays, and shrewd detective work. Setting a new standard for the practice of autoethnography, Susan Greenhalgh presents a case study of her intense encounter with an enthusiastic young specialist who, through creative interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for a newly emerging chronic disease, became convinced she had a painful, essentially untreatable, lifelong muscle condition called fibromyalgia. Greenhalgh traces the ruinous effects of this diagnosis on her inner world, bodily health, and overall well-being. Under the Medical Gaze serves as a powerful illustration of medicine's power to create and inflict suffering, to define disease and the self, and to manage relationships and lives. Greenhalgh ultimately learns that she had been misdiagnosed and begins the long process of undoing the physical and emotional damage brought about by her nearly catastrophic treatment. In considering how things could go so awry, she embarks on a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical discourse and practice in the United States. She develops fresh arguments about the power of medicine to medicalize our selves and lives, the seductions of medical science, and the deep, psychologically rooted difficulties women patients face in interactions with male physicians. In the end, Under the Medical Gaze goes beyond the critique of biomedicine to probe the social roots of chronic pain and therapeutic alternatives that rely on neither the body-cure of conventional medicine nor the mind-cure of some alternative medicines, but rather a broader set of strategies that address the sociopolitical sources of pain.

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.