The battle between Mer and Atlantis begins in the fifth volume of this Eisner Award-nominated series! While Mermin the merman is at his father's side, the rest of his friends and family are scattered around the battlefield, trying to help in any way they can. Except for Pete, who's about to stage a jailbreak out of Atlantis with a team of Mer-prisoners! Will they make it to Mer in time to stop the war? The thrilling conclusion to the Mermin series!

The battle between Mer and Atlantis begins! And while Mermin is at his father's side, the rest of his friends and family are scattered around the battlefield, trying to help in any way they can. Except for Pete, who's about to stage a jailbreak out of Atlantis with a team of Mer-prisoners! Will they make it to Mer in time to stop the war?

The first book in Joey Weiser's Eisner Award-nominated series is now in paperback! Mermin is just your average Merman from the underwater kingdom of Mer, and all he wants is to have fun adventures on land with his new human friends. But with the whole ocean out looking for him, it's going to be harder than he thought!

It's all-out war between Mer and Atlantis! At least that's what Mermin's father, King Merus, declares after Pete is taken by Atlanteans. And that's not all—Mermin will be fighting side-by-side with his father, so it's time for some intense training! Meanwhile, deep in the Kingdom of Atlantis, Pete meets other children without homes who, of course, cannot fathom that he is from the surface. His stories of Mer attract the attention of another child, who offers to introduce Pete to her “friends"—who he never expected to see in Atlantis!

No one knows much about Mer, the underwater kingdom where Mermin the merman was born, but due to a rising conflict with the people of Atlantis, Mermin is needed back home immediately. Which means that his human friends get to accompany him and see all the aquatic wonders of Mer. But once again, Mermin is tight-lipped about his past – even when it’s swimming right in front of him. And there are enemies lurking in the seedier depths of Mer, who’ve got their sights set not only on Mermin, but on Pete and his friends!

This new anthology emphasizes Victorian nonfiction prose and verse with a generous, fresh selection of pieces from authors within the canon as well as outside of it.

In It's About Time, N. David Mermin asserts that relativity ought to be an important part of everyone's education--after all, it is largely about time, a subject with which all are familiar. The book reveals that some of our most intuitive notions about time are shockingly wrong, and that the real nature of time discovered by Einstein can be rigorously explained without advanced mathematics. This readable exposition of the nature of time as addressed in Einstein's theory of relativity is accessible to anyone who remembers a little high school algebra and elementary plane geometry. The book evolved as Mermin taught the subject to diverse groups of undergraduates at Cornell University, none of them science majors, over three and a half decades. Mermin's approach is imaginative, yet accurate and complete. Clear, lively, and informal, the book will appeal to intellectually curious readers of all kinds, including even professional physicists, who will be intrigued by its highly original approach.

The First Amendment ideal of an independent press allows American journalists to present critical perspectives on government policies and actions; but are the media independent of government in practice? Here Jonathan Mermin demonstrates that when it comes to military intervention, journalists over the past two decades have let the government itself set the terms and boundaries of foreign policy debate in the news. Analyzing newspaper and television reporting of U.S. intervention in Grenada and Panama, the bombing of Libya, the Gulf War, and U.S. actions in Somalia and Haiti, he shows that if there is no debate over U.S. policy in Washington, there is no debate in the news. Journalists often criticize the execution of U.S. policy, but fail to offer critical analysis of the policy itself if actors inside the government have not challenged it. Mermin ultimately offers concrete evidence of outside-Washington perspectives that could have been reported in specific cases, and explains how the press could increase its independence of Washington in reporting foreign policy news. The author constructs a new framework for thinking about press-government relations, based on the observation that bipartisan support for U.S. intervention is often best interpreted as a political phenomenon, not as evidence of the wisdom of U.S. policy. Journalists should remember that domestic political factors often influence foreign policy debate. The media, Mermin argues, should not see a Washington consensus as justification for downplaying critical perspectives.

In the 1990's it was realized that quantum physics has some spectacular applications in computer science. This book is a concise introduction to quantum computation, developing the basic elements of this new branch of computational theory without assuming any background in physics. It begins with an introduction to the quantum theory from a computer-science perspective. It illustrates the quantum-computational approach with several elementary examples of quantum speed-up, before moving to the major applications: Shor's factoring algorithm, Grover's search algorithm, and quantum error correction. The book is intended primarily for computer scientists who know nothing about quantum theory, but will also be of interest to physicists who want to learn the theory of quantum computation, and philosophers of science interested in quantum foundational issues. It evolved during six years of teaching the subject to undergraduates and graduate students in computer science, mathematics, engineering, and physics, at Cornell University.

Now updated—the leading single-volume introduction to solid state and soft condensed matter physics This Second Edition of the unified treatment of condensed matter physics keeps the best of the first, providing a basic foundation in the subject while addressing many recent discoveries. Comprehensive and authoritative, it consolidates the critical advances of the past fifty years, bringing together an exciting collection of new and classic topics, dozens of new figures, and new experimental data. This updated edition offers a thorough treatment of such basic topics as band theory, transport theory, and semiconductor physics, as well as more modern areas such as quasicrystals, dynamics of phase separation, granular materials, quantum dots, Berry phases, the quantum Hall effect, and Luttinger liquids. In addition to careful study of electron dynamics, electronics, and superconductivity, there is much material drawn from soft matter physics, including liquid crystals, polymers, and fluid dynamics. Provides frequent comparison of theory and experiment, both when they agree and when problems are still unsolved Incorporates many new images from experiments Provides end-of-chapter problems including computational exercises Includes more than fifty data tables and a detailed forty-page index Offers a solutions manual for instructors Featuring 370 figures and more than 1,000 recent and historically significant references, this volume serves as a valuable resource for graduate and undergraduate students in physics, physics professionals, engineers, applied mathematicians, materials scientists, and researchers in other fields who want to learn about the quantum and atomic underpinnings of materials science from a modern point of view.