Analogies In Physics And Life: A Scientific Autobiography A Scientific Autobiography

Analogies play a fundamental role in science. To understand how and why, at a given moment, a certain analogy was used, one has to know the specific, historical circumstances under which the new idea was developed. This historical background is never presented in scientific articles and quite rarely in books. For the general reader, the undergraduate or graduate student who learns the subject for the first time, but also for the practitioner who looks for inspiration or who wants to understand what his colleague working in another field does, these historical circumstances can be fascinating and useful. This book discusses a series of analogy effects in subatomic physics, the prediction and theory of which the author has contributed to in the last 50 years. These phenomena are presented at a level accessible to the non-specialist, without formulae but with emphasis on the personal and historical background: memoirs of meetings, discussions and correspondence with collaborators and colleagues. As such, besides its scientific aspects, the book constitutes an absorbing witness account of a holocaust survivor who subsequently illegally crossed the Iron Curtain to escape communist persecution. Pt. I. The wandering years (1930-1974). section I. Czernowitz, a city of people and books that no longer exists (1930-1945). ch. 1. Childhood. My countries. My languages. My family. My schools. ch. 2. Politics - premonition of war. Making ends meet. ch. 3. War - the ghetto. section II. Post-war Romania; the isomeric shift; persona non grata (1945-1969). ch. 4. High school and university. Focsani 1945-1949. Bucharest. University. Theoretical physics. ch. 5. The isomeric shift on spectral lines. The discovery of the isomeric shift. Finite size effects in subatomic physics. Natural line width and the limits of optical spectroscopy. Atomic versus nuclear shells, the Pauli exclusion principle and the nuclear shell model. The isomeric shift and the shell structure of nuclei. Some confusion of terminology. The Mössbauer effect. Dubna - 1958. ch. 6. Persona non grata. Applying for emigration and its consequences. The Romanian thaw. Interdiction to leave for the West. Nuclear recoil in muonic atoms. ch. 7. Challenging conventional wisdom in particle physics. Anticipating electro-weak unification? Anticipating supersymmetry? exotic particles - bosonic leptons. Anticipating grand unified theories? exotic particles - strange leptons. The escape. Czechoslovakia. ch. 8. Nazi-communist analogy. section III. Geneva, Bonn; statistical concepts in high-energy physics (1969-1974). ch. 9. CERN. From Vienna to Geneva. CERN. Uproar in the media. Physics at CERN. Strong interaction phenomenology; Regge poles and duality. The Münchhausen principle. ch. 10. Statistical concepts in high-energy physics; phase transitions. section IV. Bonn, Bloomington (Indiana), London; superfluidity of hadronic matter (1970-1974). ch. 11. Bonn. ch. 12. USA. Indiana University. A letter from the White House. The mesonic cloud of the nucleon and superfluidity. ch. 13. London, Imperial College. Trips on the continent. Superfluidity and symmetries. Supefluidity and superconductivity: analogies and follow-ups. Related developments. Superfluidity of hadronic matter in retrospective. Statistical concepts applied to weak interactions -- pt. II. Settling years (1974-present). section V. Marburg; hot spots. ch. 14. Professor at the Philipps University of Marburg. Citizenship. ch. 15. Hot spots in "elementary" particles and in nuclei. Propagation of heat in hadronic matter. Hot spots in nuclei. Meeting Bethe. section VI. Germany's coping with the past; the hydrodynamical analogy. ch. 16. Rewriting history. The German A-bomb. Attempts to justify the past. Ignoring history. Misunderstanding the past. Coping with the communist past of East Germany. ch. 17. From Superfluids to fluids; the hydrodynamical analogy applied to multiparticle production in strong interactions. The Landau model rules the waves in nuclei as well. Equation of state and the speed of sound in hadronic matter. Initial conditions in the Landau model: inelasticity and Lorentz contraction. Local equilibrium - the LESIP meetings. section VII. Einstein in Marburg; solitons; the Auschwitz "experiments". ch. 18. Einstein criticized in a Marburg colloquium. Hagedorn's paper submitted for publication to Physikalische Blätter. Albrecht Unsöld - what follows after that? ch. 19. From hot spots to solitons - on revient toujours au vieil amour. Density solitons. From jupiter to atomic nuclei - solitons in rotating nuclei. ch. 20. Caught up again by the past. The Einstein scandal: follow-ups 1983-1989. The Auschwitz "experiments". section VIII. From optics to particle physics; traveling to the East. ch. 21. Quantum optical analogies and methods in strong interactions high-energy physics. ch. 22. Bose-Einstein correlations. Attempts of falsification. Some pions are more equal than others and some unequal pions are more unequal than others. ch. 23. Order and chaos. From correlation to multiplicity distributions. The time-rapidity analogy. Self-induced transparency in proton-nucleus reactions; a filter for production of coherent pion beams? Superradiance in heavy ion reactions. Superfluorescence and the Centauro effect. Squeezed states. ch. 24. Traveling to the East. section IX. From Germany to France; quark-gluon plasma; a literary intermezzo; reflections (1995-Present). ch. 25. Moving to Paris. ch. 26. France versus Germany, personal impressions. French impressions from a scientist's point of view. Linguistic impressions. Law and order. Social and political differences. The principle of presumed innocence. The Outreau affair. Foreign policy. Anti-semitism. Political correctness in Germany and France. Schools and religion. German-French convergence. section X. Quark-gluon plasma; a literary intermezzo; reflections. ch. 27. Quark-gluon plasma, another old love. Where, actually, does asymptotic freedom begin? From supefluidity to strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma. Anticipating strongly interacting quark matter; the Archimede effect as a model for confinement of quarks and gluons. ch. 28. Evidence for quark-gluon plasma from particle physics. The mystery of the large number of degrees of freedom. Some history. Large transverse momenta and another analogy: leakage. Multiplicity distributions. Global equilibrium: the universality of the hadronization process. Atomic mass dependence of multiplicity. ch. 29. Evidence for quark-gluon plasma from heavy ion reactions. Traces of QGP in low energy heavy ion reaction? An Excursion into cosmology. Solving exactly the equations of hydrodynamics. Outlook. ch. 30. Literary intermezzo: the mini-atom project. ch. 31. Reflections. Breakdown of analogies: mysteries of modern physics. Classical versus quantum physics. Intuition and analogies: three definitions of intuition. Referees, editors, and publishers. Original papers. Review papers. Fiction "This book discusses a series of analogy effects in subatomic physics, the prediction and theory of which the author has contributed to in the last 50 years. These phenomena are presented at a level accessible to the non-specialist, without formulae but with emphasis on the personal and historical background: memoirs of meetings, discussions and correspondence with collaborators and colleagues. As such, besides its scientific aspects, the book constitutes an absorbing witness account of a holocaust survivor who subsequently illegally crossed the Iron Curtain to escape communist persecution."--Jacket Noncommutative geometry is a novel approach which is opening up new possibilities for geometry from a mathematical viewpoint. It is also providing new tools for the investigation of quantum space-time in physics. Recent developments in string theory have supported the idea of quantum spaces, and have strongly stimulated the research in this field. This self-contained volume contains survey lectures and research articles which address these issues and related topics. The book is accessible to both researchers and graduate students beginning to study this subject Richard M. Weiner. Includes Bibliographical References (p.383-394) And Index.