The army blamed “human error†and a sordid love triangle. Though overshadowed by Three Mile Island, SL-1 remains the only fatal nuclear reactor incident in American history. Todd Tucker, who first heard the rumors about the Idaho Falls explosion as a trainee in the navy’s nuclear program, suspected there was more to the accident than rumors suggested. Poring over hundreds of pages of primary sources and interviewing survivors revealed that the army and its contractors had deliberately obscured the true cause of the accident, which resulted from poor engineering as much as uncontrolled passions. The National Reactor Testing Station, where the meltdown occurred, had been a proving ground where engineers, generals, and admirals attempted to realize the Atomic Age dream of unlimited power—amid the frantic race for nuclear power between the army, the navy, and the air force. The fruit of those ambitious plans included that of the nation’s unofficial nuclear patriarch, Admiral Rickover, whose “true submarine,†the USS Nautilus, would forever change naval warfare. But with the meltdown in Idaho came the end of the army’s program and the beginning of the navy’s long-standing monopoly on military nuclear power. Atomic America provides a fast-paced narrative history, advocating caution and accountability in harnessing nuclear energy.

    [...] Built from the ground up on a wealth of research into how readers learn physics and how they can be taught more effectively, College Physics leads readers to more proficient and long-lasting problem-solving skills, a deeper and better-connected understanding of the concepts, and a broader picture of the relevance of physics to the world around them. Force and Motion: Concepts of Motion and Mathematical Background, Motion in One Dimension, Vectors and Motion in Two Dimensions, Forces and Newton's Laws of Motion, Applying Newton's Laws, Circular Motion, Orbits, and Gravity, Rotational Motion, Equilibrium and Elasticity. Conservation Laws: Momentum, Energy and Work, Using Energy. Properties of Matter: Thermal Properties Of Matter, Fluids. Oscillations and Waves: Oscillations, Traveling Waves and Sound, Superposition and Standing Waves. For all readers interested in algebra-based college physics.

    No graduate student of quantum theory should leave it unread"--W.C Schieve, University of Texas

    John Taylor has brought to his new book, Classical Mechanics, all of the clarity and insight that made his introduction to Error Analysis a best-selling text.

    With a cruel council leading the only safe city of it's kind in this world, she will have to prove her worth to stay as well as help this city as it is the target for two evil wizards who seek to destroy the city and it's ruling council.Will the council's mighty army of guardians be enough to repel the onslaught of the two wizards' wrath?To help the city and also get back home, she will need the help of the greatest mathematician of all time, Archimedes. In a world where math is magic, Alex wishes she paid more attention in math class.

    It remains an elementary and non-mathematical introduction to molecular spectroscopy that emphasizes the overall unity of the subject and offers a pictorial perception rather than a mathematical description of the principles of spectroscopy.

    In elegant, witty three-page summations, Dr. Trefil "makes sense of science for the rest of us" (Washington Post).

    In ten short chapters of lyrical prose—each one an ode to a breathtaking realm of discovery—Stefan Klein uses everyday objects and events as a springboard to meditate on the beauty of the underlying science. Klein sees in a single rose the sublime interdependence of all life; a day of stormy weather points to the world’s unpredictability; a marble conjures the birth of the cosmos. As he contemplates the deepest mysteries—the nature of reality, dark matter, humanity’s place among the galaxies, and more—Klein encourages us to fall in love with the universe the way scientists do: with a grasp of the key ideas and theories of twenty-first-century physics that bring to life the wonders of, really, everything. You won’t look at a rose—or at our world—the same way again.

    It is also one of the most difficult, literally and figuratively, to grasp. Antimatter explores this strange mirror world, where particles have identical yet opposite properties to those that make up the familiar matter we encounter everyday, where left becomes right, positive becomes negative, and where--should matter and antimatter meet--the resulting flash of blinding energy would make even thermonuclear explosions look feeble by comparison. Antimatter is an idea long beloved of science-fiction writers--but here, renowned science writer Frank Close shows that the reality of antimatter is even more intriguing than the fiction. We know that at one time antimatter and matter existed in perfect counterbalance, and that antimatter then perpetrated a vanishing act on a cosmic scale that remains one of the great mysteries of the universe. Today, antimatter does not exist normally, at least on Earth, but we know that it is real, as scientists are now able to make small pieces of it in particle accelerators, such as that at CERN in Geneva. Looking at the remarkable prediction of antimatter and how it grew from the meeting point of relativity and quantum theory in the early 20th century, at the discovery of the first antiparticles, at cosmic rays, annihilation, antimatter bombs, and antiworlds, Close separates the facts from the fiction about antimatter, and explains how its existence can give us profound clues about the origins and structure of the universe. For all those wishing to take a closer look at the flip side of the visible world, this lucidly written book shines a bright light into a truly strange realm. "Beautifully written... This book will inspire a sense of awe in even the most seasoned of physics readers." --Amanda Gefter, New Scientist "This is a must read for fans of science and science fiction alike." --John Gribbin, www.bbcfocusmagazine.com

    Written by one of the world's leading experimental cosmologists, this short but deeply insightful book describes what scientists are revealing through precise measurements of the faint thermal afterglow of the Big Bang--known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB--and how their findings are transforming our view of the cosmos.Blending the latest findings in cosmology with essential concepts from physics, Lyman Page first helps readers to grasp the sheer enormity of the universe, explaining how to understand the history of its formation and evolution in space and time. Then he sheds light on how spatial variations in the CMB formed, how they reveal the age, size, and geometry of the universe, and how they offer a blueprint for the formation of cosmic structure.Not only does Page explain current observations and measurements, he describes how they can be woven together into a unified picture to form the Standard Model of Cosmology. Yet much remains unknown, and this incisive book also describes the search for ever deeper knowledge at the field's frontiers--from quests to understand the nature of neutrinos and dark energy to investigations into the physics of the very early universe.

    We start counting our fingers and toes and end up balancing checkbooks and calculating risk. So powerful is the appeal of numbers that many people ascribe to them a mystical significance. Other numbers go beyond the supernatural, working to explain our universe and how it behaves. In Cosmic Numbers, mathematics professor James D. Stein traces the discovery, evolution, and interrelationships of the numbers that define our world. Everyone knows about the speed of light and absolute zero, but numbers like Boltzmann’s constant and the Chandrasekhar limit are not as well known, and they do far more than one might imagine: They tell us how this world began and what the future holds. Much more than a gee-whiz collection of facts and figures, Cosmic Numbers illuminates why particular numbers are so important—both to the scientist and to the rest of us.

    Highly recommended for graduate-level libraries.' ChoiceThis highly successful text, which first appeared in the year 1972 and has continued to be popular ever since, has now been brought up-to-date by incorporating the remarkable developments in the field of 'phase transitions and critical phenomena' that took place over the intervening years. This has been done by adding three new chapters (comprising over 150 pages and containing over 60 homework problems) which should enhance the usefulness of the book for both students and instructors. We trust that this classic text, which has been widely acclaimed for its clean derivations and clear explanations, will continue to provide further generations of students a sound training in the methods of statistical physics.

    But when Feynman said he didn’t understand quantum mechanics, he didn’t mean that he couldn’t do it – he meant that’s all he could do. He didn’t understand what the maths was saying: what quantum mechanics tells us about reality.Over the past decade or so, the enigma of quantum mechanics has come into sharper focus. We now realise that quantum mechanics is less about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information: about what can be known and how.This is more disturbing than our bad habit of describing the quantum world as ‘things behaving weirdly’ suggests. It calls into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and knowledge itself.The quantum world isn’t a different world: it is our world, and if anything deserves to be called ‘weird’, it’s us. This exhilarating book is about what quantum maths really means – and what it doesn’t mean.

    Free of ramp-up and ancillary material, Physics Essentials For Dummies contains content focused on key topics only. It provides discrete explanations of critical concepts taught in an introductory physics course, from force and motion to momentum and kinetics. This guide is also a perfect reference for parents who need to review critical physics concepts as they help high school students with homework assignments, as well as for adult learners headed back to the classroom who just need a refresher of the core concepts. The Essentials For Dummies SeriesDummies is proud to present our new series, The Essentials For Dummies. Now students who are prepping for exams, preparing to study new material, or who just need a refresher can have a concise, easy-to-understand review guide that covers an entire course by concentrating solely on the most important concepts. From algebra and chemistry to grammar and Spanish, our expert authors focus on the skills students most need to succeed in a subject.

    From the minds of the world's leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the pinnacle of wonderment and to the very depths of human despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed weapons with the capacity to destroy our reality, whilst at the same time denying us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend it.Almost everything we think we know about the nature of our world comes from one theory of physics. This theory was discovered and refined in the first thirty years of the twentieth century and went on to become quite simply the most successful theory of physics ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the twenty-first century technology that we have learned to take for granted. But its success has come at a price, for it has at the same time completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at the level of its most fundamental constituents.Rejecting the fundamental elements of uncertainty and chance implied by quantum theory, Albert Einstein once famously declared that 'God does not play dice'. Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it. The charismatic American physicist Richard Feynman went further: he claimed that nobody understands it.This is quantum theory, and this book tells its story.Jim Baggott presents a celebration of this wonderful yet wholly disconcerting theory, with a history told in forty episodes -- significant moments of truth or turning points in the theory's development. From its birth in the porcelain furnaces used to study black body radiation in 1900, to the promise of stimulating new quantum phenomena to be revealed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider over a hundred years later, this is the extraordinary story of the quantum world.Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.