Find a Hotter Place! : A History of Nuclear Astrophysics.
Title:
Find a Hotter Place! : A History of Nuclear Astrophysics.
Author:
Celnikier, Ludwik Marian.
ISBN:
9789812773968
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (210 pages)
Series:
World Scientific Series in Astronomy and Astrophysics ; v.11
World Scientific Series in Astronomy and Astrophysics
Contents:
Contents -- Preface -- 1 The Vacuum the Universe and Things That Go "Pop" in the Night -- 1.1 The discovery of the vacuum -- 1.2 The rise and fall of the vacuum -- 1.3 The vacuum reborn -- 1.4 The transmutation of the vacuum -- 1.5 The tribulations of a simple oscillator -- 1.6 The aether nouveau regime -- 1.7 The unbearable heaviness of the vacuum -- 2 Eleven Quadrillion Six Hundred Thousand Billion Tonnes of Coal per Second -- 2.1 The eternal triangle -- 2.2 Cracks in the celestial sphere -- 2.3 The rebirth of atoms -- 3 Fin de Siecle Fin du Monde -- 3.1 The atoms of chemistry -- 3.2 The atoms of heat -- 3.3 Chemical analysis without chemistry -- 3.4 Temperature measurement without a thermometer -- 3.5 A bagful of loose ends -- 3.6 Thermodynamics: the 19th century astronomer's best friend -- 3.7 The death of the Universe -- 4 A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma -- 4.1 The mystery -- 4.2 The enigma -- 5 The Rise of the New Physics -- 5.1 Almost but not quite the alchemist's dream -- 5.2 Light magic -- 5.3 To catch a beam of light -- 5.4 A locked room mystery . . . solved -- 5.5 Of what is the Universe made? -- 6 The Chicken and the Egg -- 6.1 Balancing acts -- 6.2 Neutrons to the rescue? -- 6.3 Cosmology to the rescue? -- 7 The Best of Times and the Worst of Times -- 7.1 Theories to end all theories -- 7.2 Thermonuclear leggo -- 7.3 And yet they shine -- 7.4 The inflationary economy of stars -- 7.5 To see the World in a grain of sand -- 8 A Tale of Two Theories and One Dogma -- 8.1 Fiat lux? -- 8.2 Continuous creation? -- 8.3 Cosmic cooking pots -- 8.4 Death of a travelling dogma -- 9 Relics of a Bygone Age -- 9.1 One man's noise is another man's Nobel prize -- 9.2 Clues about the distant past -- 9.3 Genesis according to Gamow -- 10 Cosmic Ash.
10.1 "The fault dear Enrico is not in our stars but in your neutrinos" -- 10.2 Things that go bump in the night -- 10.3 "I come not to bury Caesar but to praise him" -- 10.4 Most of our Universe is missing -- Epilogue - the Mysterious Universe -- A Personal Chronology of 20th Century Astrosphysics -- Bibliography -- Index.
Abstract:
Find a hotter place! is the insightful story of the tortured path that led to our current understanding of how the elements in the Universe came to be. This is a story which began in Greek Antiquity, with the first musings on the nature of matter and the void, and continues today with ever more refined analyses involving virtually every aspect of 20th century physics, astronomy, cosmology and information technology. Identifying the source of stellar energy, probing the earliest instants of the Universe, and discovering of how and where each element was made are some of the outstanding success stories of the 20th century, but have received little attention beyond the specialized literature.The year 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the key papers on stellar nucleosynthesis, universally referred to as the B2FH paper. This book is a timely survey of how a new discipline - nuclear astrophysics - was born, and how it has matured. Almost completely non-technical, the book remains scientifically rigorous, and thereby fills an important gap.Science is not a linear process, as the ill-named "scientific method" might suggest to the unwary. The author emphasizes the meanders, the dead ends and the obsessive dogmas which have guided researchers through the 20th century. He also makes it clear that our understanding of where the elements come from has come through discoveries in diverse, not necessarily related, disciplines.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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Electronic Access:
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