The Discovery Of Dynamics

"Originally published as Absolute or relative motion? volume 1, The discovery of dynamics, Cambridge University Press, 1989".

Ever since Newton created dynamics, there has been controversy about its foundations. Are space and time absolute? Do they form a rigid but invisible framework and container of the universe? Or are space, time, and motion relative? If so, does Newton's 'framework' arise through the influence of the universe at large, as Ernst Mach suggested? Einstein's aim when creating his general theory of relativity was to demonstrate this and thereby implement 'Mach's Principle'. However, it is widely believed that he achieved only partial success. This question of whether motion is absolute or relative has been a central issues in philosophy; the nature of time has perennial interest. Current attempts to create a quantum description of the whole universe keep these issues at the cutting edge of modern research. Written by the world's leading expert on Mach's Principle, The Discovery of Dynamics is a highly original account of the development of notions about space, time, and motion. Widely praised in its hardback version, it is one of the fullest and most readable accounts of the astronomical studies that culminated in Kepler's laws of planetary motion and of the creation of dynamics by Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton. Originally published as Absolute or Relative Motion?, Vol. 1: The Discovery of Dynamics (Cambridge), The Discovery of Dynamics provides the technical background to Barbour's recently published The End of Time, in which he argues that time disappears from the description of the quantum universe.

The theme of this text is the philosophy that any particle flow generates a particle dynamics, in a suitable geometrical framework. It covers topics that include: geometrical and physical vector fields; field lines; flows; stability of equilibrium points; potential systems and catastrophe geometry; field hypersurfaces; bifurcations; distribution orthogonal to a vector field; extrema with nonholonomic constraints; thermodynamic systems; energies; geometric dynamics induced by a vector field; magnetic fields around piecewise rectilinear electric circuits; geometric magnetic dynamics; and granular materials and their mechanical behaviour. The text should be useful for first-year graduate students in mathematics, mechanics, physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and economics. It can also be addressed to professors and researchers whose work involves mathematics, mechanics, physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and economics.

"The Key to Newton's Dynamics is lucid, important, and fills a large gap in the existing literature. Brackenridge is undoubtedly that gifted, patient teacher that one expects from a quality liberal arts college."—Alan E. Shapiro, University of Minnesota

This book takes a traditional approach to the development of the methods of analytical dynamics, using two types of examples throughout: simple illustrations of key results and thorough applications to complex, real-life problems.

Discovering Discrete Dynamical Systems is a mathematics textbook designed for use in a student-led, inquiry-based course for advanced mathematics majors. Fourteen modules each with an opening exploration, a short exposition and related exercises, and a concluding project guide students to self-discovery on topics such as fixed points and their classifications, chaos and fractals, Julia and Mandelbrot sets in the complex plane, and symbolic dynamics. Topics have been carefully chosen as a means for developing student persistence and skill in exploration, conjecture, and generalization while at the same time providing a coherent introduction to the fundamentals of discrete dynamical systems. This book is written for undergraduate students with the prerequisites for a first analysis course, and it can easily be used by any faculty member in a mathematics department, regardless of area of expertise. Each module starts with an exploration in which the students are asked an open-ended question. This allows the students to make discoveries which lead them to formulate the questions that will be addressed in the exposition and exercises of the module. The exposition is brief and has been written with the intent that a student who has taken, or is ready to take, a course in analysis can read the material independently. The exposition concludes with exercises which have been designed to both illustrate and explore in more depth the ideas covered in the exposition. Each module concludes with a project in which students bring the ideas from the module to bear on a more challenging or in-depth problem. A section entitled "To the Instructor" includes suggestions on how to structure a course in order to realize the inquiry-based intent of the book. The book has also been used successfully as the basis for an independent study course and as a supplementary text for an analysis course with traditional content.

Since the discovery of geomagnetically trapped radiation by Van Allen in 1958, an impressive amount of experimental information on the earth's particle and field environment has nourished research work for scores of scientists and thesis work for their students. This quest has challenged space-age technology to produce better and more sophisticated instru ments and has challenged the international scientific community and governments to establish more, and more effective, cooperative programs of research and information exchange. As a result, an orderly picture of the principal physical mechanisms governing the earth's radiation environment is beginning to emerge. The interest in this topic has reached far beyond the domain of geo physics. Indeed, we find trapped radiation elsewhere in the universe: Jupiter's radiation belts, particle trapping in sunspot magnetic fields, cosmic rays confined in interstellar fields and, possibly, ultra-high-energy particles trapped in the magnetic fields of rotating neutron stars. There is abundant technical and scientific literature available on Van Allen radiation; comprehensive reviews are published regularly in journals* or have been collected in book form**, and books have been written on the subject***. The aim of this monograph is to complement the existing literature with a concise discussion of the basic dynamical processes that control the earth's radiation belts. It is mainly intended to help a graduate student or a researcher new to this field to understand the underlying physics and to provide him with guidelines for quantita tive, numerical applications of the theory.