Lancaster University Ghana

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS

The activity of science has dramatically transformed society; since 1850 applied science has become the basis of the means of economic production in Europe. While modern society depends on industrial production based on the application of scientific results, the spectacular achievements of science in the last century have led to a transformation in the nature of science itself. The organisation of scientific activity for the generation of useful, practical knowledge has acquired a new meaning and impulse in the twentieth century, a development which has been described as the emergence of ‘industrialised science’, science as an industry producing applicable knowledge. An understanding of the dominance of science in contemporary culture and society demands an analysis of the social and intellectual transformations which led to such striking confidence in the value of the investigation and control of nature and the emergence of science as a socially-organised activity. The profound conceptual changes in physics in the twentieth century, the abandonment of the doctrines of absolute space and time in Einstein's theory of relativity and of causality and determinism in quantum mechanics, has customarily led to a depiction of the development of science by means of a disjunction between ‘classical’ or ‘Newtonian’ and ‘modern’ science. This historiographic framework is unsatisfactory, for the development of science must be seen in a broader perspective, as a social and cultural phenomenon. The attainment by natural science of appropriate methods of enquiry and social institutions, its methods being viewed as trained and organised common sense and its aims customarily regarded as value-free, is a feature of its recent history.

Computer experiments in non-linear stochastic physics

Introduction This chapter is devoted to developing digital techniques to integrate multidimensional stochastic differential equations. A variety of different spectral densities of the stochastic forcing can be achieved with the algorithms presented. Very often (for example, when several dimensions are involved, or an external deterministic forcing is present, or fluctuation–dissipation relations do not hold for the physical system modelled by the set of stochastic differential equations) a digital simulation is the only viable way of extracting the detailed information one is looking for. Also, digital techniques can simulate the theoretical model in a sort of ideal environment, where everything is under control and no non-idealities are present. It is actually the author's personal belief that digital simulation in stochastic physics should be thought of as a theoretical tool, like, say, Padé approximations or steepest descents, and it should be considered as the natural complement of modelling. The chapter is organized as follows: in Section 7.2 a general algorithm for integrating sets of autonomous differential equations in the presence of just one external stochastic forcing is derived. In Section 7.3 the algorithm is generalized to include non-autonomous differential equations and multidimensional external forcings. Sections 7.4 and 7.5 contain applications to, respectively, overdamped and underdamped non-linear oscillators: what is presented in these two sections should be regarded as examples of digital simulation capabilities, and papers cited there should be consulted for more details and references.

The nature of bonds in paper and the behaviour of paper under mechanical strain

Work done during the past twenty years on the physics of fibre bonds in paper and the behaviour of paper under mechanical strain is reviewed. The first major section of the article illustrates the chemical nature of the cohesion in paper and reports the results of direct observations on fibre-to-fibre bonds. A statistical theory of the geometry of fibrous networks is shown to be a basis for the characterization of fibre bonding in paper. The second major section is concerned with the mechanical behaviour of paper. This is shown to be a complex subject because paper exhibits almost every known rheological property. Direct, conventional rheological methods, molecular theories and the concept of elastic networks are discussed in this context. Further complications arise from any changes in the water content of the environment. Such effects are conveniently thought of as a competitive process wherein cellulose and water compete for hydrogen bonds for their hydroxyl groups. Not least among the rheological phenomena that paper exhibits is mechanical fracture. This is a discontinuous process that is found to be intimately connected with the mechanical work done on the specimen and is principally governed by its geometrical distortion.

Science, industry, and the social order in Mulhouse, 1798–1871

There is a story, which historians of modern France often tell, of the ministerial official in Paris who had only to glance at his clock in order to know the exact passage of Vergil being construed and the law of physics being expounded in every school throughout the country. Invariably, the story is told for a purpose. It is used to demonstrate the high degree of centralization and the attendant rigidity of the French educational system, usually with special reference to the nineteenth century. The story, which has its roots in the rich corpus of Napoleonic legend, serves this purpose very well, but unfortunately it is both apocryphal and misleading. For while it is true that most nineteenth-century ministers with responsibility for education aspired to the ideal of total control, not one of them came close to it in reality.

Will detente kill millikelvin research?

The Data Ocean Project

Transparent use of commercial cloud resources for scientific experiments is a hard problem. In this article, we describe the first steps of the Data Ocean R&D collaboration between the high-energy physics experiment ATLAS together with Google Cloud Platform, to allow seamless use of Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage for physics analysis. We start by describing the three preliminary use cases that were identified at the beginning of the project. The following sections then detail the work done in the data management system Rucio and the workflow management systems PanDA and Harvester to interface Google Cloud Platform with the ATLAS distributed computing environment, and show the results of the integration tests. Afterwards, we describe the setup and results from a full ATLAS user analysis that was executed natively on Google Cloud Platform, and give estimates on projected costs. We close with a summary and and outlook on future work.

Atomic hydrogen stabilized

A two-dimensional superfluid?

Low-temperature physics: Knudsen effects in liquid helium

Serber Says: About Nuclear Physics – World Scientific Lecture Notes in Physics Vol 10

Robert Serber 1987 Singapore: World Scientific vii + 298 pp price £40.85 ISBN 9971 50 1 58 9 From the late 1930s to the early 1950s a considerable effort went into understanding the broad aspects of nuclei and, in particular, nuclear forces at relatively low energies. This was a very important and necessary contribution to physics, leading to important understanding of magnitudes and to ideas like charge independence and isotopic spin.

Low-temperature physics: Persistent currents in liquid 3He