The two messages of complexity theories and their implications to the study of society: Comments by J. Portugali on the Visioneer white papers by D. Helbing and S. Balietti

This article comments on the Visioneer (Envisioning a Socio Economic Knowledge Collider) Project as described in the following white papers [1–3].^{b b}The comments are based on my new book Complexity, Cognition and the City [4].     

Review of the book <Emphasis Type="Italic">Optics of Microstructured Fibers</Emphasis> by A.M. Zheltikov (Nauka,Moscow, 2004)

Chronicle

Review of the book Optics of Microstructured Fibers by A.M. Zheltikov (Nauka, Moscow, 2004)     

W.R. Grove and the fuel cell

Though known these days largely because he invented the fuel cell, Grove also had many other distinguished achievements to his credit. His monumental book On the Correlation of Physical Forces contained all the arguments that led to the enunciation of the first law of thermodynamics. He was also an extremely versatile natural philosopher who was, in addition, well versed in classical literature, particularly the works of the eminent scholars of ancient Greece and Rome. This article touches upon these qualities, but is predominantly concerned with the emergence and modern aspects of the H₂/O₂ fuel cell and its potential for the clean generation of energy.     

Comment

We comment on the book Symmetries of Spacetimes and Riemannian Manifolds by Krishan L. Duggal and Ramesh Sharma, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1999, and the related book review by M. Keyl, Gen. Rel. Grav. 32 (2001) 933–935.     

Mechanical vs. informational components of price impact

We study the problem of what causes prices to change. It is well known that trading impacts prices — orders to buy drive the price up, and orders to sell drive it down. We introduce a means of decomposing the total impact of trading into two components, defining the mechanical impact of a trading order as the change in future prices in the absence of any future changes in decision making, and the informational impact as the remainder of the total impact once mechanical impact is removed. This decomposition is performed using order book data from the London Stock Exchange. The average mechanical impact of a market order decays to zero as a function of time, at an asymptotic rate that is consistent with a power law with an exponent of roughly 1.7. In contrast the average informational impact builds to approach a constant value. Initially the impact is entirely mechanical, and is about half as big as the asymptotic informational impact. The size of the informational impact is positively correlated to mechanical impact. For cases where the mechanical impact is zero for all times, we find that the informational impact is negative, i.e. buy market orders that have no mechanical impact at all generate strong negative price responses.     

Kristian Camilleri: Heisenberg and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics—The Physicist as Philosopher

The book Heisenberg and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics—The Physicist as Philosopher, by Kristian Camilleri is critically reviewed. The work details Heisenberg’s philosophical development from an early positivist commitment towards a later philosophy of language. It is of interest to researchers and graduate students in the history and philosophy of quantum mechanics.     

Applied Fractal Geometry and the Fineparticle Specialist. Part I: Rugged boundaries and rough surfaces

Fractal Geometry developed in 1977 by B. Mandelbrot describes the structure of rugged systems by extending the concepts of classical dimensional analysis to include a fractional addendum to the topological dimension of a system in order to describe the space filling properties of the rugged system. In the 15 years since the publication of Mandelbrot's book describing his seminal ideas fractal geometry has found many applications in fineparticle science and technology. This body of applied knowledge is now known as Applied Fractal Geometry. The purpose of this review is to focus on the various branches of applied fractal geometry of interest to the fineparticle specialist in a systematic manner. The first part is concerned with ruggedness of fineparticle boundaries, the structure of simple porous bodies, fragmentation and powder production, the assessment of the properties of such materials as paper, and the characterization of rough surfaces. The second part will explore the use of fractal dimensions to describe mixing operations, composite bodies, such as synthetic bones, and paint films.     

Reply to Comments on Chapter 12 of “Railway Noise and Vibration: Mechanisms, Modelling and Means of Control”, by D. Thompson (with contributions from C. Jones and P.-E. Gautier), Elsevier, 2009

In this authors’ reply it is stressed that the book “Railway Noise and Vibration: Mechanisms, Modelling and Means of Control, Elsevier (2009)” is a textbook which does not set out to provide a historical review. Moreover, the topic of the increase in vibration above a critical speed is considered by the authors to be a comparatively rare phenomenon within the topic of ground vibration from surface railways, the latter itself only being dealt with in a single chapter of the book.     

Quantum measure spaces

In this article I present some material of a forthcoming book with the titleQuantum Measures and Spaces. The main theme are generalizations of Gleason's theorem and spaces in which quantum measures exist. Characterizations of such spaces and classifications of their measures are given. The book will contain some supplementary results from the orthomodular theory under the heading Miscellaneous. It is a sequel to the bookMeasures and Hilbert Lattices of the same author.     

Characterization of Nanophase Materials

This contribution is a preprint of one chapter of Professor Wang's edited new book “Characterization of Nanophase Materials” (ISBN 3–527–29837–1), published by WILEY–VCH Verlag GmbH, Weinheim, Germany. Engineering of nanophase materials and devices is of vital interest in electronics, semiconductors and optics, catalysis, ceramics and magnetism. Development of nanotechnology involves several steps, of which characterization of nanoparticles is indespensable in understanding the behavior and properties of nanoparticles, aiming at implementing nanotechnology, controlling their behavior and designing new nanomaterials systems with super performance. The book focuses on structural and property characterization of nanocrystals and their assemblies, with an emphasis on basic physical approach, detailed techniques, data interpretation and applications. Intended as a comprehensive reference work for postgraduate students and researchers in the field who are specialized in materials chemistry, materials physics, and materials science.     

Optical Potentials for Elastic and Inelastic Scattering of Non-Electronic Projectiles from Electronic Targets

The usual text book one-particle Green's function possesses a self-energy that is known to be an optical potential for elastic scattering. The introduction of an optical potential reduces the complex many-body scattering problem into a tractable one-body problem. In this work the definition of the Green's functions is extended. The defined inelastic functions are shown to possess self-energies that can be expressed in closed form in terms of the target states. It is proven that these self-energies are optical potentials for inelastic scattering. The properties of these potentials and working equations for the scattering wave functions are discussed. Received January 2, 1996; revised June 7, 1996; accepted for publication June 19, 1996     

Minimal orthomodular lattices

The lattices calledminimal orthomodular (MOL) arise in a special exclusion problem concerning the class of all orthomodular lattices (OML) and the subclass of all modular orthocomplemented lattices. This problem was given in G. Kalmbach's book,Orthomodular Lattices. We prove that an exclusion system necessarily must contain an infinite lattice. We prove that, except one, all the finite, irreducible MOLs have only blocks with eight elements. We characterize finite MOLs by a covering property related to equational classes generated by the modular ortholattices MOn.     

On horizons and the Cosmic Landscape

Susskind claims in his recent book The Cosmic Landscape that evidence for the existence and nature of ‘pocket universes’ in a multiverse would be available in the detailed nature of the Cosmic Blackbody Background Radiation that constantly bathes all parts of our observable universe. I point out that acceptance of the complex chain of argument involved does not imply possible experimental verification of multiverses at the present time. Rather this claim relates only to theoretically possible observations in the very far future of the universe.     

A Physicist in the Corridors of Power: P. M. S. Blackett's Opposition to Atomic Weapons Following the War

In 1948, the year in which P. M. S. Blackett received the Nobel Prize in physics, he published a highly controversial book on the military and political consequences of atomic energy. The book appeared in the United States under the sensationalist title Fear, War and the Bomb. Blackett had been a naval officer during the First World War, a veteran of Ernest Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory and head of the physics department at Manchester in the interwar years, and he was a founder of operational research during the Second World War. Vilified in the British and American press in the 1940s and 1950s, he continued to contest prevailing nuclear weapons strategy, finding a more favorable reception for his arguments by the early 1960s. This paper examines the publication and reception of Blackett's views on atomic weapons, analyzing the risks to a physicist who writes about a subject other than physics, as well as the circumstances that might compel one to do so.     

Applications of Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Materials Research

Abstract

This review article deals with the applications of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to materials. The authors have attempted to perform a thorough review of the current literature. The articles examined span the period mainly from January 1989 to June 1993. The authors used CAS on-line and Science Citation Index on CD-ROM as their main sources of references using numerous key words for the searches. The authors also assume a basic knowledge on the part of the reader of NMR and h4R.I. For the novice reader or someone who would like more background on NMR theory, the authors suggest, T. C. Farrar's book Pulse h'MR (Farragut Press) and E. D. Becker's book High Resolution M R (Academic Press). For information regarding MRI and microscopy, the reader is referred to a book by F. W. Wehrli entitled Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Imaging (VCH) and a book by B. Blumich and W. Kuhn entitled Magnetic Resonance Microscopy (VCH). A book by Ernst, Bodenhausen, and Wokaun called Principles of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in One- and Two-Dimensions is another valuable resource.     

Einstein. a centenary volume

“At a meeting early in 1976, the International Commission on Physics Education took note of the fact that 14 March 1979 would be the centenary of the birth of Albert Einstein.…This book is the result. We hope that, in the spirit of our intentions, the book will appeal to a wide range of readers. In planning it, however, we had especially in mind both teachers and students of physics at secondary and undergraduate (tertiary) levels. Our main purpose has been to provide something of a picture of Einstein the man, of his scientific work and its subsequent significance, and of his role as a humanitarian and a World statesman.”     

Quantum Gravity and Phenomenological Philosophy

The central thesis of this paper is that contemporary theoretical physics is grounded in philosophical presuppositions that make it difficult to effectively address the problems of subject-object interaction and discontinuity inherent to quantum gravity. The core objectivist assumption implicit in relativity theory and quantum mechanics is uncovered and we see that, in string theory, this assumption leads into contradiction. To address this challenge, a new philosophical foundation is proposed based on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Then, through the application of qualitative topology and hypernumbers, phenomenological ideas about space, time, and dimension are brought into focus so as to provide specific solutions to the problems of force-field generation and unification. The phenomenological string theory that results speaks to the inconclusiveness of conventional string theory and resolves its core contradiction. This article is based on my 2008 book, The Self-Evolving Cosmos, appearing in the Series on Knots and Everything of World Scientific Publishing Company.     

On Transonic Shocks in a Nozzle with Variable End Pressures

In the book, Courant and Friedrichs (Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves. New York: Interscience Publishers, 1948) described the following transonic shock phenomena in a de Laval nozzle: Given the appropriately large receiver pressure p _r , if the upstream flow is still supersonic behind the throat of the nozzle, then at a certain place in the diverging part of the nozzle a shock front intervenes and the gas is compressed and slowed down to subsonic speed. The position and the strength of the shock front are automatically adjusted so that the end pressure at the exit becomes p _r . When the end pressure p _r varies and lies in an appropriate scope, in general, it is expected that a curved transonic shock is still formed in a nozzle. In this paper, we solve this problem for the two-dimensional steady Euler system with a variable exit pressure in a nozzle whose divergent part is an angular sector. Both existence and uniqueness are established. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.10571082) and the National Basic Research Programm of China (No.2006CB805902). Supported in part by Zheng Ge Ru Foundation, and Hong Kong RGC Earmarked Research Grants CUHK4028/04P, CUHK4040/06P and RGC Central Allocation Grant CA05/06.SC01.