Bernard H. Lavenda – författare

More than to any other single individual, thermodynamics owes its creation to Nicolas-Leonard-Sadi ' Carnot. Sadi, the son of the "great Carnot" Lazare, was he- ily in uencedby his father. Not onlywas LazareMinister of War duringNapoleon's consulate, he was a respected mathematician and engineer in his own right. Ma- ematically, Lazare can lay claim to the de nition of the cross ratio, a projective invariant of four points. Lazare was also interested in how machines operated, - phasizing the roles of work and "vis viva," or living force, which was later to be associated with the kinetic energy. He arrived at a dynamical theory that machines in order to operate at maximum ef ciency should avoid "any impact or sudden change. " This was the heritage he left to his son Sadi. The mechanics of Newton, in his Principia, was more than a century old. It dealt with the mechanics of conservative systems in which there was no room for p- cesses involving heat and friction. Such processes would ruin the time reversibility of mechanical laws, which could no longer be derived by minimizing the difference between kinetic and potential energies.When Sadi wrote his only scienti c work in 1824, there were no laws governing the mechanical effects of heat. In fact, caloric theory was still in vogue, which treated heat as an imponderable uid that was c- served.

More than to any other single individual, thermodynamics owes its creation to Nicolas-Leonard-Sadi ' Carnot. Sadi, the son of the "great Carnot" Lazare, was he- ily in uencedby his father. Not onlywas LazareMinister of War duringNapoleon's consulate, he was a respected mathematician and engineer in his own right. Ma- ematically, Lazare can lay claim to the de nition of the cross ratio, a projective invariant of four points. Lazare was also interested in how machines operated, - phasizing the roles of work and "vis viva," or living force, which was later to be associated with the kinetic energy. He arrived at a dynamical theory that machines in order to operate at maximum ef ciency should avoid "any impact or sudden change. " This was the heritage he left to his son Sadi. The mechanics of Newton, in his Principia, was more than a century old. It dealt with the mechanics of conservative systems in which there was no room for p- cesses involving heat and friction. Such processes would ruin the time reversibility of mechanical laws, which could no longer be derived by minimizing the difference between kinetic and potential energies.When Sadi wrote his only scienti c work in 1824, there were no laws governing the mechanical effects of heat. In fact, caloric theory was still in vogue, which treated heat as an imponderable uid that was c- served.

Starting off from noneuclidean geometries, apart from the method of Einstein's equations, this book derives and describes the phenomena of gravitation and diffraction. A historical account is presented, exposing the missing link in Einstein's construction of the theory of general relativity: the uniformly rotating disc, together with his failure to realize, that the Beltrami metric of hyperbolic geometry with constant curvature describes exactly the uniform acceleration observed.This book also explores these questions:

The book points out what has gone wrong with physics since Einstein's formulation of this theory of general relativity a century ago. It points out inconsistencies and fallacies in the standard model of the big bang and the inflationary scenario which was supposed to have overcome those shortcomings, the evolution of string theory from a theory of the strong interaction to a theory of gravitation and quantum mechanics which has not produced a single verifiable prediction, and what it has accomplished is reaffirming wrong results like the entropy of a black hole, which is not an entropy at all. There have even been attempts to demote gravity to an emergent phenomenon with catastrophic effects. We know exactly what happened at 10-34 seconds after the big bang, but do not know how fast gravity propagates, whether gravitational waves exist, and what are the limits of Newton's law. Attempts to rectify this are the prediction of dark energy/matter, which has never been observed nor ever will, and MOND. The latter is really not a modification of Newtonian mechanics, but a transformation of a dynamical law into a statistical one.