Gustavo E. Romero - Böcker

Gamma-ray astronomy has undergone an enormous progress in the last 15 years. The success of satellite experiments like NASA's Comp­ ton Gamma-Ray Observatory and ESA's INTEGRAL mission, as well as of ground-based instruments have open new views into the high-energy Universe. Different classes of cosmic gamma-ray sources have been now detected at different energies, in addition to young radio pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, the classical ones. The new sources include radio­ quiet pulsars, microquasars, supernova remnants, starburst galaxies, ra­ dio galaxies, flat-spectrum radio quasars, and BL Lacertae objects. A large number of unidentified sources strongly suggests that this brief enumeration is far from complete. Gamma-ray bursts are now estab­ lished as extragalactic sources with tremendous energy output. There is accumulating evidence supporting the idea that massive stars and star forming regions can accelerate charged particles up to relativistic ener­ gies making them gamma-ray sources. Gamma-ray astronomy has also proved to be a powerful tool for cosmology imposing constraints to the background photon fields that can absorb the gamma-ray flux from dis­ tant sources. All this has profound implications for our current ideas about how particles are accelerated and transported in both the local and distant U niverse. The evolution of our knowledge on the gamma-ray sky has been so fast that is not easy for the non-specialist scientist and the graduate student to be aware of the full potential of this field or to grasp the fundamentals of a given topic in order to attempt some original contribution.

Based on the proceedings of the workshop on Multiwavelength Approach to Unidentified Gamma-ray Sources, which intends to shed light on the problem of the nature of the unidentified gamma-ray sources. This book is aimed at researchers in the high-energy astrophysics and related research areas as well as for scientists and graduate students.

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge. Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the ?rst time in the 17th century.

This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge.Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities.

This textbook presents the basics of philosophy that are necessary for the student and researcher in science in order to better understand scientific work.

This book is based on the lecture notes of a one-semester course on black hole astrophysics given  by the author and is aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in astrophysics. The material included goes beyond that found in classic textbooks and presents details on astrophysical manifestations of black holes. In particular, jet physics and detailed accounts of objects like microquasars, active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts, and ultra-luminous X-ray sources are covered, as well as advanced topics like black holes in alternative theories of gravity. The author avoids unnecessary technicalities and to some degree the book is self-contained. The reader will find some basic general relativity tools in Chapter 1. The appendices provide some additional mathematical details that will be useful for further study, and a guide to the bibliography on the subject.

This book presents the most updated review of our current knowledge of cosmic gamma-ray sources. Besides chapters devoted to each type of known gamma-ray emitting object, it provides a self-contained introduction to gamma-ray astrophysics, including a description of the relevant physical processes, a guide through the basic phenomenology, and the prospects for further advances. The book will be of interest for all active researchers in the field, for scientists interested in understanding the recent progress in gamma-ray astronomy, and for graduate students.