Leonardo Hsu - Böcker

Dr W Kroll, a young post-doc working under Heisenberg at Leipzing in the 1930s, was forced to escape from the Nazis and eventually came to the National Taiwan University in 1941. He taught many of the advanced courses in theoretical physics for over two decades, and prepared a generation of physicists in Taiwan. A symposium on pure and applied physics was held in memory of Prof Kroll at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in August 1996. These proceedings, composed of papers contributed to the symposium by many of Prof Kroll's former students now reaching professorial ranks in the West, reflect in a small measure the legacy he left behind.

Prof T-Y Wu is not only an eminent physicist with an encyclopedic knowledge, but also a motivational teacher and an influential policy maker in science and technology. The young Wu was inspired by Prof Y-T Yao, whose course on modern physics sparked an interest that burned during a long and productive career. Among Wu's achievements are 14 books and more than 120 papers covering subjects from atomic and molecular physics to plasmas and gases to atmospheric physics to relativity theory. Even at the age of 90 he remains active, publishing papers and lecturing on physics.Prof Wu feels grateful that he had the opportunity to educate a group of extremely talented students and, in particular, to discover T D Lee's remarkable talent. Although creative talent is no doubt a product of nature, it must also be nurtured. Prof Wu has played a crucial role for an entire generation of physicists in China and has won great respect from former students such as C N Yang, T D Lee, K Huang, and countless others. Prof Wu's love of physics and his dedication in teaching and research will always be remembered.

This book shows how one can combine Yang-Mills gauge symmetry and effective Einstein-Grossmann metric tensors to tackle physical problems at microscopic, macroscopic and super-macroscopic length scales. In particular, the combination of gauge symmetry and an effective metric tensor provides a framework for and leads to an alternative dynamics of cosmic expansion based on quantum Yang-Mills gravity at the super-macroscopic limit. Together with the cosmological principle, one can investigate and derive expanding scale factors, the age of the universe, the cosmic redshift, and the Hubble recession velocity. Furthermore, this framework leads to a possible explanation for the late-time accelerated cosmic expansion due to baryon masses and charges. All these discussions are based on the operationally defined space and time coordinates of inertial frames. Finally, this book expounds on the intimate relationship between space-time translation gauge symmetry and the beautiful ideas of the Lie derivative and Pauli's variation. One interesting application of the Lie derivative is to formulate a gravitational theory with an external space-time gauge group, which leads to Yang-Mills gravity.

This monograph expounds on general Yang-Mills symmetry, a new symmetry based on arbitrary vector gauge functions and Hamilton's characteristic phase functions in the gauge transformations of Abelian and non-Abelian groups. General Yang-Mills symmetry includes the conventional gauge symmetries as special cases and is useful for describing phenomena at scales ranging from the super-macroscopic such as dark matter, to the ultra-microscopic such as the quantum 3-body problem of baryons. Moreover, this symmetry supports the Broader Particle-Cosmology framework based on particle physics and quantum Yang-Mills gravity in flat space-time, which can explain why the gravitational force is always attractive. This volume also discusses how CPT invariance in particle physics suggests a "Big Jets" model for the birth of the universe, proposing one explanation for the dearth of anti-matter in our universe. Finally, we discuss a simplified quantum shell model for N baryons with a quark Hamiltonian and a Sonine-Laguerre equation that gives reasonable eigenvalues for the energies of the 29 N baryons.

A Broader View of Relativity shows that there is still new life in old physics. The book examines the historical context and theoretical underpinnings of Einstein's theory of special relativity and describes Broad Relativity, a generalized theory of coordinate transformations between inertial reference frames that includes Einstein's special relativity as a special case. It shows how the principle of relativity is compatible with multiple concepts of physical time and how these different procedures for clock synchronization can be useful for thinking about different physical problems, including many-body systems and the development of a Lorentz-invariant thermodynamics. Broad relativity also provides new answers to old questions such as the necessity of postulating the constancy of the speed of light and the viability of Reichenbach's general concept of time. The book also draws on the idea of limiting-four-dimensional symmetry to describe coordinate transformations and the physics of particles and fields in non-inertial frames, particularly those with constant linear accelerations. This new edition expands the discussion on the role that human conventions and unit systems have played in the historical development of relativity theories and includes new results on the implications of broad relativity for clarifying the status of constants that are truly fundamental and inherent properties of our universe.