Peter Goddard – författare

This book shows how modern cosmology and astronomy have led to the need to introduce dark matter in the universe. Some of this dark matter is in the familiar form of protons, electrons and neutrons, but most of it must have a more exotic form. The favoured, but not the only, possibility is neutrinos of non-zero rest mass, pair-created in the hot big bang and surviving to the present day. After a review of modern cosmology, this book gives a detailed account of the author's recent theory in which these neutrinos decay into photons which are the main ionising agents in hydrogen and nitrogen in the interstellar and intergalactic medium. This theory, though speculative, explains a number of rather different puzzling phenomena in astronomy and cosmology in a unified way and predicts values of various important quantities such as the mass of the decaying neutrino and the Hubble constant. Written by a cosmologist of the first rank, this topical book will be essential reading to all cosmologists and astrophysicists.

This text provides a thoroughly modern graduate-level introduction to the theory of critical behaviour. Beginning with a brief review of phase transitions in simple systems and of mean field theory, the text then goes on to introduce the core ideas of the renormalization group. Following chapters cover phase diagrams, fixed points, cross-over behaviour, finite-size scaling, perturbative renormalization methods, low-dimensional systems, surface critical behaviour, random systems, percolation, polymer statistics, critical dynamics and conformal symmetry. The book closes with an appendix on Gaussian integration, a selected bibliography, and a detailed index. Many problems are included. The emphasis throughout is on providing an elementary and intuitive approach. In particular, the perturbative method introduced leads, among other applications, to a simple derivation of the epsilon expansion in which all the actual calculations (at least to lowest order) reduce to simple counting, avoiding the need for Feynman diagrams.

This book provides an introduction to lattice models of polymers. This is an important topic both in the theory of critical phenomena and the modelling of polymers. The first two chapters introduce the basic theory of random, directed and self-avoiding walks. The next two chapters develop and expand this theory to explore the self-avoiding walk in both two and three dimensions. Following chapters describe polymers near a surface, dense polymers, self-interacting polymers and branched polymers. The book closes with discussions of some geometrical and topological properties of polymers, and of self-avoiding surfaces on a lattice. The volume combines results from rigorous analytical and numerical work to give a coherent picture of the properties of lattice models of polymers. This book will be valuable for graduate students and researchers working in statistical mechanics, theoretical physics and polymer physics. It will also be of interest to those working in applied mathematics and theoretical chemistry.

This timely review provides a self-contained introduction to the mathematical theory of stationary black holes and a self-consistent exposition of the corresponding uniqueness theorems. The opening chapters examine the general properties of space-times admitting Killing fields and derive the Kerr-Newman metric. Strong emphasis is given to the geometrical concepts. The general features of stationary black holes and the laws of black hole mechanics are then reviewed. Critical steps towards the proof of the 'no-hair' theorem are then discussed, including the methods used by Israel, the divergence formulae derived by Carter, Robinson and others, and finally the sigma model identities and the positive mass theorem. The book is rounded off with an extension of the electro-vacuum uniqueness theorem to self-gravitating scalar fields and harmonic mappings. This volume provides a rigorous textbook for graduate students in physics and mathematics. It also offers an invaluable, up-to-date reference for researchers in mathematical physics, general relativity and astrophysics.

The Dirac operator has many useful applications in theoretical physics and mathematics. This book provides a clear, concise and self-contained introduction to the global theory of the Dirac operator and to the analysis of spectral asymptotics with local or non-local boundary conditions. The theory is introduced at a level suitable for graduate students. Numerous examples are then given to illustrate the peculiar properties of the Dirac operator, and the role of boundary conditions in heat-kernel asymptotics and quantum field theory. Topics covered include the introduction of spin-structures in Riemannian and Lorentzian manifolds; applications of index theory; heat-kernel asymptotics for operators of Laplace type; quark boundary conditions; one-loop quantum cosmology; conformally covariant operators; and the role of the Dirac operator in some recent investigations of four-manifolds. This volume provides graduate students with a rigorous introduction and researchers with a valuable reference to the Dirac operator and its applications in theoretical physics.

This book is an introduction to the applications in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of chaotic dynamics, and also to the use of techniques in statistical mechanics important for an understanding of the chaotic behaviour of fluid systems. The fundamental concepts of dynamical systems theory are reviewed and simple examples are given. Advanced topics including SRB and Gibbs measures, unstable periodic orbit expansions, and applications to billiard-ball systems, are then explained. The text emphasises the connections between transport coefficients, needed to describe macroscopic properties of fluid flows, and quantities, such as Lyapunov exponents and Kolmogorov-Sinai entropies, which describe the microscopic, chaotic behaviour of the fluid. Later chapters consider the roles of the expanding and contracting manifolds of hyperbolic dynamical systems and the large number of particles in macroscopic systems. Exercises, detailed references and suggestions for further reading are included.

Public issue television is a major contribution to understanding the relationship between television, politics and society. Based on full access to the archives, it offers a fascinating historical account of how one television series, Granada’s World in Action, celebrated for its tough journalism, visual directness and public impact, functioned and developed over its run across 35 years between 1963 and 1998. In a succession of chapters looking at different periods in the series’ development and at key dimensions of its distinctive identity, it gets deep inside the making of factual television and examines how a particular culture of production works within broader conditions of possibility and constraint. In particular, it charts the interwoven processes of change – technological, professional, aesthetic, institutional, economic, social and political. As well as discussing achievement and success, it examines the tensions, the debates and open conflicts that formed part of the context within which the series was made and transmitted across four decades.

Public issue television is a major contribution to understanding the relationship between television, politics and society. Based on full access to the archives, it offers a fascinating historical account of how one television series, Granada’s World in Action, celebrated for its tough journalism, visual directness and public impact, functioned and developed over its run across 35 years between 1963 and 1998. In a succession of chapters looking at different periods in the series’ development and at key dimensions of its distinctive identity, it gets deep inside the making of factual television and examines how a particular culture of production works within broader conditions of possibility and constraint. In particular, it charts the interwoven processes of change – technological, professional, aesthetic, institutional, economic, social and political. As well as discussing achievement and success, it examines the tensions, the debates and open conflicts that formed part of the context within which the series was made and transmitted across four decades.

This lively and ground-breaking collection brings together work on forms of popular television within the authoritarian regimes of Europe after World War Two. Ten chapters based on new and original research examine approaches to programming and individual programmes in Spain, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the USSR and the GDR at a time when they were governed as dictatorships or one-party states. Drawing on surviving archives, scripts and production records, contemporary publications, YouTube clips and interviews with producers and performers, its chapters recover examples of television programming history unknown beyond national borders and often preserved largely in the memories of the audiences who lived with them. The introduction examines how television can be considered ‘popular’ in circumstances where audience appeal is often secondary to the need for state control. Published in English, Popular television in authoritarian Europe represents a significant intervention in transnational television studies, making these histories available to scholars for the first time, encouraging comparative enquiry and extending the reach – intellectually and geographically – of European television history.There is a foreword by John Corner and an informative timeline of events in the history of television in the countries covered.

For scholars of media and war, the 2003 invasion of Iraq is a compelling case to study. As part of President Bush’s ‘war on terror’, the invasion was the most controversial British foreign policy decision since Suez, and its ramifications and aftermath have rarely been far from the news. In the many political and public debates regarding this conflict, arguments over the role of the media have been omnipresent. For some, media coverage was biased against the war, for others it became a cheerleader for the invasion. Where does the truth lie? Drawing upon a uniquely-detailed and rich content and framing analysis of television and press coverage, and on interviews with some of the journalists involved, Pockets of Resistance provides an authoritative assessment of how British news media reported the 2003 Iraq invasion and also of the theoretical implications of this case for our understanding of wartime media-state relations. Pockets of Resistance examines the successes and failures of British television news as it sought to attain independence under the difficult circumstances of war, and describes and explains the emergence of some surprisingly vociferous anti-war voices within a diverse national press.

A startling new portrait of Gould, including never-before-seen material.Glenn Gould’s astonishing recordings deliver that unmistakable jolt of genius to each generation newly discovering the great Canadian pianist. With the support of the Glenn Gould Estate, Peter Goddard draws on his own interviews with Gould and on new, and in some cases overlooked, sources to present a freshly revealing portrait of Gould’s unsettled life, his radical decision to quit concertizing, his career as a radio innovator, and his deep response to the Canadian environment. Sci-fi and hi-fi, hockey and Petula Clark, Elvis, jazz, chess, the Beatles, and sex — all these inform this exploration of the pianist’s far-reaching imagination. There is even a touching account of the only piano lesson Gould ever gave.This is the perfect gift for anyone new to classical music and those already immersed in it, for those with an interest in Canadian music, in Glenn Gould himself, and in what led to The Goldberg Variations, one of the greatest recordings in music history.

The final word from one of popular music's greatest critics.In the summer of 2020, acclaimed music critic and journalist Peter Goddard began work on a new book that would take readers on a journey back through his fifty-plus years spent writing professionally about rock music and the musical styles circling it—everything from blues and jazz to country and classical. His plan was to revisit his old haunts and their habitués, scenes and figures he first wrote about starting in the mid-1960s when he became Canada’s first on-staff popular music critic, to show how ongoing revisions continually reframe first impressions.Tragically, Goddard died in 2022 before work on the manuscript was complete. But many of the core essays—on Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Who, k.d. lang, David Bowie, Liza Minelli, The Band, Neil Diamond, and others—are here. Accompanying these new essays is a collection of some of the best writing of Goddard’s career—ranging from interviews with B. B. King, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and Janis Joplin to reviews of classic albums by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Neil Young, to close readings of Leonard Cohen, Anne Murray, Led Zeppelin, and Gordon Lightfoot. Taken as a whole, One Foot on the Platform represents more than fifty years of thought and writing by one of Canada’s foremost cultural critics.