Kirjahaku

From physics to information theory and cosmology, from the structure of animal societies to the linguistic analysis of human writing, systems consisting of many interacting constituents often show a collective behaviour not predictable from the interaction of the individual constituents. In More than the Sum of the Parts, Helmut Satz addresses different forms of this complex behaviour, which have been thoroughly investigated only in the past decades. Although these studies originate in physics, the behaviour is found to be universal, ranging from the structure of the early universe to the formation of flocks of birds, and to the frequency of words in literary texts. Complexity is thus becoming an increasingly important interdisciplinary field for future scientific research. In a conceptual and non-technical way, Satz opens up this exciting field for a general readership and those studying any field of the natural sciences.

What is the origin of the universe? What was there before the universe appeared? We are currently witnessing a second Copernican revolution: neither our Earth and Sun, nor our galaxy, nor even our universe, are the end of all things. Beyond our world, in an endless multiverse, are innumerable other universes, coming and going, like ours or different. Fourteen billion years ago, one of the many bubbles constantly appearing and vanishing in the multiverse exploded to form our universe. The energy liberated in the explosion provided the basis for all the matter our universe now contains. But how could this hot, primordial plasma eventually produce the complex structure of our present world? Does not order eventually always lead to disorder, to an increase of entropy? Modern cosmology is beginning to find out how it all came about and where it all might lead. Before Time Began tells that story.

Flocks of birds, schools of fish and swarms of locusts display amazing forms of collective motion, while huge numbers of glow worms can emit light signals with almost unbelievable synchronization. These and many other collective phenomena in animal societies take place according to laws very similar to those governing the collective behavior in the inanimate nature, such as the magnetization of iron and the light radiation of lasers. During recent years, this has led to the study of swarm behavior as a challenging new field of science, in which ideas from the physical world are applied in order to understand the formation and structure of animal swarms. From these studies, it has become clear that such collective behavior of animals emerges in a self-organized way, without any need of overall coordination. In this book, we present different swarm phenomena of the animal world and compare them to their counterparts in physics, in a conceptual and non-technical way, addressed to a general readership.

This book describes our current understanding of the navigation of birds, their methods, capabilities, and achievements. Our knowledge of this field has progressed immensely in the last fifty years, due to the availability of miniaturized tracking and positioning devices, which now allow us to know when and where a specific bird is located and where it is flying. The book is written for a general readership and requires no more of the reader than a true interest in the topic. The text provides accessible overview of the relevant geographic and geophysical basics (latitudes and longitudes, geomagnetism) and of the neural faculties that allow birds to identify these features. The author surveys a variety of striking avian achievements, ranging from trans-ocean and pole-to-pole flights to circumnavigations of the earth. Readers will also learn how the required knowledge is provided and passed on to future generations, through instinct as well as through experience. Our understanding of such information transfer is today much deeper than it was fifty years ago. Nevertheless, many open questions remain. How an albatross leaving the coast of Brazil can find the way to its nest on a rock off the coast of New Zealand—this is a question still waiting to be answered. Thus, a further purpose of the book is to stimulate additional interest and new research into the fascinating and challenging world of avian navigation.

This book is a course-tested primer on the thermodynamics of strongly interacting matter – a profound and challenging area of both theoretical and experimental modern physics. Analytical and numerical studies of statistical quantum chromodynamics provide the main theoretical tool, while in experiments, high-energy nuclear collisions are the key for extensive laboratory investigations. As such, the field straddles statistical, particle and nuclear physics, both conceptually and in the methods of investigation used. The book addresses, above all, the many young scientists starting their scientific research in this field, providing them with a general, self-contained introduction that highlights the basic concepts and ideas and explains why we do what we do. Much of the book focuses on equilibrium thermodynamics: first it presents simplified phenomenological pictures, leading to critical behavior in hadronic matter and to a quark-hadron phase transition. This is followedby elements of finite temperature lattice QCD and an exposition of the important results obtained through the computer simulation of the lattice formulation. It goes on to clarify the relationship between the resulting critical behavior due to symmetry breaking/restoration in QCD, before turning to the QCD phase diagram. The presentation of bulk equilibrium thermodyamics is completed by studying the properties of the quark-gluon plasma as a new state of strongly interacting matter. The final chapters of the book are devoted to more specific topics that arise when nuclear collisions are considered as a tool for the experimental study of QCD thermodynamics. This second edition includes a new chapter on the hydrodynamic evolution of the medium produced in nuclear collisions. Since the study of flow for strongly interacting fluids has gained ever-increasing importance over the years, it is dealt with it in some detail, including comments on gauge/gravity duality. Moreover, other aspects ofexperimental studies are brought up to date, such as the search for critical behavior in multihadron production, the calibration of quarkonium production in nuclear collisions, and the relation between strangeness suppression and deconfinement.

Vogelschwärme führen komplexe Manöver aus über uns am Himmel, Fische vollbringen Ähnliches in den Tiefen der See. Im asiatischen Dschungel zeigen Leuchtkäfer Lichtvorführungen, in denen Tausende von Käfern in perfekter, synchroner Harmonie strahlen. Diese und ähnliche Vorgänge haben dazu geführt, dass Mathematiker und Physiker sich mit Kollegen der Biologie zusammengefunden haben, um die dem Schwarmverhalten zugrunde liegende Struktur zu erforschen. Tatsächlich ist diese Struktur universell und ähnlich der, die man in der Physik vieler wechselwirkender Teilchen findet. Das Entstehen und die Struktur eines Vogelschwarms entsprechen in vieler Hinsicht der Magnetisierung von Eisen, bei der ganz plötzlich die Spins der meisten Atome in die gleiche Richtung weisen. Die Synchronisierung der Leuchtkäferstrahlung wiederum beruht auf Mechanismen, die der Lichtemission eines Lasers ähneln. Dieses Buch beschreibt die verschiedenen Formen des Schwarmverhaltens von Tiergemeinschaften und stellt diesen dann die entsprechenden Strukturen in Physik und Informatik gegenüber. Doch keine Angst: es wird nur einfache Mathematik benötigt, und auch die angeführte Physik und Biologie bewegt sich auf allgemeinverständlichem Niveau. Erleben Sie mit, wie aus einfachen Gesetzmäßigkeiten die komplexesten Phänomene entstehen können - ohne dass es einer zentralen Kontrollinstanz bedarf.

In the last hundred years, modern physics and cosmology have shown that there exist regions of the universe forever beyond our reach, hidden by truly ultimate horizons. Such regions exist in those remote parts of the universe where, from our point of view, space expands faster than the speed of light. They are found in black holes, where the gravity is strong enough to retain even light within its field of attraction. And in the realm of the very small, quarks must remain forever confined to their world of extreme density and can never be removed from it. The aim of this book is to describe these ultimate horizons, how they were discovered, how they shape our view of the world, and what clues we have about a world beyond them.

In the last hundred years, modern physics and cosmology have shown that there exist regions of the universe forever beyond our reach, hidden by truly ultimate horizons. Such regions exist in those remote parts of the universe where, from our point of view, space expands faster than the speed of light. They are found in black holes, where the gravity is strong enough to retain even light within its field of attraction. And in the realm of the very small, quarks must remain forever confined to their world of extreme density and can never be removed from it. The aim of this book is to describe these ultimate horizons, how they were discovered, how they shape our view of the world, and what clues we have about a world beyond them.

Von der Physik bis zur Informationstheorie und Kosmologie, von der Struktur tierischer Gesellschaften bis zur linguistischen Analyse der menschlichen Schrift zeigen Systeme, die aus vielen interagierenden Bestandteilen bestehen, oft ein kollektives Verhalten, das sich nicht aus der Interaktion der einzelnen Bestandteile vorhersagen lässt. In Mehr als die Summe der Teile befasst sich Helmut Satz mit verschiedenen Formen dieses komplexen Verhaltens, die erst in den letzten Jahrzehnten gründlich untersucht worden sind. Obwohl diese Studien ihren Ursprung in der Physik haben, erweist sich das Verhalten als universell und reicht von der Struktur des frühen Universums über die Bildung von Vogelschwärmen bis hin zur Häufigkeit von Wörtern in literarischen Texten. Die Komplexität wird somit zu einem immer wichtigeren interdisziplinären Bereich für die künftige wissenschaftliche Forschung.Auf konzeptionelle und nicht-technische Weise erschließt Satz dieses spannende Gebiet für eine allgemeine Leserschaft und für Studierende aller naturwissenschaftlichen Fächer.