Human Rights and the Third World: Issues and Discourses deals with the controversial questions on the universalistic notions of human rights. It finds Third World perspectives on human rights and seeks to open up a discursive space in the human rights discourse to address unresolved questions, citing issues and problems from different countries in the Third World: 1. Whether alternative perspectives should be taken as the standard for human rights in the Third World countries?2. Sho...

The process of realizing the ground state of some typical (frustrated) quantum many-body systems, starting from the ‘disordered’ or excited states, can be formally mapped to the search of solutions for computationally hard problems. The dynamics through the critical point, in between, are therefore extremely crucial. In the context of such computational optimization problems, the dynamics (of rapid quenching or slow annealing), while tuning the appropriate elds or uctuations, in particular...

A physicist himself, Gino Segrè writes about what scientists do and why they do it with intimacy, clarity, and passion. In Faust in Copenhagen, he evokes the fleeting, magical moment when physics' and the world was about to lose its innocence forever. Known by physicists as the miracle year, 1932 saw the discovery of the neutron and antimatter, as well as the first artificially induced nuclear transmutations. However, while scientists celebrated these momentous discoveries, which ...

For the last five years, Britain has been under the hammer of Austerity’. In its name, wages have been frozen, benefits have been slashed and public spending squeezed. The pain of a financial crisis caused by bankers and speculators has been borne by ordinary people all over the country and by the poor and disabled most of all.

Over the course of the last century it has become clear that both elementary particle physics and relativity theories are based on the notion of symmetries. These symmetries become manifest in that the "laws of nature" are invariant under spacetime transformations and/or gauge transformations. The consequences of these symmetries were analyzed as early as in 1918 by Emmy Noether on the level of action functionals. Her work did not receive due recognition for nearly half a century, but can ...

This undergraduate textbook discusses the nature of the microscopic universe from a modern perspective, based on Einstein's notions of relativity and Noether's proof of the emergence of conservation laws from symmetries of the equations of motion. These ideas drove the development of the Standard Model of particle physics and subsequent attempts to define a unified (string) theory. The second half of the book explores various aspects of many-body physics, ranging from chemical systems to p...

"Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear."— Salman RushdieRaif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian blogger, shared his thoughts on politics, religion, and liberalism online. He was sentenced to 1,000 lashes, ten years in prison, and a fine of 1 million Saudi Riyal, over a quarter of a million U.S. dollars. This politically topical polemic gathers together Badawi’s pivotal texts. He expresses his opinions on life in an autocratic-Islamic state under the Sharia...

This book presents quantum kinetic theory in a comprehensive way. The focus is on density operator methods and on non-equilibrium Green functions. The theory allows to rigorously treat nonequilibrium dynamics in quantum many-body systems. Of particular interest are ultrafast processes in plasmas, condensed matter and trapped atoms that are stimulated by rapidly developing experiments with short pulse lasers and free electron lasers. To describe these experiments theoretically, the most pow...

Enthusiasm for research on the quantum Hall effect (QHE) is unbounded. The QHE is one of the most fascinating and beautiful phenomena in all branches of physics. Tremendous theoretical and experimental developments are still being made in this sphere. Composite bosons, composite fermions and anyons were among distinguishing ideas in the original edition.In the 2nd edition, fantastic phenomena associated with the interlayer phase coherence in the bilayer system were extensively desc...

An inspiring photographic account of the worldwide Women's March of 2017—one of the biggest peaceful protests in history.On January 21, 2017, five million people in eighty-two countries and on all seven continents stood up with one voice. The Women's March began with one cause, women's rights, but quickly became a movement around the many issues that were hotly debated during the 2016 U.S. presidential race—immigration, health care, environmental protections, LGBTQ ...

Gauge/gravity duality creates new links between quantum theory and gravity. It has led to new concepts in mathematics and physics, and provides new tools to solve problems in many areas of theoretical physics. This book is the first textbook on this important topic, enabling graduate students and researchers in string theory and particle, nuclear and condensed matter physics to get acquainted with the subject. Focusing on the fundamental aspects as well as on the applications, this textboo...

The second edition deals with all essential aspects of non-relativistic quantum physics up to the quantisation of fields. In contrast to common textbooks of quantum mechanics, modern experiments are described both for the purpose of foundation of the theory and in relation to recent applications. Links are made to important research fields and applications such as elementary particle physics, solid state physics and nuclear magnetic resonance in medicine, biology and material science. Spec...