This book builds on the path-breaking work of George E. Smith and further explores the notions of evidence and confirmation in the exact sciences from two perspectives: conceptual and historical. Contributions in this volume investigate the philosophical presuppositions, explanatory scope, and historical precursors of evidence in mathematical physics and related disciplines. The papers are written by and of interest to philosophers and historians of science.

Purpose and Emphasis. Mechanics not only is the oldest branch of physics but was and still is the basis for all of theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics can hardly be understood, perhaps cannot even be formulated, without a good knowledge of general mechanics. Field theories such as electrodynamics borrow their formal framework and many of their building principles from mechanics. In short, throughout the many modern developments of physics where one frequently turns back to the principles of classical mechanics its model character is felt. For this reason it is not surprising that the presentation of mechanics reflects of modern physics and that today this classical to some extent the development branch of theoretical physics is taught rather differently than at the time of Arnold Sommerfeld, in the 1920s, or even in the 1950s, when more emphasis was put on the theory and the applications of partial-differential equations. Today, symmetries and invariance principles, the structure of the space-time continuum, and the geometrical structure of mechanics play an important role. The beginner should realize that mechanics is not primarily the art of describing block-and-tackles, collisions of billiard balls, constrained motions of the cylinder in a washing machine, or bicycle riding.

This book, written for a general readership, reviews and explains the three-body problem in historical context reaching to latest developments in computational physics and gravitation theory. The three-body problem is one of the oldest problems in science and it is most relevant even in today’s physics and astronomy.

The book gives a detailed and rigorous treatment of the theory of optimization (unconstrained optimization, nonlinear programming, semi-infinite programming, etc.) in finite-dimensional spaces. The fundamental results of convexity theory and the theory of duality in nonlinear programming and the theories of linear inequalities, convex polyhedra, and linear programming are covered in detail.

Franz Georg Hey summarises the development and testing of a micro-Newton thrust balance, as well as the downscaling of a High Efficiency Multistage Plasma Thruster to micro-Newton thrust levels. The balance is tailored to fully characterise thruster candidates for the space based gravitational wave detector LISA. Thus, thrust noise measurements in sub-micro-Newton regime can be performed in the overall LISA bandwidth. The downscaled thruster can be operated down to serval tens of micro-Newton with a comparably high specific impulse.

Analysis (Calculus auf Englisch) hat einen sehr schlechten Ruf zwischen Studenten, Schüler und Laien. Das liegt oft an der extremen Abstraktion von Konzepte wie Ableitung oder Integrale.

“Newton’s Gravity” conveys the power of simple mathematics to tell the fundamental truth about nature. Many people know the tides are caused by the pull of the Moon and to a lesser extent the Sun. But very few can explain exactly how and why that happens. Fewer still can calculate the actual pulls of the Moon and Sun on the oceans. This book shows in clear detail how to do this with simple tools.