The Three-body Problem from Pythagoras to Hawking
By: and and and and and
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- Synopsis
- This book, written for ageneral readership, reviews and explains the three-body problem in historicalcontext reaching to latest developments in computational physics and gravitationtheory. The three-body problem is one of the oldest problems in science and itis most relevant even in today's physics and astronomy. The long history of theproblem from Pythagoras to Hawking parallels the evolution of ideas about ourphysical universe, with a particular emphasis on understanding gravity and howit operates between astronomical bodies. The oldest astronomical three-body problemis the question how and when the moon and the sun line up with the earth to produceeclipses. Once the universal gravitation was discovered by Newton, it became immediatelya problem to understand why these three-bodies form a stable system, in spiteof the pull exerted from one to the other. In fact, it was a big questionwhether this system is stable at all in the long run. Leading mathematicians attackedthis problem over more than two centuries without arriving at a definiteanswer. The introduction of computers in the last half-a-century hasrevolutionized the study; now many answers have been found while new questions aboutthe three-body problem have sprung up. One of the most recent developments hasbeen in the treatment of the problem in Einstein's General Relativity, the new theoryof gravitation which is an improvement on Newton's theory. Now it is possible tosolve the problem for three black holes and to test one of the most fundamentaltheorems of black hole physics, the no-hair theorem, due to Hawking and hisco-workers.
- Copyright:
- 2016
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9783319227269
- Publisher:
- Springer International Publishing, Cham
- Date of Addition:
- 10/20/16
- Copyrighted By:
- Springer
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Science
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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