Science and Hypothesis

by Henri Poincare, J. Larmor (Preface by)

Overview

Nontechnical essays on hypothesis in physical theory, concept of number, magnitude, force, intuition vs. logic, more. Chapters include "On the Nature of Mathematical Reasoning," "Mathematical Magnitude and Experiment," and "The Calculus of Probabilities."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486602219
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	11/30/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	319,208
Product dimensions:	5.45(w) x 8.02(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 - 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist by Eric Temple Bell, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.

As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until it was solved in 2002-2003.

In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.

Poincaré made clear the importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928) in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.

Table of Contents

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
PART I. NUMBER AND MAGNITUDE.
 CHAPTER I. ON THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL REASONING
 CHAPTER II. MATHEMATICAL MAGNITUDE AND EXPERIMENT
PART II. SPACE.
 CHAPTER III. NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRIES
 CHAPTER IV. SPACE AND GEOMETRY
 CHAPTER V. EXPERIMENT AND GEOMETRY
PART III. FORCE.
 CHAPTER VI. THE CLASSICAL MECHANICS
 CHAPTER VII. RELATIAVE AND ABSOLUTE MOTION
 CHAPTER VIII. ENERGY AND THERMO-DYNAMICS
PART IV. NATURE.
 CHAPTER IX. HYPOTHESES IN PHYSICS
 CHAPTER X. THE THEORIES OF MODERN PHYSICS
 CHAPTER XI. THE CALCULUS OF PROBABILITIES
 CHAPTER XII. OPTICS AND ELECTRICITY
 CHAPTER XIII. ELECTRO-DYNAMICS