This is a new release of the original 1959 edition.

The book is an expanded autobiography of the famous theoretical physicist Isaak Khalatnikov. He worked together with L.D. Landau at the Institute for Physical Problems lead by P.L. Kapitza. He is the co-author of L.D. Landau in a number of important works. They worked together in the frame of the so-called Nuclear Bomb Project. After the death of L.D. Landau, I.M. Khalatnikov initiated the establishment of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, named in honour of L.D. Landau, within the USSR Academy of Sciences. He headed this institute from the beginning as its Director. The institute inherited almost all traditions of the Landau scientific school and played a prominent role in the development of theoretical physics. So, this is a story about how the institute was created, how it worked, and about the life of the physicists in the "golden age" of the Soviet science. A separate chapter is devoted to today ́s life of the institute and the young generation of physicists working now in science. It is an historically interesting book on the development of Soviet and Russian science and presents the background of the Soviet nuclear bomb program in the cold war age. In war times, Khalatnikov was a chief of the military staff of nuclear research. He writes about the internal conditions of Soviet society, the way of operating of the Soviet authorities and ways for scientists to interact with them. It gives many interesting insights into the development of superconductivity and superfluidity. The book is written by the most experienced and best informed person among the few living Russian scientists in the environment of Landau. Many stories of the book were never published before and considered as "top secret".

This book offers the first comprehensive and authoritative text on the history of physics in Italy’s industrial and financial capital, from the foundation of the University of Milan’s Institute of Physics in 1924 up to the early 1960s, when it moved to its current location. It includes biographies and a historical-scientific analysis of the main research topics investigated by world-renowned physicists such as Aldo Pontremoli, Giovanni Polvani, Giovanni Gentile Jr., Beppo Occhialini, and Piero Caldirola, highlighting their contributions to the development of Italian physics in a national and international context. Further, the book provides a historical perspective on the interplay of physics and politics in Italy during both the Fascist regime and the postwar reconstruction period, which led to the creation of the CISE (Centro Informazioni Studi Esperienze, a research center for applied nuclear physics, funded by private industries) in 1946, and of the Milan division of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in 1951.

The aim of this volume of scientific essays is twofold. On the one hand, by remembering the scientific figure of Eduardo R. Caianiello, it aims at focusing on his outstanding contributions – from theoretical physics to cybernetics – which after so many years still represent occasion of innovative paths to be fruitfully followed. It must be stressed the contribution that his interdisciplinary methodology can still be of great help in affording and solving present day complex problems. On the other hand, it aims at pinpointing with the help of the scientists contributing to the volume – some crucial problems in present day research in the fields of interest of Eduardo Caianiello and which are still among the main lines of investigation of some of the Institutes founded by Eduardo (Istituto di Cibernetica del CNR, IIAS, etc).

Winner of the 2007 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics since the middle of the twentieth century. Introduced by the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) soon after World War II as a means of simplifying lengthy calculations in quantum electrodynamics, they soon gained adherents in many branches of the discipline. Yet as new physicists adopted the tiny line drawings, they also adapted the diagrams and introduced their own interpretations. Drawing Theories Apart traces how generations of young theorists learned to frame their research in terms of the diagrams—and how both the diagrams and their users were molded in the process. Drawing on rich archival materials, interviews, and more than five hundred scientific articles from the period, Drawing Theories Apart uses the Feynman diagrams as a means to explore the development of American postwar physics. By focusing on the ways young physicists learned new calculational skills, David Kaiser frames his story around the crafting and stabilizing of the basic tools in the physicist's kit—thus offering the first book to follow the diagrams once they left Feynman's hands and entered the physics vernacular.

This biography provides a stimulating and coherent blend of scientific and personal narratives describing the many achievements of the theoretical physicist Herbert Fröhlich. For more than half a century, Fröhlich was an internationally renowned and much respected figure who exerted a decisive influence, often as a ‘man ahead of his time’, in fields as diverse as meson theory and biology. Although best known for his contributions to the theory of dielectrics and superconductivity, he worked in many other fields, his most important legacy being the pioneering introduction quantum field-theoretical methods into condensed matter physics in 1952, which revolutionised the subsequent development of the subject. Gerard Hyland has written an absorbing and informative account, in which Herbert Fröhlich’s magnetic personality shines through.

This volume is concerned with the determination of the behaviour of perturbation theory at large orders in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, and its application to the problem of summation of perturbation series. Perturbation series in quantum field theory and in many quantum mechanics models are only asymptotic and thus diverge for all values of the expansion parameter. Their behaviour at large orders provides information about whether they define the theory uniquely (the problem of Borel summability). It suggests methods to extract numerical information from the series when the expansion parameter is not small. The articles reprinted here deal with the explicit evaluation of large-order behaviour in many quantum mechanics and field theory models. The large-order behaviour is related to barrier penetration effects for unphysical values of the expansion parameter, which can be calculated by WKB or instanton methods. The calculation of critical exponents of &fgr;4 field theory is presented as a practical application.