The Poincarè Seminar is held twice a year at the Institute Henri Poincarè in Paris. The goal of this seminar is to provide up-to-date information about general topics of great interest in physics. Both the theoretical and experimental results are covered, with some historical background. Particular care is devoted to the pedagogical nature of the presentation. This volume contains the lectures of the third and fourth Poincarè Seminar, both held in 2003. The third one is devoted to Bose-Einstein Condensation: it covers the physics of superfluid liquid helium as well as the recently discovered atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. Major experimental results are presented, together with relevant theoretical approaches and remaining open questions. The fourth one concentrates on Entropy, giving a comprehensive account of the history and various realizations of this concept, from thermodynamics to black holes, and including theoretical and experimental discussions of the corresponding fluctuations for mesoscopic systems near equilibrium. Contributing authors: Roger Balian Sèbasten Balibar Claude Cohen-Tannoudji Jean Dalibard Thibault Damour Olivier Darrigol Christian Maes Philippe Noziéres Fèlix Ritort Christophe Salomon Gora V. Shlyapnikov

The Poincaré Seminar is held twice a year at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris. This volume contains the lectures of the 2002 seminars. The main topic of the first one was the vacuum energy, in particular the Casimir effect and the nature of the cosmological constant. The second one concentrated on renormalization, giving a comprehensive account of its mathematical structure and applications to high energy physics, statistical mechanics and classical mechanics. Students will find excellent introductions to the subjects with further lectures leading to the frontiers of experimental and theoretical research, scientists will profit from contributions by outstanding experts.

This is the first volume of a modern introduction to quantum field theory which addresses both mathematicians and physicists, at levels ranging from advanced undergraduate students to professional scientists. The book bridges the acknowledged gap between the different languages used by mathematicians and physicists. For students of mathematics the author shows that detailed knowledge of the physical background helps to motivate the mathematical subjects and to discover interesting interrelationships between quite different mathematical topics. For students of physics, fairly advanced mathematics is presented, which goes beyond the usual curriculum in physics.

This fascinating look at combinatorial games, that is, games not involving chance or hidden information, offers updates on standard games such as Go and Hex, on impartial games such as Chomp and Wythoff's Nim, and on aspects of games with infinitesimal values, plus analyses of the complexity of some games and puzzles and surveys on algorithmic game theory, on playing to lose, and on coping with cycles. The volume is rounded out with an up-to-date bibliography by Fraenkel and, for readers eager to get their hands dirty, a list of unsolved problems by Guy and Nowakowski. Highlights include some of Siegel's groundbreaking work on loopy games, the unveiling by Friedman and Landsberg of the use of renormalization to give very intriguing results about Chomp, and Nakamura's "Counting Liberties in Capturing Races of Go." Like its predecessors, this book should be on the shelf of all serious games enthusiasts.

Written by international experts, this book explores the possibilities for the next 20 years in conducting gravitational experiments in space that would make the most of the new and much-improved existing capabilities. They start from the premise that over the next decade the gravitational physics community will benefit from dramatic improvements in many technologies critical to the tests of gravity. This volume contains a comprehensive presentation of the theory, technology, missions and projects on relativistic gravity in space.

From Hamiltonian Chaos to Complex Systems: A Nonlinear Physics Approach collects contributions on recent developments in non-linear dynamics and statistical physics with an emphasis on complex systems. This book provides a wide range of state-of-the-art research in these fields. The unifying aspect of this book is demonstration of how similar tools coming from dynamical systems, nonlinear physics, and statistical dynamics can lead to a large panorama of research in various fields of physics and beyond, most notably with the perspective of application in complex systems.

Over the years enormous effort was invested in proving ergodicity, but for a number of reasons, con?dence in the fruitfulness of this approach has waned. — Y. Ben-Menahem and I. Pitowsky [1] Abstract The basic motivation behind the present text is threefold: To give a new explanation for the emergence of thermodynamics, to investigate the interplay between quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, and to explore possible ext- sions of the common validity range of thermodynamics. Originally, thermodynamics has been a purely phenomenological science. Early s- entists (Galileo, Santorio, Celsius, Fahrenheit) tried to give de?nitions for quantities which were intuitively obvious to the observer, like pressure or temperature, and studied their interconnections. The idea that these phenomena might be linked to other ?elds of physics, like classical mechanics, e.g., was not common in those days. Such a connection was basically introduced when Joule calculated the heat equ- alent in 1840 showing that heat was a form of energy, just like kinetic or potential energy in the theory of mechanics. At the end of the 19th century, when the atomic theory became popular, researchers began to think of a gas as a huge amount of bouncing balls inside a box.