The second edition of this book would not have been possible without the comments and suggestions from students, especially those at Columbia University. Many of the new topics introduced here are a direct result of student feedback that helped refine and clarify the material. The intention of this book was to develop material that the author would have liked to have had available as a student.

Everywhere in the world, except, for the time being, in some Asian countries, young people are losing interest in science. This disenchantment with science studies is particularly strong in the United States, but has affected Europe, and France especially. Official statistics confirm this, and I can add a telling example of my own. When I began teaching physics at Grenoble University in 1960, there were some 350 students studying to be electrical engineers. Today, 57 students are enrolled in the Physics Maitrise programme at the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, and 15 of them are foreign students. In that time interval, the total number of students enrolled in institutes of higher learning in mainland France rose from 309 700 (in 1960-1961) to 2 111 100 (in 2000-2001). If we look at what happened in the USA, to try to avoid making the same mistakes, there is indeed a strongly antiscientific trend in that society, of which the "Politically Correct Movement" is the most extreme manifestation. Yet this movement has profoundly influenced the humanities departments of American universities, and the persons responsible for training teachers. There is a risk that similar negative effects will show up in France, where many primary school teachers have a background in the humanities, and often have no scientific culture at all. c. P. Snow's famous pamphlet on the "two cultures" was published in 1959, but is still exceedingly topical and should be recommended reading in all teacher training institutes.

This book is the result of my teaching efforts during the last ten years at the Royal Institute of Technology. The purpose is to present the subject of polymer physics for undergraduate and graduate students, to focus the fundamental aspects of the subject and to show the link between experiments and theory. The intention is not to present a compilation of the currently available literature on the subject. Very few reference citations have thus been made. Each chapter has essentially the same structure: starling with an introduction, continuing with the actual subject, summarizing the chapter in 30D-500 words, and finally presenting problems and a list of relevant references for the reader. The solutions to the problems presented in Chapters 1-12 are given in Chapter 13. The theme of the book is essentially polymer science, with the exclusion of that part dealing directly with chemical reactions. The fundamentals in polymer science, including some basic polymer chemistry, are presented as an introduction in the first chapter. The next eight chapters deal with different phenomena (processes) and states of polymers. The last three chapters were written with the intention of making the reader think practically about polymer physics. How can a certain type of problem be solved? What kinds of experiment should be conducted? This book would never have been written without the help of my friend and adviser, Dr Anthony Bristow, who has spent many hours reading through the manuscript. criticizing the content.

Over 100 scientists met at the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose. California for a symposium on the Physics and Chemistry of Liquid Crystal Devices. The two-day meeting was intellectually stimulating with excellent oral presentations and with person-to-person discussions. The applications of liquid crystals have developed dramatically in the past ten years. In these few years, they have moved from being a laboratory curiosity to products in the market place. The first commercial application (1940's) of liquid crystals was the preparation of a light polarizer. The second commercial application was their use as temperature sensors. The third major application of liquid crystals dealt with commercial displays. Other current applications include polymeric and graphitic fibers and light attenuators. The future of liquid crystals looks very promising indeed. One can expect to see new fibers of qualities which will be superior to those presently known. Graphitic fibers or other physical forms of graphitic materials will be used as catalytic surfaces for chemical synthesis. In the display area. one can expect to see television screens using liquid crystals. Larger displays than are now used in wrist watches and pocket calculators will become available. Liquid crystals using color displays will become commercially practical. Watches. calculators and television screens will have color.

71 For a given value of I the field is independent of the geometrical composition of the coil inside the winding space. The actual number of turns and the cross­ section of the conductors is entirely determined by the impedance of the power supply to which the magnet should be adapted. In the case of low impedance (high current and low voltage) few turns of thick metal should be used. In the case of high impedance (low current and high voltage) many turns of thin material are needed. High impedance coils are made of square wire or flat strip wound into layers or "pancakes" 1. A nice system for low impedance coils was deve­ loped by BITTER. The turns of his magnets consist of flat copper discs separated by thin insulating sheets and joined together at their edges. In this type of coil the current density is higher near the axis than at the exterior, resulting into a higher value for G (see above). For the details of the construction we refer to the original papers 2, 3. If the power is dissipated at a low voltage the cooling may be achieved with the help of water. Distilled water should be preferred over mains' water in order to prevent the magnet from corrosion. In the case of a high voltage coil some non-inflammable organic fluid should be used. A low viscosity and a large specific heat are advantageous.

This book, a classic in its field, deals with the physical systems and physiological processes that intervene in music. It analyzes what objective, physical properties of sound are associated with what subjective psychological sensations of music, and it describes how these sound patterns are actually generated in musical instruments, how they propagate through the environment, and how they are detected by the ear and interpreted in the brain. Using the precise language of science, but without complicated mathematics, the author weaves a close mesh of the physics, psychophysics and neurobiology relevant to music. A prior knowledge of physics, mathematics, neurobiology or psychology is not required to understand most of the book; it is, however, assumed that the reader is familiar with music - in particular, with musical notation, musical scales and intervals, and some of the basics of musical instruments. This new edition presents substantially updated coverage of psychoacoustics, including:

This book is the first to offer a systematic account of the role of language in the development and interpretation of physics. An historical-conceptual analysis of the co-evolution of mathematical and physical concepts leads to the classical/quatum interface. Bohrian orthodoxy stresses the indispensability of classical concepts and the functional role of mathematics. This book analyses ways of extending, and then going beyond this orthodoxy orthodoxy. Finally, the book analyzes how a revised interpretation of physics impacts on basic philosophical issues: conceptual revolutions, realism, and reductionism.

This textbook presents mathematical physics in its chronological order. It originated in a four-semester course I offered to both mathematicians and physicists, who were only required to have taken the conventional intro­ ductory courses. In order to be able to cover a suitable amount of advanced materil;ll for graduate students, it was necessary to make a careful selection of topics. I decided to cover only those subjects in which one can work from the basic laws to derive physically relevant results with full mathematical rigor. Models which are not based on realistic physical laws can at most serve as illustrations of mathematical theorems, and theories whose pre­ dictions are only related to the basic principles through some uncontrollable approximation have been omitted. The complete course comprises the following one-semester lecture series: I. Classical Dynamical Systems II. Classical Field Theory III. Quantum Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules IV. Quantum Mechanics of Large Systems Unfortunately, some important branches of physics, such as the rela­ tivistic quantum theory, have not yet matured from the stage of rules for calculations to mathematically well understood disciplines, and are there­ fore not taken up. The above selection does not imply any value judgment, but only attempts to be logically and didactically consistent. General mathematical knowledge is assumed, at the level of a beginning graduate student or advanced undergraduate majoring in physics or mathe­ matics.

The connection between mathematics and physics .•. Is it only that physicists talk in the language of mathematics? It is more. This book describes how mathematics associates to some important physical abstractions (modelsl its own mental constructions, which are far removed from the direct impressions of experience and physical experiment.