Zeno meets modern science and other physics essays

This is a collection of physics essays written by the author at various times. The essays are both entertaining and informative. The book begins with some unexpected encounters of Zeno with modern science. Surprisingly, questions aroused two and half millennium ago and scrutinized many times are still not exhausted. The second chapter is intended to give some flavor of mirror matter, which is predicted to exist if parity is an unbroken symmetry of nature, to non-experts. The theme of hypothetical mirror matter is elaborated in the next three essays up to the conclusion that the mirror matter, if it exists at all, could be even technologically useful. It will allow a construction of would be Maxwell's demons which can act like perpetuum mobiles of the second kind: extract heat energy from only one reservoir, use it to do work and be isolated from the rest of ordinary world. The next essay describes a generalization of Feynman's notorious derivation of Maxwell equations to the case of extra spatial dimensions. Then Special relativity is reviewed from the perspective of modern science. Sparkling April 1 joke about contemporary physics and Darwinian evolution ends the book.

Autorentext

Zurab Silagadze was born in 1957 in Georgia. In 1979 he graduated Tbilisi State University. In 1986 moved to Novosibirsk where he got his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics in 1995. Currently he works as senior researcher at Budker institute of Nuclear Physics and as assistant professor at Novosibirsk State University.