Science and Hypothesis

by Henri Poincare, J. Larmor (Preface by)

Overview

Here is Poincare's famous discussion of creative psychology as it is revealed in the physical sciences. Explaining how such basic concepts as number and magnitude, space and force were developed, the great French mathematician refutes the skeptical position that modern scientific method and its results are wholly factitious. The places of rigorous logic and intuitive leaps are both established by an analysis of contrasting methods of idea-creation in individuals and in modern scientific traditions. The nature of hypothesis and the role of probability are investigated with all of Poincare's usual fertility of insight.
Partial contents: On the nature of mathematical reasoning. Magnitude and experiment. Space: non-Euclidean geometrics, space and geometry, experiment and geometry. Force: classical mechanics, relative and absolute motion, energy and thermodynamics. Nature: hypotheses in physics, the theories of modern physics, the calculus of probabilities, optics and electricity, electro-dynamics.
"Poincare's was the last man to take practically all mathematics, both pure and applied as his province. Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic vision that Poincare's had, and none is his superior in the gift of clear exposition." Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell, Professor of Mathematics, University of Cambridge"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486602219
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	11/30/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged
Pages:	288
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