Böcker av Martin H. Krieger

In this insightful work, Martin H. Krieger shows what physicists are really doing behind the nearly impenetrable cloud of mathematical models they use as research tools. He argues that the technical details of these complex calculations serve not only as a means to an end, but also reveal key aspects of the physical properties they model. Using two tours de force of modern physics as case studies - proofs that ordinary matter is stable, and solutions to the Ising model of a phase transition (how a liquid freezes to a solid, for instance) - Krieger uncovers the philosophical foundations on which the mathematical models of these phenomena are built. In so doing, he gives the reader a better feel not just for how physicists believe the natural world is structured, but also for how they have arrived at those conclusions. Krieger's lucid discussions will help students of physics and applied mathematics appreciate the larger physical issues behind the mathematical details of modern physics. Historians and philosophers of science will gain deeper insights into how theoretical physicists do science, while technically advanced general readers will get a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of modern physics.

Like a CAT scan of an organ, urban tomography documents metropolitan life by sampling and compiling multiple slices of a city. Using photography and audio recording, urban planning expert Martin H. Krieger scans contemporary Los Angeles to illuminate different aspects of a community, from work to worship.

The product of a lifetime of experience in American universities, The Scholar's Survival Manual offers advice for students, professors, and administrators on how to get work done, the path to becoming a professor, getting tenured, and making visible contributions to scholarship, as well as serving on promotion and tenure committees. Martin H. Krieger covers a broad cross section of the academic experience from a graduate student's first foray into the job market through retirement. Because advice is notoriously difficult to take and context matters a great deal, Krieger has allowed his ideas to percolate through dozens of discussions. Some of the advice is instrumental, matters of expediency; some demands our highest aspirations. Readers may open the book at any place and begin reading; for the more systematic there is a detailed table of contents. Krieger's tone is direct, an approach born of the knowledge that students and professors too often ignore suggestions that would have prevented them from becoming academic roadkill. This essential book will help readers sidestep a similar fate.

Doing Physics makes concepts of physics easier to grasp by relating them to everyday knowledge. Addressing some of the models and metaphors that physicists use to explain the physical world, Martin H. Krieger describes the conceptual world of physics by means of analogies to economics, anthropology, theater, carpentry, mechanisms such as clockworks, and machine tool design. The interaction of elementary particles or chemical species, for example, can be related to the theory of kinship-who can marry whom is like what can interact with what. Likewise, the description of physical situations in terms of interdependent particles and fields is analogous to the design of a factory with its division of labor among specialists. For the new edition, Krieger has revised the text and added a chapter on the role of mathematics and formal models in physics. Doing Physics will be of special interest to economists, political theorists, anthropologists, and sociologists as well as philosophers of science.