Jenni Kershaw’s ordinary, eighth grade life becomes a thing of the past when her science class goes on a field trip. Armed with only their notebooks, MP3 players, and wits, Jenni and her classmates are magically transported to another world. Follow Jenni and her class on their extraordinary adventures in their fight to find a way home and discover who— and what— they really are.
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Author : Alan Tucker
Genre : Juvenile Fiction
Summary : Eighth-grade life becomes a thing of the past when Jenni and her science class go on a field trip and are unknowingly transported to another world. There they encounter amazing creatures, some of which think a kid shish kebab would be a tasty treat.
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Author : Rudolf Arnheim
Genre : Art
Summary : This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction between the striving for order in nature and in man and the principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics - between the tendency toward greater organization and the general trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.
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Author : Arieh Ben-Naim
Genre : Science
Summary : The aim of this book is to explain in simple language what we know and what we do not know about information and entropy -- two of the most frequently discussed topics in recent literature -- and whether they are relevant to life and the entire universe. Entropy is commonly interpreted as a measure of disorder. This interpretation has caused a great amount of "disorder" in the literature. One of the aims of this book is to put some "order" in this "disorder." The book explains with minimum amount of mathematics what information theory is and how it is related to thermodynamic entropy. Then it critically examines the application of these concepts to the question of "What is life?" and whether or not they can be applied to the entire universe.
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Author : W Tschacher
Genre : Science
Summary : This volume focuses on the modeling of cognition, and brings together contributions from psychologists and researchers in the field of cognitive science. The shared platform of this work is to advocate a dynamical systems approach to cognition. Several aspects of this approach are considered here: chaos theory, artificial intelligence and Alfie models, catastrophe theory and, most importantly, self-organization theory or synergetics. The application of nonlinear systems theory to cognitive science in general, and to cognitive psychology in particular, is a growing field that has gained further momentum thanks to new contributions from the science of robotics. The recent development in cognitive science towards an account of embodiment, together with the general approach of complexity theory and dynamics, will have a major impact on our psychological understanding of reasoning, thinking and behavior. Contents: Theory and Concepts:Synergetics and Some Applications to Psychology (H Haken)Defending the Dynamical Hypothesis (T van Gelder)From Continuous Dynamics to Symbols (H Jaeger)On Measures for Order and Its Relation to Complexity (J Shiner et al.)Synergetics of Human Creativity (H Knyazeva & H Haken)Dynamical Concepts in Cognitive Psychology:Situated Cognition, Ecological Perception, and Synergetics: A Novel Perspective for Cognitive Psychology? (W Tschacher & J-P Dauwalder)Attitudes and the Self as Self-Organising Systems (R Eiser)An Affect-Centered Model of the Psyche and Its Consequences for a New Understanding of Nonlinear Psychodynamics (L Ciompi)Formation and Adaptation of Schemata (T Bröcker & J Kriz)Simulations of Stagewise Development with a Symbolic Architecture (F Gobet)Autonomous Agents:The Embodied Cognitive Science Approach (C Scheier & R Pfeifer)A Computational Model of Spatial Development (K Hiraki et al.)Societies of Autonomous Agents and Their Reorganization (N Glaser & P Morignot)Investigations into Internal and External Aspects of Dynamic Agent-Environment Couplings (K Dautenhahn)A Formal Theory of Collective Intelligence (W Sulis)Empirical Studies:The Detection of Catastrophe Flags in Personally Relevant Decisions (M Coulson & S Nunn)Synergetic Organization in Speech Rhythm (F Cummins)Exploring the Dynamics of Personality Change with Time Series Models (F Keller et al.)Hierarchical Dynamics Affecting Work Performance in Organizations (S J Guastello) Readership: Psychologists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, philosophers and biologists. Keywords:Artificial Intelligence (AI);Autonomous Agents;(Embodied) Cognition;(Situated) Cognition;Dynamical Systems;Dynamics;Embodiment;Psychology;Robot;Self-Organization;Synergetics
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Author : Arieh Ben-Naim
Genre : Science
Summary : The principal message of this book is that thermodynamics and statistical mechanics will benefit from replacing the unfortunate, misleading and mysterious term ?entropy? with a more familiar, meaningful and appropriate term such as information, missing information or uncertainty. This replacement would facilitate the interpretation of the ?driving force? of many processes in terms of informational changes and dispel the mystery that has always enshrouded entropy.It has been 140 years since Clausius coined the term ?entropy?; almost 50 years since Shannon developed the mathematical theory of ?information? ? subsequently renamed ?entropy.? In this book, the author advocates replacing ?entropy? by ?information,? a term that has become widely used in many branches of science.The author also takes a new and bold approach to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Information is used not only as a tool for predicting distributions but as the fundamental cornerstone concept of thermodynamics, held until now by the term ?entropy.? The topics covered include the fundamentals of probability and information theory; the general concept of information as well as the particular concept of information as applied in thermodynamics; the re-derivation of the Sackur?Tetrode equation for the entropy of an ideal gas from purely informational arguments; the fundamental formalism of statistical mechanics; and many examples of simple processes the ?driving force? for which is analyzed in terms of information.
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Author : Felix Alba-Juez
Genre :
Summary : This Black & White printed Edition of Aiming at Reality, the second book of the series 'Quantum Physics free of Folklore', starts with a hypothetical Socratic/Platonic dialog between the realist Sancho Panza and the idealist Don Quixote, after the latter confronted the Reality of colliding with a windmill. He had kicked at one of his imaginary giants and the real windmill had kicked back at him. The Reality of the impact had not been compromised: Don Quixote 'explained' to Sancho that the same enchanter who had burned his library had -with a spooky action at a distance- turned the giant into a windmill right before their encounter. Somehow, the real windmill had been created by the measurement (encounter) while, before it, a blurred pseudo-Reality (a whole set of potentialities) had been hovering in the mind of the ingenious knight-errant. The parallel between this iconic passage of Cervantes's fictional magnum opus and what happened during the first half of the 20th century (and is still happening) is compelling. Reality has dwarfed fiction. Most of the conundrums, ingrained in the century-old controversy regarding the physical interpretations of Quantum Physics, are encrypted in the imaginary dialog between Don Quixote and Sancho: 1. What is the nature of a physical object in the micro-world? Why do we insist in confusing the semantics of 'behaving like' (epistemic metaphor) with the semantics of 'being' (ontic). Micro-objects are neither particles nor waves (and of course they are not both!) 2. What is Probability? How do Probability and Statistics work together to describe Reality in Quantum Physics? Are they just a tool to palliate our lack of knowledge and/or limited computing capacity or... are they Nature's intrinsic modus operandi? 3. What is the role of the observer? Is the correct interpretation of Quantum Mechanics intimately related to the correct interpretation of probability (classical, subjectivist, frequentist, and propensity)? 4. Why are complex numbers so important for the new Physics? If the probabilities are real numbers, why does Quantum Physics calculate them through a mysterious complex number? 5. Why is the Second Law of Thermodynamics not a strictly deterministic law but a probabilistic one? Why is a macro-property like Entropy a measure of disorder (randomness) in the microcosm and how is it related to Nature's innovation by chance we see in biological evolution and everywhere? And what is the relation between Statistical Entropy and the anisotropy of time? Through a quantum-like description of a mundane macro-object like the Galton/Popper bean machine, the reader can grasp the concepts of quantum state, eigenstates, eigenvalues, and wavefunction. S/he can also understand: a. Probabilities are objective properties of the physical world that 'kick' us back when we 'kick' them; b. What is really behind the infamous 'collapse of the wavefunction'; c. A bean (photon) does not need to 'know' whether a pin (slit) has been removed (closed) or not; and d. Einstein's spooky action at a distance is happening around us all the time. The fact that the reader may not have a scientific education does not mean that s/he does not have the intelligence to understand profound concepts -- as long as they are presented with semantic and epistemological clarity. After all, Einstein said that Science is simply the refinement of our intuition and everyday experiences.
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Author : Frank Schweitzer
Genre : Computers
Summary : During the past twenty years, a broad spectrum of theories and methods have been developed in physics, chemistry and molecular biology to explain structure formation in complex systems. These methods have been applied to many different fields such as economics, sociology and town planning, and this book reflects the interdisciplinary nature of complexity and self-organisation. The main focus is on the emergence of collective phenomena from individual or microscopic interactions. Presents a wide-ranging overview from fundamental aspects of the evolution of complexity, to applications in biology, ecology, sociology, economics, and urban structure formation.