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History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

David D Nolte

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in History

Historical Notes: Modern Dynamics Dec 2018

Historical Notes: Modern Dynamics

David D Nolte

Historical notes and historical biographies in the history of physics and the history of modern dynamics.

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The Tangled Tale Of Phase Space, David D. Nolte Dec 2009

The Tangled Tale Of Phase Space, David D. Nolte

David D Nolte

(Preview of Chapter 6: Galileo Unbound: Oxford 2018) Phase space has been called one of the most powerful inventions of modern science.  But its historical origins are clouded in a tangle of independent discovery and mis-attributions that persist today.  This Physics Today article unravels the twisted tale of the discovery and the naming of phase space that began with Liouville in 1838, but by no means ended there, culminating in an encyclopedia article of 1911 that had unintended and lasting etymological side effects never intended by its authors.

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The Glass Bead Game, David D. Nolte Jan 2001

The Glass Bead Game, David D. Nolte

David D Nolte

Our lives are filled with images. Everyday we see signals, read signs, and learn symbols.We find our way with maps, look for news and bargains in newspapers, calculate ourbills and taxes. We turn printed music into wonderful sounds, often without consciouseffort. Icons fill our churches, synagogues and mosques, dot our computer screens, andare sprawled on billboards, on clothing and advertisement pages. Architecture and artconspire to fill our views with meaningful shapes and form. Pictures capture an instant intime, while movies and video entertain us with visual motion. We live in a visual world,full of information transmitted by light.

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The Age Of Entanglement Jan 2001

The Age Of Entanglement

David D Nolte

Quantum mechanics is a venerable field of study. The year 2000 marked the 100th anniversary of theoriginal quantum hypothesis proposed by Max Planck in November of 1900. Few current fields in physicsor engineering are as old as quantum mechanics. It predates relativity, both special and general. It predatesnuclear and particle physics. Quantum mechanics even predates universal acceptance of the molecularhypothesis, that is, that all matter is made up of individual molecules in thermal motion. It may be hard tobelieve, but this happened only after Einstein's paper on Brownian motion was published in his miracleyear 1905.

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Preface, David D. Nolte Dec 2000

Preface, David D. Nolte

David D Nolte

Light is the quintessential messenger. It travels faster than anything. It weighs nothing, and
costs almost as little to make. A million rays of light carrying a thousand colors can travel along with each
other or through each other without interacting, carrying data and commands between millions of locations.
This is the parallelism of light, and it represents massive communication and computational power. With
it, machines of light can do a million things at once.

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