Your Spark Is Light: The Quantum Mechanics of Human Creation

In life and work, Claudio Bunster (formerly Teitelboim) prefers extreme challenges. Bunster, a physicist who contemplates brain-warping theories of space and time, returned to his native Chile from the United States precisely when most intellectuals would have stayed clear— during the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship (K. Mossman, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

I would like to take some poetic license in introducing this volume in a way that seems appropriate for a country, like Chile, that Iooks to the ocean. I believe it was Heisenberg who compared different times in physics with sailing a ship. He said that most of the time we keep our ships in port, or in the protection of a bay. But on a few occasions we go into the open sea, and those occasions are really the great times in theoretical physics, when everything can change. It does not seem totally unwarranted to hope that we are now entering one of those times. In that spirit, I would like to mention a wonderful book, which in English would be called something like Chile, Or a Crazy Geography.

Particles with fractional statistics interpolating between bosons and fermions have attracted considerable interest from mathematical physicists. In recent years it has emerged that these so-called anyons have rather unexpected applications, such as the fractional Hall effect, anyonic excitations in films of liquid helium, and high-temrperature superconductivity. Furthermore, they are discussed also in the context of conformal field theories. This book is a systematic and pedagogical introduction that considers the subject of anyons from many different points of view. In particular, the author presents the relation of anyons to braid groups and Chern-Simons field theory and devotes three chapters to physical applications. The book, while being of interest to researchers, primarily addresses advanced students of mathematics and physics.

From January 8-13,1990, distinguished physicists from many nations came to Chile to share with each other and with Latin American students exciting recent developments. The occasion was the third of a series of meetings on Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems which are held every two years at the Centro de Estudios Cientificos de Santiago.

Non-central forces have a wide variety of applications in classical and quantum mechanics as demonstrated in this book. The author emphasizes the study of time-dependent potentials, predominantly in two dimensions, without neglecting the quite well understood time-independent case. The construction of invariants in the classical case and the study of solutions to Schrödinger's equation, as well as a detailed presentation of various mathematical techniques are of main concern to the author. The book addresses theoretical physicists and mathematicians, but it will also be useful for electrical and mechanical engineers.

Based on the interactive program Interquanta, Quantum Mechanics on the Macintosh, uses extensive 3-D graph- ics to guide the student through computer experiments in the quantum mechanics of free particle motion, bound states and scattering, tunneling, two-particle interactions, and more. It also includes a section on special functions of mathematical physics. With more than 200 problems, the text and programs provide students with practical experiences in using such hard-to-visualize concepts as complex amplitudes, eigenvalues, and scattering cross sections. The diskettes included with the book provide two versions of the programs, one for use in computers with a mathematical coprocessor, the other optimized for machines without a coprocessor.

Based on the interactive program Interquanta, "Quantum Mechanics on the Macintosh", uses 3-D graphics to guide the student through computer experiments in the quantum mechanics of free particle motion, bound states and scattering, tunnelling, two-particle interactions and more. It also inc ludes a section on special functions of mathematical physics. With more than 200 problems, the text and the accompanying computer programs offer students practical experiences in using such hard-to-visualize concepts such as complex amplitudes, eigenvalues and scattering cross sections. The diskettes included with the book provide two versions of the programs, one for use in computers with a mathematical coprocessor and the other optimized for machines without a coprocessor.