Problems in The Foundations of Physics

Research and scientific progress are based upqn intuition coordinated with a wide theoretical knowledge, experimental skill, and a realistic sense of the limitations of technology. Only a deep insight into physical phenomena will supply the necessary skills to handle the problems that arise in acoustics. The acoustician today needs to be well acquainted with mathematics, dynamics, hydrodynamics, and physics; he also needs a good knowledge of statistics, signal processing, electrical theory, and of many other specialized subjects. Acquiring this background is a laborious task and would require the study of many different books. It is the goal of this volume to present this background in as thorough and readable a manner as possible so that the reader may turn to specialized publications or chapters of other books for further information without having to start at the preliminaries. In trying to accomplish this goal, mathematics serves only as a tool; the better our understanding of a physical phenomenon, the less mathematics is needed and the shorter and more concise are our computa tions. A word about the choice of subjects for this volume will be helpful to the reader. Even scientists of high standing are frequently not acquainted with the fundamentals needed in the field of acoustics. Chapters I to IX are devoted to these fundamentals. After studying Chapter I, which dis­ cusses the units and their relationships, the reader should have no difficulty converting from one system of units to any other.

This textbook teaches classical mechanics as one of the foundations of physics. It describes the mechanical stability and motion in physical systems ranging from the molecular to the galactic scale. Aside from the standard topics of mechanics in the physics curriculum, this book includes an introduction to the theory of elasticity and its use in selected modern engineering applications, e.g.