Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics

Download or read book Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics written by Stephen Malvern Omohundro and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1986 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book which focusses on mechanics, waves and statistics, describes recent developments in the application of differential geometry, particularly symplectic geometry, to the foundations of broad areas of physics. Throughout the book, intuitive descriptions and diagrams are used to elucidate the mathematical theory. It develops a coordinate-free framework for perturbation theory and uses this to show how underlying symplectic structures arise from physical asymptotes. It describes a remarkable parity between classical mechanics which arises asymptotically from quantum mechanics and classical thermodynamics which arises asymptotically from statistical mechanics. Included here is a section with one hundred unanswered questions for further research.