Alexander Piel Book order

This book tells the fascinating story of air navigation. In the beginning, pilots found their way by comparing the landscape below with the map. Railroads became their 'iron compass'. Above the clouds, the pilot had to make proper corrections of his heading for the deflection by the wind. This was the hour of birth for mechanical instruments for solving the wind problem. Soon these instruments were complemented with a set of scales to calculate flight time, fuel consumption, corrected instrument readings, and many more. The description of these instruments and their principles is embedded in a narrative of their historical context and their ingenious inventors. Collectors of these instruments will find detailed descriptions of models and makers.

This book is an outgrowth of courses in plasma physics which I have taught at Kiel University for many years. During this time I have tried to convince my students that plasmas as different as gas dicharges, fusion plasmas and space plasmas can be described in a uni ed way by simple models. The challenge in teaching plasma physics is its apparent complexity. The wealth of plasma phenomena found in so diverse elds makes it quite different from atomic physics, where atomic structure, spectral lines and chemical binding can all be derived from a single equation—the Schrödinger equation. I positively accept the variety of plasmas and refrain from subdividing plasma physics into the traditional, but arti cially separated elds, of hot, cold and space plasmas. This is why I like to confront my students, and the readers of this book, with examples from so many elds. By this approach, I believe, they will be able to become discoverers who can see the commonality between a falling apple and planetary motion. As an experimentalist, I am convinced that plasma physics can be best understood from a bottom-up approach with many illustrating examples that give the students con dence in their understanding of plasma processes. The theoretical framework of plasma physics can then be introduced in several steps of re nement. In the end, the student (or reader) will see that there is something like the Schrödinger equation, namely the Vlasov-Maxwell model of plasmas, from which nearly all phenomena in collisionless plasmas can be derived.