Overview

Science and Hypothesis is a book written by French mathematician Henri Poincare, directed at non-specialist readers; it deals with mathematics, physics, space, and nature. It puts forward the hypotheses that undeniable truth in science is unattainable, and that many beliefs of scientists are held as convenient precepts rather than because they are more credible than the alternatives. In this book, Poincare describes controversial scientific questions regarding the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the relativity of physical laws in space. Reading this book inspired Albert Einstein's subsequent Annus Mirabilis papers. Jules Henri Poincare a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. Henri is often described as a polymath, and as The Last Universalist, since he transcended in all fields of the discipline as it already existed during his life. As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original contributions to mathematical physics, pure and applied mathematics, and celestial mechanics. He formulated the Poincare conjecture that became one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until 2002-2003 when solved by Grigori Perelman. During his research on the three-body problem, Poincare became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system that constitutes the foundations of modern chaos theory. Poincare is also considered to be one of the originators of the field of topology. He made clear the significance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics below different transformations and Poincare was the first to exhibit the Lorentz transformations in their present symmetrical form. He discovered the outstanding relativistic velocity transformations and wrote them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz. Obtaining perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, a significant step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity. Poincare first proposed gravitational waves emanating from a celestial body and propagating at the speed of light as being expected by the Lorentz transformations. The Poincare group used in physics and mathematics was named after him.

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