Abstract

Among the classics of physics and astronomy now reappearing in the Dover edition, it is especially pleasing to welcome this book, which nearly twenty years ago developed the application of generalized dynamics to the largest assemblage of " molecules " known, the hundred thousand stars of a cluster and the hundred thousand million of a galaxy. Worked out rigorously from first principles, beginning from Liouville's theorem and Hamiltonian equations, topics treated in detail include here the possible disintegration of star clusters, the sources of spiral structure in galaxies, and the time of relaxation of an initially disturbed assemblage.