The science of magnetically confined plasmas covers the entire spectrum of physics from classical and relativistic electrodynamics to quantum mechanics. During the last sixty years of research, our initial primitive understanding of plasma physics has made impressive progress thanks to a variety of experiments — from tabletop devices with plasma temperatures of a few thousands of degrees and confinement times of less than 100 microseconds, to large tokamaks with plasma temperatures of up to five hundred million degrees and confinement times approaching one second. We discovered that plasma confinement is impaired by a variety of instabilities leading to turbulent processes with scales ranging from the plasma size to a few millimeters. Understanding these phenomena, which have slowed down progress towards a fusion reactor, requires the use of very sophisticated diagnostic tools, many of which employ electromagnetic waves.The primary objective of this book is to discuss the fundamental physics upon which the application of electromagnetic waves to the study of magnetically confined plasmas is based.

The book's text and many photographs introduce readers to the renowned teachers and researchers who are still well known in engineering circles. Electrical engineering is a protean profession. Today the field embraces many disciplines that seem far removed from its roots in the telegraph, telephone, electric lamps, motors, and generators. To a remarkable extent, this chronicle of change and growth at a single institution is a capsule history of the discipline and profession of electrical engineering as it developed worldwide. Even when MIT was not leading the way, the department was usually quick to adapt to changing needs, goals, curricula, and research programs. What has remained constant throughout is the dynamic interaction of teaching and research, flexibility of administration, the interconnections with industrial progress and national priorities. The book's text and many photographs introduce readers to the renowned teachers and researchers who are still well known in engineering circles, among them: Vannevar Bush, Harold Hazen, Edward Bowles, Gordon Brown, Harold Edgerton, Ernst Guillemin, Arthur von Hippel, and Jay Forrester. The book covers the department's major areas of activity -- electrical power systems, servomechanisms, circuit theory, communications theory, radar and microwaves (developed first at the famed Radiation Laboratory during World War II), insulation and dielectrics, electronics, acoustics, and computation. This rich history of accomplishments shows moreover that years before "Computer Science" was added to the department's name such pioneering results in computation and control as Vannevar Bush's Differential Analyzer, early cybernetic devices and numerically controlled servomechanisms, the Whirlwind computer, and the evolution of time-sharing computation had already been achieved.

Lists citations with abstracts for aerospace related reports obtained from world wide sources and announces documents that have recently been entered into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Database.