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This book is roughly divided in three parts. The first one is a general introduction to theories with extra dimensions and, more specifically, to brane worlds. Both old-fashioned topics (such as Kaluza-Klein theories) and more modern aspects (e.g. Large Extra Dimensions and Randall-Sundrum models) are discussed. The second and third parts (which we refer to as Part I and II respectively) are essentially two monographs. There, the reader is guided through the construction of the 4D effective field theory derived from higher dimensional (in particular five-dimensional and six-dimensional) models. Part I is devoted to the study of how the heavy Kaluza-Klein modes contribute to the low energy dynamics of the light modes. Part II concerns instead the analysis of the spectrum arising from non-standard compactifications of six-dimensional (supersymmetric) theories, involving a warp factor and conical defects in the internal manifold. Several applications of the above mentioned topics are discussed, providing an up to date overview of these subjects.

This is a new publication of Hermann Weyl's book Space-Time-Matter, which was first published in German in 1919 and the English translation was published in 1922.What makes Weyl's book invaluable is that, in addition to his masterfully presented lectures on special and general relativity (starting with a helpful introduction to tensor analysis), he was the first (and essentially the only one so far) who tried to reconcile two seemingly unreconcilable facts - Minkowski's discovery (deduced from the failed experiments to detect absolute motion) of the spacetime structure of the world (that it is a static four-dimensional world containing en bloc the entire history of the perceived by us three-dimensional world) and the inter-subjective fact that we are aware of ourselves and the world only at one single moment of time - the present moment (the moment now) - which constantly changes. Weyl reached the conclusion that it is our consciousness (somehow "traveling" in the four-dimensional world along our worldlines) which creates our feeling that time flows. Unfortunately, Weyl's reconciliation of the above facts has not been rigorously examined so far; the apparent contradiction that the consciousness "travels" in the "frozen" four-dimensional world - spacetime - is not an excuse because Weyl had surely been aware of it and nevertheless "went public" with his proposed resolution.