The new edition will provide the sole comprehensive resource available for non-linear optics, including detailed descriptions of the advances over the last decade from world-renowned experts.

This volume, produced in three parts, is the Second Edition of Volume 85 of the series, Modern Nonlinear Optics, edited by M.W. Evans and S. Kielich. Volume 119 is largely a dialogue between two schools of thought, one school concerned with quantum optics and Abelian electrodynamics, the other with the emerging subject of non-Abelian electrodynamics and unified field theory. In one of the review articles in the third part of this volume, the Royal Swedish Academy endorses the complete works of Jean-Pierre Vigier, works that represent a view of quantum mechanics opposite that proposed by the Copenhagen School. The formal structure of quantum mechanics is derived as a linear approximation for a generally covariant field theory of inertia by Sachs, as reviewed in his article. This also opposes the Copenhagen interpretation. Another review provides reproducible and repeatable empirical evidence to show that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle can be violated. Several of the reviews in Part 1 contain developments in conventional, or Abelian, quantum optics, with applications.

In Part 2, the articles are concerned largely with electrodynamical theories distinct from the Maxwell–Heaviside theory, the predominant paradigm at this stage in the development of science. Other review articles develop electrodynamics from a topological basis, and other articles develop conventional or U(1) electrodynamics in the fields of antenna theory and holography. There are also articles on the possibility of extracting electromagnetic energy from Riemannian spacetime, on superluminal effects in electrodynamics, and on unified field theory based on an SU(2) sector for electrodynamics rather than a U(1) sector, which is based on the Maxwell–Heaviside theory. Several effects that cannot be explained by the Maxwell–Heaviside theory are developed using various proposals for a higher-symmetry electrodynamical theory. The volume is therefore typical of the second stage of a paradigm shift, where the prevailing paradigm has been challenged and various new theories are being proposed. In this case the prevailing paradigm is the great Maxwell–Heaviside theory and its quantization. Both schools of thought are represented approximately to the same extent in the three parts of Volume 119.