That vision thing........................

 Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance.  What we see does not cease to astonish us.  We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate.  Earth is not flat; it is not stationary.  The world continues to change before our eyes as we gradually see more extensively and more clearly.

-Carlo Rovelli,  Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

To the very last...................

 

     When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration.*  When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of his blackboard in his study.  There's a drawing on it.  A drawing of the "light-filled box" in Einstein's thought experiment.  To the very last, the desire to challenge one-self and understand more.  And to the very last: doubt.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

*"With the death of Albert Einstein, a life in the service of science and humanity which was as rich and fruitful as any in the whole history of our culture has come to an end. Mankind will always be indebted to Einstein for the removal of the obstacles to our outlook which were involved in the primitive notions of absolute space and time." -Niels Bohr

Einstein's jewel............................

 

     There are absolute masterpieces that move us intensely: Mozart's Requiem, Homer's Odyssey, the Sistine Chapel, King Lear.  To fully appreciate their brilliance may require a long apprenticeship, but the reward is sheer beauty—and not only this, but the opening of our eyes to a new perspective upon the world.  Einstein's jewel, the general theory of relativity, is a masterpiece of this order.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Loafing....................

In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly.  You don't get anywhere by not "wasting" time - something, unfortunately, that parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.  He was in Pavia.  He had joined his family, having abandoned his studies in Germany, unable to endure the rigors of his high school there.  It was the beginning of the twentieth century, and in Italy the beginning of its industrial revolution.  His father, an engineer, was installing the first electricity-generating power plant in the Paduan plains.  Albert was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia:  for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams.  It is thus that serious scientists are made.

-Carlo Rovelli, the opening paragraph of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Or speed us up.........................

     The laws of physics suggest we cannot go in one direction forever.  Sooner or later, something will slow us down.  Whether it be stocks, housing prices, economics, or entire civilizations, even the biggest booms stall.  We build castles, churches, and monuments believing they will last forever, our perception of solidity often belies an underlying movement that is difficult to perceive.  Sometimes we can see the wave of change coming.  But more often we are swept along in it.

-Lawrence Levy, as excerpted from To Pixar And Beyond:  My Unlikely Journey With Steve Jobs To Make Entertainment History

Interested in increasing......................

.................................................your understanding of physics?

Then check out Theories of Everything, Mapped.  It is very cool.

Fifty years ago........................

In 1963 Richard P. Feynman, a professor of Physics at CalTech, published Six Easy Pieces:  Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher.  Here is his opening paragraph:

This two-year course in physics is presented from the point of view that you, the reader, are going to be a physicist.  This is not necessarily the case of course, but that is what every professor in every subject assumes!  If you are going to be a physicist, you will have a lot to study:  two hundred years of the most rapidly developing field of knowledge that there is.  So much knowledge, in fact, that you might think that you cannot learn all of it in four years, and truly you cannot;  you will have to go to graduate school too!

On most days, this one included, I'm happy with my B.A. in History, thank you.