Robert P. Crease

The Great Equations

Worthwhile book, not enough notes while reading. WCCLS also has three other books by Crease

021 01 Pythagorean Theorem
042 interlude Proofs
046 02 Newton's Second Law of Motion
065 interlude The Book of Nature
069 03 Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation
088 interlude That Apple
091 04 Euler's Equation
097 interlude Equations as Icons
- film: The Glass Bottom Boat
111 05 The Second Law of Thermodynamics
128 interlude The Science of Impossibility
132 06 Maxwell's Equations
152 interlude Overcoming Anosognosia
- 154 (Irish novelist) John Banville complains about big words in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday
- 154 anosognosia cognitively unaware of a disability
156 07 E=mc²
180 interlude Crazy Ideas
185 08 Einstein's Equation for General Relativity
209 interlude Science Critics
214 09 Schrödinger's Equation
230 interlude The Double Consciousness of Scientists
235 10 The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
261 interlude The Yogi and the Quantum
266 Bringing the Strange Home

The ten most beautiful experiments in science

003 Measuring the World: Erasthene's Measurement of the Earth's Circumference
021 Dropping the Ball: The Legend of the Leaning Tower
043 The Alpha Experiment: Galileo and the Inclined Plane
059 Experimentum Crucis: Newton's Decomposition of Sunlight with Prisms
083 Weighing the World: Cavendish's Austere Experiment
105 Light a Wave: Young's Lucid Analogy
119 Science and Metaphor
- Metaphors work in 3 ways:
  - illuminate aspects of primary subject, filter out the rest
  - creative, bring to bear an already-organized set of equations
  - recast overall view; Lewis Thomas: the earth not an organism, most like a single cell
    - Stephen Jay Gould replaying life's tape
125 Seeing the Earth Rotate: Foucault's Sublime Pendulum
145 Seeing the Electron: Millikan's Oil Drop Experiment
- 150 formed cloud of oil drops, turned on power, cloud dissipated, except for a few drops, where charge*field ~= gravity*mass
- 163 Interlude: Barbara McClintock chromosomes:
- "I found that the more I worked with them, the bigger and bigger [the chromosomes] got, and when I was really working with them, I wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them, and everything got bit. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes."
169 Dawning Beauty: Rutherford's Discovery of the Atomic Nucleus
191 The Only Mystery: The Quantum Interference of Single Electron

What ten thinkers can teach us about science and authority