Robert P. Crease

The Great Equations

Robert P. Crease 2008 | Hillsboro 509 CREASE

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 Prism and the Pendulum

The ten most beautiful experiments in science

Robert P. Crease 2003 | Tigard 509 CRE

• 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 Electrons

The Workshop and the World

What ten thinkers can teach us about science and authority

Robert P. Crease 2019 | Tigard 306.45 CRE

Francis Bacon Galileo Galilei Rene Descartes Giambattista Vico Mary Shelley August Comte Max Weber Kemal Ataturk Edmund Husserl Hannah Arent