Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when colliding with something else. The ‘quantum leaps’ from one orbit to another are the only means they have of being

The confusion between these two diverse human activities – inventing stories and following traces in order to find something – is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture. The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in

A hot substance is a substance in which atoms move more quickly.

he soon came to understand that gravity, like electricity, must be conveyed by a field as well: a ‘gravitational field’ analogous to the ‘electrical field’ must exist.

Why does heat go from hot things to cold things, and not vice versa?

Or does it mean, as it seems to me, that we must accept the idea that reality is only interaction?

It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah – scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something which we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong,

Undistracted by schooling, one studies best during vacations.

itself and the Earth does not turn around it because of a mysterious force but because it is racing directly in a space which inclines, like a marble that rolls in a funnel. There are no mysterious forces generated at the centre of the funnel; it is the curved nature of the walls which causes the marble to roll. Planets circle around the sun, and t