Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
Robert B. Leightonamazon.com
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
An ion is an atom which either has a few extra electrons or has lost a few electrons.
Robert B. Leighton • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little par
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We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description.
Robert B. Leighton • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
Statistical mechanics, then, is the science of the phenomena of heat, or thermodynamics.
Robert B. Leighton • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
Physics is of great importance in biology and other sciences for still another reason, that has to do with experimental techniques. In fact, if it were not for the great development of experimental physics, these biochemistry charts would not be known today. The reason is that the most useful tool of all for analyzing this fantastically complex sys
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What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. This statement can be expressed mathematically by the equation
Robert B. Leighton • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we wat
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His special talent was to approach essentially mainstream topics in an idiosyncratic way. This meant eschewing existing formalisms and developing his own highly intuitive approach.
Robert B. Leighton • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” (Gibbon)