Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The mechanical rules of “inertia” and “forces” are wrong—Newton’s laws are wrong—in the world of atoms. Instead, it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale. That is what makes physics difficult—and very interesting. It is hard because the way things behave on a small scale is so ”unnatural“; we have
... See moreRobert B. Leighton • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
That proof showed that general relativity is only an incomplete theory: it cannot tell us how the universe started off, because it predicts that all physical theories, including itself, break down at the beginning of the universe. However, general relativity claims to be only a partial theory, so what the singularity theorems really show is that
... See moreStephen Hawking • A Brief History of Time
Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
Tom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
In hindsight, what really
Thomas Hertog • On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory
The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics (Union Square & Co. Milestones)
amazon.com
while our latest monitoring and modeling are certainly more advanced, there is nothing new either about our understanding of the greenhouse effect or about the consequences of steadily increasing emissions of greenhouse gases: in principle, we have been aware of them for more than 150 years, and in a clear and explicit manner for more than a
... See moreVaclav Smil • How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
“This is a simulation center tradition. When the first atom bomb was exploded, Dr. Fermi tossed torn paper into the air, and according to the distance the pieces drifted in the shock wave, he was able to accurately compute the yield of the bomb. Now we do the same thing for every simulation we run.” Rey Diaz brushed the
Cixin Liu • The Dark Forest (The Three-Body Problem Series Book 2)
Every day we are assaulted by scientific or biomedical questions that we don’t even know how to think about, from toxic wastes and “Star Wars” and nuclear energy to acid rain and gene splicing and surrogate motherhood. Many of them are the legacy of scientists who now admit that they didn’t understand how their decisions would affect the quality of
... See more