November 22, 2006
Isaac Newton
-- William Blake's "Isaac Newton", 1795
So I finished my second book on the "From the Stacks" challenge list. (I'm not going in order, by the way - I'll read the books in any order I please!)
But I just finished Isaac Newton - by James Gleick. Funny - one of the reader reviews on that Amazon page says, "I found myself reading this book as I walked to the busstop - it was that good." I experienced the same thing. I couldn't put it down. I read it everywhere. On the bus, waiting in line, sitting in the movie theatre waiting for the previews to start ... I had it with me at all times over this past week. I enjoyed it so much that I slowed down my reading pace for the last 20 pages because I didn't want the book to end.
This book doesn't really dwell on Newton's personal life (uhm, what personal life??) - it briefly mentions his mental collapse near the end of his life, that people are still arguing about - it mentions his problems with maintaining celibacy and the diary entries he wrote about his dreams of "woemen", etc. But it's mainly a scientific biography - It focuses on Newton the scientist - and the surrounding Scientific Revolution that was going on at that time. There are long descriptions of his arguments with other scientists - Leibniz, primarly, but also Robert Hooke. I found it so interesting how Newton pretty much hid in plain sight. There he was, a semi-public figure, sitting on all of this information, on the calculus ... and there are excerpts from letters from scientists - begging him to divulge, publish, let us in, stop being so secretive.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this book (and what I enjoy about biographies, in general) - is the amount of first-hand textual information that is included. We get his letters, his papers, how HE described things (oh, and the endnotes are indispensable - just wonderful - they aren't just a list of Ibid Ibid ibid ... Gleick elaborates on his points in the text in the endnotes, we get fuller quotes from Newton's letters, to give context - we get diary entries from Samuel Pepys - etc. The endnotes are fantastic - almost like other additional chapters).
A couple things I found enormously fascinating:
-- Newton's thing with crimson. This blew me away. Gleick doesn't dwell on it like other more Freudian biographers do - but still - it's a fact that cannot be denied. Richard deVillamil wrote in 1931 (he had analyzed the inventory of Newton's house at the time of Newton's death): "crimson mohairs nearly everywhere. Newton's own bed was a "crimson mohair bed," witih "crimson Harrateen' bed-curtains" ... "crimson mohair hangings" ... a "crimson sattee." In fact, there is no other colour referred to in the "Inventary" but crimson. This living in what I may call an "atmosphere of crimson" is probably one of the reasons why Newton became rather irritable toward the end of his life." That's just such a vivid image. An entirely red room. Fascinating!!
-- the descriptions of Newton's long solitary years of standing in his room - not sitting - calculating, experimenting, scribbling
-- the whole alchemy thing. I just have this image of Newton hovering over these boiling smelting pots ... It's just extraordinary to me.
-- his heretical ruminations on scripture - documents that were kept secret for centuries
-- also the sense (described very well in the book) of how much was not known at that time ... and how Newton changed everything ...
-- how he perceived the natural world
-- and just ... HOW he did what he did
I loved the stories about the first scientific journal - published by the Royal Society - and how scientists from all over Europe would send in accounts of their experiments. Measuring the tides in a certain town in Norway. Whatever. This thirst for knowledge. An explosion of interest and energy ... but so much still not known, the pieces of the puzzle not put together ... but you can totally get the sense of the time, and it was thrilling to read. It's so validating - the human mind - the curious inquisitive courageous human mind.
Oh, too funny. I sat at a bar earlier this week - I was going to a movie across the street and had an hour to kill. I sat at the bar and read this book and had a drink. The bartender was a big rough guy with a pockmarked face and a long ponytail. He noticed what I was reading. Didn't mention it - but just started listing names at me in a thick Bronx accent: "Copernicus. Kepler. Galileo. Einstein. Newton. You know. These guys are like the smartest guys who have ever lived. Right? Want another beer?" I just wanted to hug him. Hearing "Copernicus. Kepler. Galileo" in a dark Irish pub. Hysterical.
I don't have a science background, obviously, but I love biographies of scientists - and have many on my shelves. They're one of my pet obsessions - and it's important to find the right TYPE of biography ... If this stuff can be explained in language that I can understand, where even if I don't get the math, I get the IMPORTANCE of the vision, then that's the kind of book I want. Thankfully, there seems to be a glut of those types of biographies being published right now. I have many of them, and they're always great reads.
Here's an excerpt from Isaac Newton. The prose is open, clear, and goose-bumpy. The whole book was goosebumpy.
No one understands the mental faculty we call mathematical intuition; much less, genius. People's brains do not differ much, from one to the next, but numerical facility seems rarer, more special, than other talents. It has a threshold quality. In no other intellectual realmdoes the genius find so much common ground with the idiot savant. A mind turning inward from the world can see numbers as lustrous creatures; can find order in them, and magic; can know numbers as if personally. A mathematician, too, is a polyglot. A powerful source of creativity is a facility in translating, seeing how the same thing can be said in seemingly different ways. If one formulation doesn't work, try another.Newton's patience was limitless. Truth, he said much later, was "the offspring of silence and meditation."
And he said: "I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light."
Marvelous. I love that: "I keep the subject constantly before me."
Another excerpt:
When he observed the world it was as if he had an extra sense organ for peering into the frame or skeleton or wheels hidden beneath the surface of things. He sensed the understructure. His sight was enhanced, that is, by the geometry and calculus he had internalized. He made associations between seemingly disparate physical phenomena and across vast differences in scale. When he saw a tennis ball veer across the court at Cambridge, he also glimpsed invisible eddies in the air and linked them to eddies he had watched as a child in the rock-filled stream at Woolsthorpe. When one day he observed an air-pump at Christ's College, creating a near vacuum in a jar of glass, he also saw what could not be seen, an invisible negative: that the reflection on the inside of the glass did not appear to change in any way. No one's eyes are that sharp. Lonely and dissocial as his worlld was, it was not altogether uninhabited; he communed night and day with forms, forces, and spirits, some real and some imagined.
The painting above is by William Blake (any Blake fans will have recognized it immediately). Blake despised Isaac Newton (of course he did - if you know anything about Blake, you would expect nothing less) ... and Newton comes up constantly in his poems. The book ends with a chapter about the centuries after Newton's death - how he was interpreted - how the message traveled - those who loved him, those who hated him, those who resented his "mechanical" view of the universe, those who embraced it.
I always loved this quote from Albert Einstein in 1919:
"Let no one suppose that the mighty work of Newton can really be superseded by this or any other theory. His great and lucid ideas will retain their unique significance for all time as the foundations of our whole modern conceptual structure in the sphere of natural philosophy."
(Echoes of the bartender's wisdom).
Speaking of the scientists who begged Newton to give up the goods - to share what he had been working on ... He seemed to be the gatekeeper of the greatest secret of all ... Here's a letter to Newton from mathematician John Wallis:
You say, you dare not yet publish it. And why not yet? Or, if not now, when then? You adde, lest I create you some trouble. What trouble now, more then at another time? ... Mean while, you loose the Reputation of it, and we the Benefit.
This is only one example of these letters - Gleick quotes many of them in his text, and they are amazing to read.
Great excerpt from the book about the publishing of the Principia:
Of the Principia itself, fewer than a thousand copies had been printed. These were almost impossible to find on the Continent, but anonymous reviews appeared in three young journals in the spring and summer of 1688, and the book's reputation spread. When the Marquis de l'Hopital wondered why no one knew what shape let an object pass through a fluid with the least resistance, the Scottish mathematician John Arbuthnot told him that this, too, was answered in Newton's masterwork: "He cried out with admiration Good god what a fund of knowledge there is in that book? ... Does he eat & drink & sleep? Is he like other men?"
Uhm, no. He is not like other men.
Excerpt about Newton's activity during "the plague year":
Newton returned home. He built bookshelves and made a small study for himself. He opened the nearly blank thousand-page commonplace book he had inherited from his stepfather and named it his Waste Book. He began filling it with reading notes. These mutated seamlessly into original research. He set himself problems; considered them obsessively; calculated answers, and asked new questions. He pushed past the frontier of knowledge (though he did not know this). The plague year was his transfiguration. Solitary and almost incommunicado, he became the world's paramount mathematician.Most of the numerical truths and methods that people had discovered, they had forgotten and rediscovered, again and again, in cultures far removed from one another. Mathematics was evergreen. One scion of Homo sapiens could still comprehend virtually all that the species knew collectively. Only recently had this form of knowledge begun to build upon itself. Greek mathematics had almost vanished; for centuries, only Islamic mathematicians had kept it alive, meanwhile inventing abstract methods of problem solving called algebra. Now Europe became a special case: a region where people were using books and mail and a single language, Latin, to span tribal divisions across hundreds of miles; and where they were, self-consciously, receiving communications from a culture that had flourished and then disintegrated more than a thousand years before. The idea of knowledge as cumulative - a ladder, or a tower of stones, rising higher and higher - existed only as one possibility among many. For several hundred years, scholars of scholarship had considered that they might be like dwarves seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but they tended to believe more in rediscovery than in progress. Even now, when for the first time Western mathematics surpassed what had been known in Greece, many philosophers presumed they were merely uncovering ancient secrets, found in sunnier times and then lost or hidden.
Newton, during the plague year, broke past the barrier of what was known, forging ahead:
Descartes opened the cage doors, freeing new bestiaries of curves, far more varied than the elegant conic sections studied by the Greeks. Newton immediately began expanding the possibilities, adding dimensions, generalizing, mapping one plane to another with new coordinates. He taught himself to find real and complex roots of equations and to factor expressions of many terms - polynomials. When the infinite number of points in a curve correspond to the infinite solutions of its equation, then all the solutions can be seen at once, as a unity. Then equations have not just solutions but other properties: maxima and minima, tangents and areas. These were visualized, and they were named.
It's a wonderful book and I didn't want it to end. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in Newton, or the history of science in general.
And I'll let Wordsworth have the last word.
Newton with his prism and silent face,Posted by sheila
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
Dearest: loved this post on Newton. Like you, I learn a great deal [maybe my only knowledge]about subjects from biographies. Your uncle Terry [who had to deal with pompous academics and scientists on a daily basis] once said to me "If you're smart enough to explain it, I'm smart enough to understand it." A good biographer is smart enough to explain it. see you soon, love dad
Posted by: dad at November 22, 2006 10:26 AMdad - Who's bettah than Uncle Terry. Love him.
See you tomorrow!
Posted by: red at November 22, 2006 10:28 AMWOW, thanks for the review/explanation of the book. As a Physics teacher I am definately going to have to read this book!! Sounds absolutely fascinating.
And yes, I also the found whole Alchemy thing interesting, but even moreso puzzling. What I marveled at was his ability to grasp concepts so far removed from "his" reality, such as motion, gravity and even more than that a "universal gravity". Then on the other hand, Newton could not or did not understand that elements are made of one unique substance. Extraordinary how the great minds think and work!!
Posted by: chuck in maine at November 22, 2006 11:14 AMchuck - I was hoping you'd comment, Mr. Physics! :)
i am blown away by how Newton was unhindered by preconceived notions. Or - he had preconceived notions - but his questions about the nature of the universe were more urgent to him - so he continued to delve into these matters, pushing knowledge further and further out ... I can barely believe he existed. Truly extraordinary!!
Posted by: red at November 22, 2006 11:18 AMWhy thank you sheila, that's nice to hear. So, to go on, the breadth of his scope of knowledge would drive most mad, himself included. Another idiosyncrasy (gawd, i love that word) I really enjoy about this man is that if Newton had a blog (well...he did, but they were actually published on paper), he would have very simialr posts to yours explaining his fascination with Galileo, Decartes, Aristotle..etc. He seemed humbled by his knowledge and willing to admit there are things he cannot explain...or wouldn't dare try without the help of others before him.
Oh, and off the beaten path, I just now realized why i have a new found love for "A Wrinkle in Time"...L'Engle is actually talking about a physics concept in 1962 that was at best in its infant stages...Universal String Theory. What an amazing book!! And secondly, have a happy turkey day.
Posted by: chuck in maine at November 22, 2006 11:40 AMYes, it was totally a great book, but there was one thing that Gleick does over and over again which really got to me; He uses commas like he's getting paid for each one he puts in. Just because there *can* be a pause in a sentence doesn't mean you need to go shoving commas into it. But otherwise, cool book. Imagine if Newton had completely blinded himself looking into the sun and what wouldn't have happened to the world of science if that was the case. It was a dumb move for such a smart guy, but they say when you get past a certain level of intelligence the common sense goes right out the window.
Care to recommend any other good science history books? I'd advise you to read "Krakatoa" by Simon Winchester. It's faboo. He also wrote two great books relating to the development of the OED, both of which I'd highly recommend: "The Meaning of Everything," and "The Professor and the Madman." I think my next science book will be "A Brief History of Time," as I'm hooked on Heroes and the whole concept of time travel addles my noodle.
Posted by: Marti at November 22, 2006 11:46 AMMarti - yeah, the whole staring directly into the sun thing - and how he pressed a piece of wood UNDER HIS EYEBALL - to see how that affected the light flow ... like: what??? Dude!! Please!
I read Krakatoa and Professor and the Madman - I wasn't too wacky about the second one (although the story itself was AWESOME) - and I loved Krakatoa. Terrifying - the thought of those big tsunami waves were just ... totally nightmarish!!
Let's see. I really liked Fermat's Enigma. Have you read that?? I also have about 3 or 4 biographies of Einstein - and I like all of them. I also have a book called "Zero" - which is about how the entire concept of zero developed - and how controversial it was at the time, how people feared "zero", etc. - and that is an amazing book. Just a really good story. I knew almost none of that history - and the whole book was a real eyeopener.
Posted by: red at November 22, 2006 11:50 AMMarti - I posted an excerpt from Zero a while ago. here it is - maybe you'd be interested in it.
Posted by: red at November 22, 2006 11:52 AMI don't know if you've ever read Neil Stephenson, Sheila, but I have a feeling his Baroque Cycle would be right up your alley after reading this post. It's a looooong series, three one-thousand page plus books (the first of which was written in ye olde English), but they're wonderful. In them, Stephenson has invented Newton's best college pal, Daniel Waterhouse, and later in his life, Daniel is called into service by Princess Caroline of Hanover to try and judge just who discovered "The Calculus"---Newton or Leibniz. It just rolls on from there. You're introduced to an extraordinary cast of characters who live in this world that calculus (and the other inventions of the Age of Reason) has set on its ear. Daniel is a wonderful character in that he's a Puritan---his father was one of Cromwell's cronies---who lusts for all things scientific. Looking through his eyes, and viewing the extraordinary events of his lifetime, is quite interesting.
The series starts with Quicksilver, moves on to The Confusion and then concludes with The System of the World. I highly recommend them, and anything else Stephenson writes. His Cryptonomicon was also great fun to read. He doesn't dumb things down for his readers, even when he's dealing with extraordinarily complex subjects, like calculus (Cryptonomicon focuses on both modern and Bletchley Park era codebreaking) and he's also got a marvelous sense of humor. For instance, one passage in Cryptonomicon deals with a very scientific description of how to eat Cap'n Crunch without tearing the roof of your mouth to shreds. Another deals with a mathematical genius' calculations in regards to his own work productivity when he, er, doesn't emit certain secretions (to attempt to put it delicately ;)) on a regular basis. Very funny stuff.
If you haven't read them already, you'll get a kick out of them.
Posted by: Kathy at November 22, 2006 12:31 PMKathy - Oh God.
They sound like books that could obsess me. For years on end. I'm almost afraid to look into them! Ha!!
I had heard of Cryptonomicon - but not the others - and I knew very little about it. You're right - they sound right up my alley.
Posted by: red at November 22, 2006 12:45 PMGive 'em a go. You'll love them.
One other thing: Quicksilver takes its time in getting going, but stick with it: it's worth it. I chalk this up to the language, which I found hard to decipher in some instances. Dorothy Dunnett, who influenced Stephenson greatly, was easier to read, I thought, and her work is a challenge even at the best of times. The other two books were not written in the ye olde English and they move along quite speedily as a result.
Have fun!
Posted by: Kathy at November 22, 2006 1:10 PMAnother fabulous review, and thanks.
I find it interesting that Blake hated Newton so much that subconsciously he reversed everything about him in the picture - sitting instead of standing, with nary a red thread anywhere - this austere celibate sitting in the altogether and looking hewn from the rocks behind him - and YOUNG, though we always picture him with the big jowly face and powdered wig and etc.
Sorry about focusing on the picture, but you've really left me with nothing to say about Newton himself. Gotta read the book.
Posted by: Nightfly at November 22, 2006 2:26 PMI adore the print, Nightfly - I'm glad to hear your thoughts on it actually.
Blake is one of my favorite poets - and he was kind of obsessed with Newton. In a way - even though he hated newton - he grappled with his ideas more seriously than most. Like - it obsessed him. He was more DISTURBED by Newton than anything else ... He writes about him quite a bit, and it's always interesting. He dismissed NONE of what Newton says - he takes it all on and tries it out and thinks about it and prays about it ...
It's fascinating. He's one of my all time faves. two geniuses of their own crafts - Blake and Newton - scowling at each other across the centuries. :)
Posted by: red at November 22, 2006 3:17 PMAnd yes - isn't it so interesting that he sees Newton as a Greek God almost - or like one of those anatomical drawings that point out the musculature. I just love that.
Posted by: red at November 22, 2006 3:37 PMYes, Sheila - or almost like a force of nature, an implacable thing, almost a golem. Math is what math is. As CS Lewis said, it's no good asking math to let you off if you've added wrong. Maybe that factors into some of Blake's wariness.
Great point on taking Newton seriously, too. You always get to know someone more thoroughly by taking them seriously and examining their ideas. Makes you a more formidable scowler, too. =)
Posted by: Nightfly at November 25, 2006 12:47 PM"Newton could not or did not understand that elements are made of one unique substance"
Well, Lord Kelvin refused to accept Arrhenius's ionic theory because he could not put it on a "mechanical" footing, and there was Einstein's famous line about God playing dice (how could He do otherwise if free will is part of His plan...?). That is one way in which Western science differs from the Ancient Greek model, which had a very Eastern (almost Buddhist) reverence of its great teachers - since we shook off the influence of Galen and Aristotle, we in the West have tried to test everything, because even genii can make mistakes - although we fail at this, we come closer than any other culture ever has.
To Sheila's uncle's point, I went to a few classes taught by the great Joe Lewis where he basically said that you don’t truly know your stuff until you can break it into pieces and teach it to someone else. That’s probably true for karate and a lot of other things, but not always true in science. The problem is learning curve. What Joe and Sheila's uncle are saying is true about science only to a limited extent.
I can explain a lot of things to a layman in a hand waving sort of way, and I can even get across pertinent points or points of contention, but the scientist expects more out of an explanation. The scientist expects to be able to test what is being said, or at least outline an experiment in his or her head that could test what is being said. In Physics and Chemistry that requires a degree of math knowledge that does not come easily to the non-mathematically trained, and in those two plus Biology, it also requires an awful lot of background subject matter knowledge. I don’t know how many times I’ve run into a freshman or sophomore college student saying: “but I thought”, or “but I was taught” when they disagreed with me, and what they are saying is true, but only for a given value of "true". But simple explanations are usually just not true enough if you actually want to do or make something out of your knowledge.
Take, for example, the knowledge that ice is colder than water. My (very blue collar) karate instructor once said that he put water in with the ice in his cooler to make his beer colder. Now, when I repeated that to a group of frosh chemistry students after a lesson about freezing and boiling points, they laughed. But for the practical purpose of getting your beer cold, they had been educated beyond their intelligence, at least at that moment. My karate instructor had an intuitive feel for the dynamics of freezing, while my students thought only about the statics. Sure, ice turns into water as you move up past the freezing point, but the question is how fast is heat transferred over the time frame your beer is in the cooler?
Heat is transferred from beer to the cooler by collisions with molecules of the surrounding substances. With just ice in the cooler, only a little bit of ice touches the beer - the rest of the heat transfer is accomplished by air in the pockets between the ice cubes. Water is a liquid that is a lot denser than air, so when it fills in the spaces between the cubes, it transfers heat more efficiently, and by the time you want to drink the beer, it's colder than if you have only ice in the cooler. The denser the liquid or gas, the more molecules per unit volume, the more molecular collisions between the surroundings and the beer can per second, and the faster the beer gets cold. By actually testing his knowledge against his observations, my karate instructor was more of a scientist, and had a better handle on the physical world, than my college students did.
Talking about more complicated subjects means that the listener has to be even quicker on his or her feet and have a lot more background knowledge than that gained from tailgate parties in order to reach a scientist's level of understanding. I remember listening to my advisor talk about things and say "I really don't understand this" when he obviously saw more than I did about the problem. As I matured as a scientist, I saw his point. If I have to take anything on faith, then I don't really understand it.
I'm not sure if I'm getting across what I mean to say. On the one hand, many scientists are such tremendous dickheads because, well, they're tremendous dickheads. On the other hand, they may seem like dickheads to the layman because their definition of "understanding" means not rote memorization of a theorem, but the ability to derive that theorem and understand when it does and does not hold. That's a high standard of understanding, but without it, we're just Sunday School students memorizing scripture when we go to science class. Which is all too often true, by the way.
One of the main themes of my blog is about my struggle to hold even laymen up to a high standard of understanding so that they can think and judge things for themselves (because being a voting citizen in our modern world demands that level of understanding), and balancing that with not being a condescending prick. It's not an easy task for an impatient scientist, and I can tell you the smarter they are, often the bigger dickheads they are, and Newton very often was a colossal dickhead.
Sorry about the rambling comment, Sheila, this is another one I probably should turn into a blog post, if I can figure out how to make myself clearer.
Posted by: John at November 25, 2006 10:22 PMNo, I get what you're saying, John - I nearly always do - but I hear you saying the same thing as my uncle said (who is, incidentally, a brilliant man - not just in his own chosen field, but in a number of areas - because of his intuitive understanding of things, like history, and politics, and power). Of course a sceintist may be bored stiff by the way his theories are described in this Isaac Newton biography - in the same way that I am bored STIFF in an elementary acting class, or bored stiff by writing that doesn't engage me at the level I am used to. People have called me a snob here for the kind of writing I enjoy. I think those people are morons with an inferiority complex. My level of expertise in certain areas means I am bored by something more simplistic. However - when I am talking to a beginning actor, or coaching younger people in how to approach a monologue - I speak to their level of expertise so that they can grow stronger and more self-sufficient. A theatre games class for kindergarteners is a different thing than a master class for people who have been working already for 20 years. There is a different degree of difficulty - and I know I've been in master classes where, somehow, a beginner slips thru the cracks - and it is so freakin' boring having to slow down the whole class in order to accommodate the one person who doesn't get it.
If you're smart enough to explain it to me John then I'm smart enough to understand it.
This may not be true with your colleagues - who have different criteria = but a book like this Newton book is for ME, not you. I mean, you probably would find it interesting, of course - but this is not for the expert.
I appreciate your concerns in your own field - but that sure isn't what I'm talking about here. We've discussed this before, you and I. I'm interested in science - and if you condescend to me about it (you never do - I'm speaking "you" as in generally) - then I will completely tune you out. I'll continue reading my science biographies, and my books about mathematics - and I feel continuously enriched by the experience, whether or not the books are perceived as difficult enough by the experts.
I have a passion for the subject and I won't be shamed out of it because some dickhead scientist thinks I'm a bonehead actress girl who doesn't have the correct science background to understand their magnificent mathematics.
Posted by: red at November 26, 2006 1:37 PM"If you're smart enough to explain it to me John then I'm smart enough to understand it."
That's the crux, Sheila, there are some things where I'm not sure I'm a good enough teacher to break it down to somone who doesn't have a few years of advanced math or physics. Granted they are few and far between, but those subjects exist.
Not to brag, but I have won teaching awards for teaching Freshman chem to students who, in my opinion, were not ready for the material, so I don't think I'm totally off base in thinking I don't suck at explaining things. But I know I have some limits by the glazed looks I see on people's faces when I broach certain topics.
Maybe I just haven't thought hard enough about the tough subjects, though. I can describe those topics to a layman, but if I went off and just started spouting gibberish with plausible explanations (and, like most scientists, I'm very good at plausible explanations), I'm not so sure a layman could tell the difference, hence I'm not sure I'm imparting understanding, merely a rote meorization of facts.
Posted by: John at November 27, 2006 1:23 PMI think the scientist can enjoy those types of science history books for similar reasons the non-scientists find it interesting, particularly the "HOW he did what he did" part. Curiosity seems to be a typical trait of scientists. And the perspective can be humbling as well.
I recently finished "Six Easy Pieces" by Richard Feynman, and even as a sort of refresher it was quite interesting. It is such a lucid, easy to read description of physics, I wish I had had it during my physics classes. And it also has the occasional short anecdote, like the one about the first scientist who realized nuclear reactions power stars. He was out with his girlfriend, and his girlfriend said, "Look at how the stars twinkle!" and he replied, "Yes, and right now, I am the only person who knows how they twinkle." (According to Feynman's story she wasn't too impressed.)
Posted by: dorkafork at November 28, 2006 8:49 PM//I think the scientist can enjoy those types of science history books for similar reasons the non-scientists find it interesting, particularly the "HOW he did what he did" part. Curiosity seems to be a typical trait of scientists. And the perspective can be humbling as well.//
That's very interesting - thanks for that. I really get that.
My interest is in the CONCEPTS - and, as much as I can grasp them, the mathematics - but it's more the CONCEPTS that hook me in. I can always grasp those. Those are fun.
I love that "sparkling stars" story!! Ha!!
Posted by: red at November 28, 2006 11:18 PM