Walter Lewin · 301 pages
Rating: (2.2K votes)
“What counts, I found, is not what you cover, but what you uncover. Covering subjects in a class can be a boring exercise, and students feel it. Uncovering the laws of physics and making them see through the equations, on the other hand, demonstrates the process of discovery, with all its newness and excitement, and students love being part of it.”
― Walter Lewin, quote from For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time: A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics
“why on earth should you generate current in that coil? It wasn’t clear at first what the importance of this discovery was. Soon afterward, the story goes, a dubious politician asked Faraday if his discovery had any practical value, and Faraday is supposed to have responded,”
― Walter Lewin, quote from For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time: A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics
“My purpose in the classroom, and the main reason I’ve written this book, is to translate the truly astounding, groundbreaking, sometimes even revolutionary discoveries of my fellow physicists into concepts and language intelligent, curious laypeople can really get hold of—to make a bridge between the world of professional scientists and your world. Too many of us seem to prefer talking only to our peers and make it awfully difficult for most people—even those who really want to understand science—to enter our world.”
― Walter Lewin, quote from For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time: A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics
“of glass and put a magnet underneath, get ready for some remarkable results—a lot more interesting”
― Walter Lewin, quote from For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time: A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics
“The characteristic sounds of a trumpet, oboe, banjo, piano, or violin are due to the distinct cocktail of harmonic frequencies that each instrument produces. I love the image of an invisible cosmic bartender, expert in creating hundreds of different harmonic cocktails, who can serve up a banjo to this customer, a kettledrum to the next, and an erhu or a trombone to the one after that”
― Walter Lewin, quote from For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time: A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics
“did what people will do in politics, or on the sea when the wind is against them,—I tacked.”
― Alexandre Dumas, quote from The Black Tulip
“Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, or to think about at all. He hadn’t thought about this for a long while. It wasn’t a thing he had deliberately tried to forget – he simply hadn’t thought about it for quite a few years. It was the unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men.”
― quote from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
“Grief takes time. Give yourself some. “Sages invest themselves in hurt and grieving” (Eccles. 7:4 MSG ). Lament may be a foreign verb in our world but not in Scripture’s. Seventy percent of the psalms are poems of sorrow. Why, the Old Testament includes a book of lamentations. The son of David wrote, “Sorrow is better than laughter, for sadness has a refining influence on us” (Eccles. 7:3 NLT ). We spelunk life’s deepest issues in the cave of sorrow. Why am I here? Where am I headed? We spelunk life’s deepest issues in the cave of sorrow. Why am I here? Where am I headed? Cemetery strolls stir hard yet vital questions. David indulged the full force of his remorse: “I am worn out from sobbing. Every night tears drench my bed; my pillow is wet from weeping” (Ps. 6:6 NLT ). And then later: “I am dying from grief; my years are shortened by sadness. Misery has drained my strength; I am wasting away from within” (Ps. 31:10 NLT ).”
― Max Lucado, quote from Facing Your Giants: God Still Does the Impossible
“The universe was filled with secrets, and he understood now that one of the biggest was that no one needed to know them all.”
― quote from Monster
“A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging[...] in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist[...] A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of itself.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Broom of the System
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