Quotes from For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time: A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics

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



About the author

Walter Lewin
Born place: in The Hague, Netherlands
Born date January 29, 1936
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Dr. B. A. Behrend, commenting on the presentation, said, “Not since the appearance of Faraday’s ‘Experimental Researches in Electricity’ has a great experimental truth been voiced so simply and so clearly…. He left nothing to be done by those who followed him. His paper contained the skeleton even of the mathematical theory.”3”
― quote from Tesla: Man Out of Time


“He had strawberry blond hair. That’s enough right there. That’s all you need to know. If you’re a man with strawberry blond hair and you’re not in the circus or a Viking, odds are you have not found your place in life and never will.”
― Paul Neilan, quote from Apathy and Other Small Victories


“A man's allowed to make lots of small mistakes, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if the mistakes are big ones and they weigh him down, his only solution is to stop taking himself seriously. It's the only way to avoid suffering - suffering, prolonged, can be fatal.”
― Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, quote from Dirty Havana Trilogy


“We've turned off all the lights
in the living room
to make hand shadows.

We've got this
big flashlight
aimed at the wall.

I make the silhouette of my hand
into a duck.
Robin makes his into a rabbit.

Now my duck kisses his rabbit
And-POOF!- it turns into
a turkey.

And for some reason
this strikes us
as hysterically funny.

But you probably had to be there.”
― Sonya Sones, quote from What My Mother Doesn't Know


“Of course, it is true that plastic surgeries and sex reassignments are “artificial,” but then again so are the exercise bikes we work out on, the antiwrinkle moisturizers we smear on our faces, the dyes we use to color our hair, the clothes we buy to complement our figures, and the TV shows, movies, magazines, and billboards that bombard us with “ideal” images of gender, size, and beauty that set the standards that we try to live up to in the first place. The class systems based on attractiveness and gender are extraordinarily “artificial”— yet only those practices that seem to subvert those classes (rather than reaffirm them) are ever characterized as such.”
― Julia Serano, quote from Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity


Interesting books

Thomas the Obscure
(585)
Thomas the Obscure
by Maurice Blanchot
The Probability of Violet & Luke
(7.5K)
The Probability of V...
by Jessica Sorensen
Broken People
(249)
Broken People
by Scott Hildreth
Afraid
(7.7K)
Afraid
by Jack Kilborn
Will ti presento Will
(277.6K)
Will ti presento Wil...
by John Green
Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success
(13.9K)
Give and Take: A Rev...
by Adam M. Grant

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.