Posted on 07/10/2008 6:51:50 PM PDT by free me
I would recommend:
The Dancing Wu Li Masters - Zukav
Does a good job of contrasting what you would think your intuition tells you and what is reality
The Rise of the New Physics - D’Abro
Excellent treatise on the historical development
The Evolution of Physics - Einstein, Infeld
Good intro to the way Einstein conceived relativity and his assumptions
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics - P.A. Dirac
If you can get past page 50, you’re way beyond me!
Finally:
Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics - J. S. Bell
This book, more than any other, shows some QM ideas from an epistemological point of view. Almost borders on the morality of QM.
And I would be doing a great injustice if I did not recommend ready anything and everything by Arthur Stanley Eddington.
Ok, so the air inside itself is also traveling at 75 mph, which is why if someone smokes inside the car, and the window is cracked, it all goes whoosh (very scientific term, whoosh) out the window like airplane with a crack.
I think I understand. How simply defined. Thank you. That has bugged me for years.
Read the book “ZERO”...It’s a great mind boggler...
You really don’t need calculus for physics. The formulas have already been solved and easy to work.
More or less.
And if you hold a ball in your hand and throw it straight up, it falls right back into your hand.
You and the ball are traveling at 75 mph. In the same direction, horizontally. So you see the ball go straight up vertically and straight down. You see no horizontal movement because you are sharing the same horizontal movement as the ball.
An outside observer, standing by the road would see the ball travel in an arc. He is not sharing your horizontal movement. From his perspective, you move straight horizontally, while the ball moves both horizontally and vertically. In an arc.
I’ll look it up . Thanks.
And do you work as a civil engineer now ?
I love that book. I have probably read it 4 or 5 times.
Some years ago there was a television series called, “The Mechanical Universe.” It was really good. If you could find a set of those videos they might be helpful.
Although this is not heavy-duty physics; this guy has the extraordinary talent of explaining the most complicated things simply.
(I believe he was Steven Hawking's boss at MIT)
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