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but couldn't remember where he had put the formula. Pressed by Halley, Newton agreed to redo the calculations and produce a paper. He did as promised, but then did much more. He retired for two years of intensive reflection and scribbling, and at length produced his masterwork: the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, better known as the Principia. Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can't quite decide which is the more amazing—the fact or the thinking of it. Principia was one of those moments. It made Newton instantly famous. For the rest of his life he would be draped with plaudits and honors, becoming, among much else, the first person in Britain knighted for scientific achievement. Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz, with whom Newton had a long, bitter fight over priority for the invention of the calculus, thought his contributions to mathematics equal to all the accumulated work that had preceded him. “Nearer the gods no mortal may approach,” wrote Halley in a sentiment that was endlessly echoed by his contemporaries and by many others since. Although the Principia has been called “one of the most inaccessible books ever written” (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn't be pestered by mathematical “smatterers,” as he called them), it was a beacon to those who could follow it. It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified the attractive force that got them moving in the first place—gravity. Suddenly every motion in the universe made sense. At Principia's heart were Newton's three laws of motion (which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction) and his universal law of gravitation. This states that every object in the universe exerts a tug on every other. It may not seem like it, but as you sit here now you are pulling everything around you—walls, ceiling, lamp, pet cat—toward you with your own little (indeed, very little) gravitational field. And these things are also pulling on you. It was Newton who realized that the pull of any two objects is, to quote Feynman again, “proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them.” Put another way, if you double the distance between two objects, the attraction between them becomes four times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
6. If you’re a president, owner, or operator, attend every home game, and never leave until the last out. 7. Answer all your mail; you might learn something. 8. Listen and be available to your fans. 9. Enjoy and respect the members of the media, the stimulation and the challenge. The “them against us” mentality should exist only between the two teams on the field. 10. Create an aura in your city. Make people understand that unless they come to the ballpark, they will miss something. 11. If you don’t think a promotion is fun, don’t do it. Never insult your fans. 12. Don’t miss the essence of what is happening at the moment. Let it happen. Cherish the moment and commit it to your memory.
A case report published in the journal Biofeedback detailed the experience of a 21-year-old woman with severe IBS. Diagnosed in her teens, she suffered excessive weight loss and depression. Her doctor told her it was incurable and offered morphine as her consolation prize. Lying in her hospital bed one day, she started scrolling on her phone and happened upon a link to something called diaphragmatic breathing. She tried it immediately. “While practicing, she could feel her stomach and abdomen becoming warmer,” the researchers wrote—a sign that she was switching from fight-or-flight mode to rest-and-digest and increasing blood flow throughout her body. She cried tears of joyful surprise. This was the first time she’d been pain-free in years. The authors report that the patient ultimately experienced a near-disappearance of IBS symptoms with continued practice.
Heart Breath Mind
Leah Lagos
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