Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
The next morning we wired ourselves up. Claude wore the computer and the radio transmitter and would use his big toes to operate switches hidden in his shoes. I wore the radio receiver with the new steel wires going up my neck to the speaker in my right ear canal. As I stood ready to leave for the casino, Claude cocked his head and with an elfish smile asked, “What makes you tick?” Claude was jokingly referring to the strange sounds (actually these were musical tones) he would be sending from the computer he was wearing to my ear canal, once we went into action at the roulette table. As I look back now from the future, seeing myself wired up with our equipment, I stop that moment in time and I think about a deeper meaning to the question of what makes me tick. I was at a point then in life when I could choose between two very different futures. I could roam the world as a professional gambler winning millions per year. Switching between blackjack and roulette, I could spend some of the winnings as perfect camouflage by also betting on other games offering a small casino edge, like craps or baccarat. My other choice was to continue my academic life. The path I would take was determined by my character, namely, What makes me tick? As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Character is destiny.” I unfreeze time and watch us head for the roulette tables.
A Man for All Markets
Edward O. Thorp
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
By carrying out such simple experiments, scientists can measure the strengths of the electric and magnetic fields, and Maxwell’s equations predict that the ratio of strengths gives the speed of the waves. What, then, is the answer? What did Faraday’s benchtop measurements, coupled with Maxwell’s mathematical genius, predict for the speed of the electromagnetic waves? This is one of many key moments in our story. It is a wonderful example of why physics is a beautiful, powerful, and profound subject: Maxwell’s waves travel at 299,792,458 meters per second. Astonishingly, this is the speed of light—Maxwell had stumbled across an explanation of light itself. You see the world around you because Maxwell’s electromagnetic field drives itself through the darkness and into your eyes, at a speed predictable using only a coil of wire and a magnet. Maxwell’s equations are the crack in the door through which light enters our story in a way that is every bit as important as the discoveries of Einstein that they triggered. The existence in nature of this special speed, a single, unchanging, 299,792,458 meters per second, will lead us in the next chapter, just as it led Einstein, to jettison the notion of absolute time.
Why Does E=mc2?
Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise