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The best tribute to our homegrown training program was the astounding learning curve we achieved in the first couple of years. Building only two airplanes every three months, we enjoyed a better learning curve—78 percent—than other manufacturers had reported while building twenty-five airplanes a month. The rule of thumb in the aerospace business was the more you build, the better you get at it. Our view was that efficiency was mostly the result of quality training, careful inspection, supervision, and high worker motivation. And we achieved these efficiencies in the face of a glaring shortage of trained workers as the Reagan defense spending program began to accelerate in the 1981–1984 time period.
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
After interviewing most of the Golden Thirteen, Paul Stillwell marveled at their response: “Even their toughest instructors weren’t as demanding of them as they were of themselves.” The difficult task in front of them was no longer a threat—it was a challenge. Instead of doubting themselves individually, they believed in their collective capacity. As George Cooper articulated it, “We were convinced that if one of us made it, we were all going to make it.”
Hidden Potential
Adam Grant
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
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