Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Whenever other people in my business want to rip me, they say, “Sure, the guy started with Michael Jordan, it’s not hard to train the best.” If you think it’s “not hard” to take the best and find ways to make him better, you’ve never had to face that challenge. It’s easy to improve on mediocrity, not so easy to improve on excellence.
People aren’t everything, they are the only thing.
Planck solved the radiation problem by proposing that the vibrating particles can only radiate at certain energies. The permitted energies would be determined by a new number—“a universal constant,” he says, “which I called h. Since it had the dimension of action (energy X time), I gave it the name, elementary quantum of action.”278 (Quantum is the neuter form of the Latin word quantus, meaning “how great.”) Only those limited and finite energies could appear which were whole-number multiples of hv: of the frequency ν times Planck’s h. Planck calculated h to be a very small number, close to the modern value of 6.63 × 10−27 erg-seconds. Universal h soon acquired its modern name: Planck’s constant. Planck, a thoroughgoing conservative, had no taste for pursuing the radical consequences of his radiation formula. Someone else did: Albert Einstein. In a paper in 1905 that eventually won for him the Nobel Prize, Einstein connected Planck’s idea of limited, discontinuous energy levels to the problem of the photoelectric effect. Light shone on certain metals knocks electrons free; the effect is applied today in the solar panels that power spacecraft. But the energy of the electrons knocked free of the metal does not depend, as common sense would suggest, on the brightness of the light. It depends instead on the color of the light—on its frequency. Einstein saw a quantum condition in this odd fact. He proposed the heretical possibility that light, which years of careful scientific experiment had demonstrated to travel in waves, actually traveled in small individual packets—particles—which he called “energy quanta.” Such photons (as they are called today), he wrote, have a distinctive energy hv and they transfer most of that energy to the electrons they strike on the surface of the metal. A brighter light thus releases more electrons but not more energetic electrons; the energy of the electrons released depends on hv and so on the frequency of the light. Thus Einstein advanced Planck’s quantum idea from the status of a convenient tool for calculation to that of a possible physical fact. With these advances in understanding Bohr was able to confront the problem of the mechanical instability of Rutherford’s model of the atom. In July, at the time of the “little paper ready to show to Rutherford,” he already had his central idea. It was this: that since classical mechanics predicted that an atom like Rutherford’s, with a small, massive central nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons, would be unstable, while in fact atoms are among the most stable of systems, classical mechanics was inadequate to describe such systems and would have to give way to a quantum approach. Planck had introduced quantum principles to save the laws of thermodynamics; Einstein had extended the quantum idea to light; Bohr now proposed to lodge quantum principles within the atom itself.
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise