Sublime

Since Boltzmann’s entropy measure is not about the dispersion of heat per se, but the evolving spatial configuration of a many-particle system’s components, we may call it statistical entropy, or configurational entropy.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE POWER LAW

To deal with such paradoxes we shall adopt an approach that we call model-dependent realism. It is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the qu

The physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Learn by trying to understand simple things in terms of other ideas—always honestly and directly.”

According to modern physics, it is, at base, quantum perturbations, called electrons and photons, that exhibit properties given names such as mass and spin.

Max Gluckman once said: “A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.” Science moves forward by slaying its heroes, as Newton fell to Einstein. Every young physicist dreams of being the new champion that future physicists will dream of dethroning.

California Institute of Technology’s John Hopfield