Sublime

Lorenz realized that it could. The most basic tenet of chaos theory is that a small change in initial conditions—a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil—can produce a large and unexpected divergence in outcomes—a tornado in Texas. This does not mean that the behavior of the system is random, as the term “chaos” might seem to imply. Nor is chaos th

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has spoken often of the need, when faced with multidimensional problems, to take a “crude look at the whole”—a process he has even given an acronym, CLAW.

(It was a reaction I learned from my father: have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, “Is it reasonable?

Because it is so impractical to use the underlying physical laws to predict human behavior, we adopt what is called an effective theory. In physics, an effective theory is a framework created to model certain observed phenomena without describing in detail all of the underlying processes.

The mechanical rules of “inertia” and “forces” are wrong—Newton’s laws are wrong—in the world of atoms. Instead, it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale. That is what makes physics difficult—and very interesting. It is hard because the way things behave on a small scale is so ”unnatural“; we have n

We would like to emphasize a very important difference between classical and quantum mechanics. We have been talking about the probability that an electron will arrive in a given circumstance. We have implied that in our experimental arrangement (or even in the best possible one) it would be impossible to predict exactly what would happen. We can o

Feynman responded: “It doesn’t have any importance… I don’t care whether a thing has importance. Isn’t it fun?”