Tony Rothman - Instant Physics (1995)

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If you ask a stupid question, you may feel stupid; if you don't ask a stupid question, you remain stupid.

Tony Rothman
The Graveyard Principle: To be behind one's time is permanent death. To be ahead of one's time may be temporary death. But Confucius say: dead is dead.

Tony Rothman
You only arrive at the right answer after making all possible mistakes. The mistakes began with the Greeks.

Tony Rothman
Principle of Literary Oversight: Textbooks may be straightforward and succinct, but the path of science is crooked and tortuous.

Tony Rothman
Principle of Magnification: New discoveries follow on the heels of new equipment.

Tony Rothman
Like atoms, heat is so intangible that it was one of the last concepts in classical physics to be sorted out. In the process, the science of thermodynamics was created. Pollyannas who believe anything is possible should be subjected to a course in thermodynamics.

Tony Rothman
The Physicist's Code: A single good observation is worth a century of bad philosophy.

Tony Rothman
Relativity does not mean everything is relative. And the brilliance of Einstein's discoveries is so great that no amount of journalistic overkill has managed to dim it. Einstein and Bach are the only two people who deserve their reputations.

Tony Rothman
Quantum mechanics — the theory that explains phenomena on the size of atoms — is right. It is also so conceptually weird that physicists to this day feel uncomfortable with it.

Tony Rothman
YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: Atoms cannot be seen. To show that the world was made of particles a million times smaller than objects visible to the naked eye was so difficult that their existence was not established beyond reasonable doubt until the end of the nineteenth century.

Tony Rothman