The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg

Description

pp. 315, ” Although most people can recite Einstein’s famous little equation, even if we don’t know quite what it means, who has heard of the 18th-century mathematician Leonhard Euler, let alone know anything at all about his famous equation? Crease, a Stony Brook philosophy professor and popular science writer, has already taken on the ten most beautiful experiments in science in The Prism and the Pendulum, and in this enjoyable book he explores 10 rather beautiful equations. He begins with the beguiling simplicity of the equation that bears Pythogoras’ name (although he says the Greek wasn’t the first to discover it) and moves on to Newton’s second law of motion and law of universal gravitation, the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell’s celebrated equations, discoveries by Einstein and Schrödinger and, finally, Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle.”