A co-written book by Infeld and Einstein. Wow. Old, so can get a legally free copy here: https://archive.org/details/evolutionofphysi033254mbp

Man, I like this book. Less story and more discoveries, questions, etc. No math, but maybe that's a feature too.

• Heat capacity is weird. I know that when heating up the same mass of water and alcohol, it takes more energy to raise water one degree. But…the amount of “stuff” is the same! So where is the energy going? What is temperature anyway? (explained later in book I think or Wikipedia)
  • Answer: stored in the degrees of freedom of the molecule (think the bop it game). Interesting….
• The number of gas particles in a equal volume, temperature, and “weighted” piston means that the number of particles are the same?!
• Brownian motion was uncovered by Brown and 80 years later someone (Einstein ) wrote why it happened. No name dropping, just a clear and exciting explanation of brownian motion and its applications to determining the mass of atoms.
  • I think you could also determine the average number of atoms surrounding it too…by determining the variance which will tell you the mean of the poisson distribution!

• By Leopold Infeld (Physicist that worked with Einstein)
• Einstein explained things in basic language so that one could understand immediately what he was talking about.
• They both also didn't trust anything until they completely understood it. Even Infeld had to catch himself assuming Einstein always did things correctly.
• “Excited and happy, I went home with the manuscript of Einstein's paper. I felt the anticipation of intense emotions which always accompany scientific work: the sleepless nights in which imagination is most vivid and the controlling criticism weakest, the ecstasy of seeing the light, the despair when a long and tedious road leads nowhere; the attractive mixture of happiness and unhappiness. All this was before me, raised to the highest level because I was working in the best place in the world. ”

• Einstein: “…I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and sciences is to escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life in to the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours which look as if they were built for eternity. With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself, in the way that suits him best, a simplified and intelligible picture of the world and thus to overcome the world of experience, for which he tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. ”

• Pity for our fellow man, suffering of human beings, stirs our emotions by the resonance of sympathy.
• “Einstein remains a limiting case. I had never encountered so much kindness that was so completely detached. Though only scientific ideas and physics really matter to Einstein, he has never refused to help when he felt that his help was needed and could be effective…Einstein is kind, smiling, understanding, talkative with people whom he meets, waiting patiently for the moment when he will be left alone to return to his work”
  • Hmm…still don't understand why he did this.

• It is the detached feeling of duty based on aloof, clear thinking.
• Good, clear thinking leads ot kindness and loyalty because this is what makes life simpler, fuller, richer, diminishes friction and unhappiness in our environment and therefore also in our lives. A sound social attitude, helpfulness, friendliness, kindness, may come from both mind and heart, but… I learned to value more the second kind of decency that arises from clear thinking. Too often I have seen how emotions unsupported by clear thought are useless if not destructive.
• Theory on why Einstein was so popular: a man talking about stars and predicting the solar eclipse change due to relativity immediately after World War I ended, where there were bodies lying on the ground and people looking for something other than war. He has a hope for humanity.
• “It took me a long time to realize that in his aloofness and isolation lie the simple keys leading to an understanding of many of his actions. I am quite sure that the day Einstein received the Nobel prize he was not in the slightest degree excited and that if he did not sleep well that it was because of a problem which was bothering him and not because of the scientific distinction. His Nobel prize medal, together with many others, is laid aside among papers, honorary degrees, and diplomas in the room where his secretary works, and I am sure that Einstein has no clear idea of what the medal looks like.
  • He never reads articles about himself…he said that this helps him to be free.
• A colleague: “If Einstein dislikes his fame…why does he not do what ordinary people do?”
  • “He desires to loosen his ties with the outside world. The idea is to restrict his needs and, by this restriction, increase his freedom. We are slaves of millions of things, and our slavery progresses steadily. For a week I tried an electric razor–and one more slavery entered my life. I dreaded spending the summer where there was no electric current. We are slaves of bathrooms, Frigidaires, cars, radios, and millions of other things. Einstein tried to reduce them to the absolute minimum. Long hair minimizes the need for the barber. Socks can be done without. One leather jacket solves the coat problem for many years. Suspenders are superfluous, as are nightshirts and pajamas. It is a minimum problem which Einstein has solved, and shoes, trousers, jacket, are the very necessary things; it would be difficult to reduce them further.”
  • If a bomb strike occurred at Princeton, he would merely look up and around and continue on his walk. <as opposed to everyone else who was running around with their head cut off>

• Don't popularize and stress the results that seem to contradict the common sense of the ordinary man and persuade him how clever and intellectual the scientists are. This only results in puffing up of authors.
• But beauty can be found everywhere: in the laws governing the falling stone and in the motion of the galaxies….Emotion can be created by the effort of understanding, by the painful process of comprehending more fully and more deeply.
  • <This means to shirk the startling and spectacular effects> It means straightforward writing, it means an attempt to convince the reader that science is merely a highly developed common sense and that its aim is to order the world of our experience and to form a consistent picture of reality.
• HAHA: Einstein's interest in the book lasted exactly as long as our work lasted, it ended the moment the book was finished. <He didn't care about the fame…the book / the teaching was already done>

• John Piper on Einstein in Think: He was not a Christian not because he didn't understand that there was a God, but that the Christian preachers of the day did not have enough imagination about God!