Of late, I've been fortunate enough to be reading scientific books, both the general variety and the textbook variety, and I've been reading good books. The most striking quality of these books is the way they have been written, informative enough that they grasp attention, and yet light hearted at the appropriate spots, so that they don't lose that attention. And as for the textbooks, even good textbooks are of two kinds: the kind that just drones on about the subject in a clear, complete, and concise manner, and the kind that does the same thing while ensuring it doesn't get monotonous.
There aren't too many examples I can quote here. I don't have that kind of energy. But I do want to record those few examples. I don't want to lose track of what I've realised. It's really cute when you're reading the thing with a serious mind, and then the author puts in an appropriate line to make you smile. That really allows you to enjoy the whole process of reading the thing.
Sample this for instance. This was taken from "Engineering Electromagnetics" by Hayt and Buck.
"It is philosophically satisfying to have the most general result and to feel that we are able to obtain results for any special case at will. However, such a jump would lead to many frantic cries of help, and not a few drowned students."
Another quote from the same text. "We are faced with a choice of many methods by which to evaluate this component, and we shall use but one method and leave the others as exercises for a quiet Sunday afternoon." (!!!)
And yet again. "Since one coulomb of electric flux is produced by one coulomb of charge, the inner conductor might just as well have been a cube or a brass door key rather than a sphere, and the total induced charge on the outer sphere would still be the same. Going one step further, we could now replace the outer sphere by an empty but completely closed soup can. Q coulombs on the can would produce W = Q line of electric flux and induce -Q coulombs on the tin can.
"If the soup were a perfect insulator, it could even be left in the can, without any difference in the results!"
For those who aren't exactly physics freaks, my apologies. It's amazing, the kind of things you can learn. While dealing with the physics of time, pure mathematicians (theoreticians all of them) have gone through the pain of creating worlds (in theory) where you can travel back in time. The entire story is given in "The River Of Time", by Igor Novikov, a book on quantum principles and how they affect time, for the layman. Quote:
"These worlds are generated by solving systems of equations of general relativity. It appears that the general opinion has been that these solutions have no connection whatsoever with reality, despite being of great interest for studying the structure of the theory itself. Everyone knows from one's acquaintance with school arithmetic that the formulae of a correct theory can give incorrect - 'physically meaningless' - results. It is sufficient to insert inappropriate numbers into the conditions of a problem, for arithmetic to generate an unacceptable result: say, to excavate a hole in the ground of volume 30 cubic metres in 4 days, with each digger capable of digging 3 cubic metres per day, you need... 2.5 diggers. Results of this sort made more than one pupil cry."
Thinking leads to chaos! And how! A brilliant example on how to understand entropy, given in the same book. I loved this one. I quote:
"The heat released as a consequence of 'memorizing' makes the ambient air warmer and thus increases 'chaos' (entropy) of the Universe. It is always larger than the order introduced into the storing device when information is recorded. Stephen Hawking gives the following example. If you learned by heart each word in a book like this, your memory would record about two million bits of information. This is the measure of how much order was created in your brain. However, reading the book, you have transformed at least a thousand calories of ordered energy stored in food into disordered heat dissipated into the atmosphere. This increases the chaos in the Universe by about twenty million million million million units of data. This is ten million million million times greater than the gain in order in your brain, and that only if you do remember everything in this book..."
There aren't too many examples I can quote here. I don't have that kind of energy. But I do want to record those few examples. I don't want to lose track of what I've realised. It's really cute when you're reading the thing with a serious mind, and then the author puts in an appropriate line to make you smile. That really allows you to enjoy the whole process of reading the thing.
Sample this for instance. This was taken from "Engineering Electromagnetics" by Hayt and Buck.
"It is philosophically satisfying to have the most general result and to feel that we are able to obtain results for any special case at will. However, such a jump would lead to many frantic cries of help, and not a few drowned students."
Another quote from the same text. "We are faced with a choice of many methods by which to evaluate this component, and we shall use but one method and leave the others as exercises for a quiet Sunday afternoon." (!!!)
And yet again. "Since one coulomb of electric flux is produced by one coulomb of charge, the inner conductor might just as well have been a cube or a brass door key rather than a sphere, and the total induced charge on the outer sphere would still be the same. Going one step further, we could now replace the outer sphere by an empty but completely closed soup can. Q coulombs on the can would produce W = Q line of electric flux and induce -Q coulombs on the tin can.
"If the soup were a perfect insulator, it could even be left in the can, without any difference in the results!"
For those who aren't exactly physics freaks, my apologies. It's amazing, the kind of things you can learn. While dealing with the physics of time, pure mathematicians (theoreticians all of them) have gone through the pain of creating worlds (in theory) where you can travel back in time. The entire story is given in "The River Of Time", by Igor Novikov, a book on quantum principles and how they affect time, for the layman. Quote:
"These worlds are generated by solving systems of equations of general relativity. It appears that the general opinion has been that these solutions have no connection whatsoever with reality, despite being of great interest for studying the structure of the theory itself. Everyone knows from one's acquaintance with school arithmetic that the formulae of a correct theory can give incorrect - 'physically meaningless' - results. It is sufficient to insert inappropriate numbers into the conditions of a problem, for arithmetic to generate an unacceptable result: say, to excavate a hole in the ground of volume 30 cubic metres in 4 days, with each digger capable of digging 3 cubic metres per day, you need... 2.5 diggers. Results of this sort made more than one pupil cry."
Thinking leads to chaos! And how! A brilliant example on how to understand entropy, given in the same book. I loved this one. I quote:
"The heat released as a consequence of 'memorizing' makes the ambient air warmer and thus increases 'chaos' (entropy) of the Universe. It is always larger than the order introduced into the storing device when information is recorded. Stephen Hawking gives the following example. If you learned by heart each word in a book like this, your memory would record about two million bits of information. This is the measure of how much order was created in your brain. However, reading the book, you have transformed at least a thousand calories of ordered energy stored in food into disordered heat dissipated into the atmosphere. This increases the chaos in the Universe by about twenty million million million million units of data. This is ten million million million times greater than the gain in order in your brain, and that only if you do remember everything in this book..."
