Sunday, November 25, 2012

Chapters 4 and 5

Interesting tidbits from Everything That Can Happen Does Happen:

  • Teleological ideas are ideas that "appear to happen in order to achieve a pre-specified outcome"
  • Action is m(x^2)/t where m is mass, x is distance and t is time
  • Leonard Euler found that a ball, when thrown, traverses the path that minimizes its action
  • Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle:
"The more precisely you know the position if a particle at some instant, the less well you know how fast it is moving and therefore where it will be sometime later."
Other interesting tidbits from Movement as an Illusion:

  • Another flashback to sophomore chemistry: de Broglie's equation ("the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics")
  •  It is more acurate to describe motion as the summation of the infiniate paths a particle travels to get from point a to point b

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