An Introduction To The Meaning And Structure Of Physics PDF
Preview An Introduction To The Meaning And Structure Of Physics
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MEANING AND STRUCTURE OF PHYSICS > LEON N COOPER AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MEANING AND STRUCTURE OF PHYSICS . LEON N COOPER HENRY LEDYARD GODDARD UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR BROWN UNIVERSITY A N INTRODUCTION TO THE MEANING AND STRUCTURE OF PHYSICS Harper & Row, Publishers NEW YORK EVANSTON LONDON Cover photographs by Alain Dejean An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics copyright © 1968 by Leon N Cooper Printed in the United States of America. All rights re¬ served. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in criti¬ cal articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 49 East 33rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10016. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-12925 PREFACE Physics is said to be very difficult—even physicists believe this. But if we make an elementary distinction between creating new physics and under¬ standing what others have done, physics, perhaps, requires no more pa¬ tience or intelligence than poetry, foreign languages, or any of a dozen other products of the human imagination. It is the reward that differs. Music or painting can touch our emotions in a very direct way. In physics we hear no violins that sob, see no images that threaten. There is drama in the creation and power in the result, but our admiration for the work itself can be excited only by its elegance, consistency, and es¬ thetic wholeness (as perhaps is true for the somewhat mythical pure novel). The forms are unfortunately less familiar than those we see in a painting, hear at the opera, or read in a novel, but—to the cultivated taste—equally rewarding. It is my hope that this book can provide an en¬ trance into this world for those with no special technical abilities or pre¬ tensions—both for the pleasure of seeing what is there and for its obvious relevance to those other activities which together make up what we call civilization. We are told how difficult it is to write a book, but one has to write one to believe it. I have, in writing this, had the assistance of many people and relied on the learning in many other books and hope—sitting here surrounded by unread galleys, unfinished problems, and unanswered questions, immersed in a chaos, like that planned by Dante, which I had thought reserved for the damned—that I will not add to my sins by the omission of any name that should properly be included. I have profited particularly from Lane Cooper’s Aristotle, Galileo, and The Tower of Fisa, Charles Coulston Gillispie’s The Edge of Objec¬ tivity, William Francis Magie’s A Source Book in Physics, Henry A. Boorse and Lloyd Motz’s The World of the Atom, the Physical Science Study Committee text, Physics, Alfred M. Bork’s Foundations of Electro¬ magnetic Theory: Maxwell, and Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution. I would like to express my gratitude— To Mr. William Jones of the Educational Development Center for making available the many photos and diagrams from the PSSC text, Pro¬ fessor Harry Woolf for allowing me to see a prepublication draft of
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