Informationen zum Autor Walter Lewin taught the three core classes in physics at MIT for more than thirty years and made major discoveries in the area of X-ray astronomy. His physics lectures have been the subject of great acclaim, including a 60 Minutes feature, stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Newsweek and US News and World Report. They have also been top draws on YouTube and iTunes University. He was awarded three prizes for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He has published more than 450 scientific articles, and his honors and awards include the NASA Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, the Alexander von Humboldt Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1993. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Warren Goldstein is a professor of history and chair of the History Department at the University of Hartford. A prizewinning historian, essayist, and journalist, he has had a lifelong fascination with physics. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and many other national periodicals. His prior books include Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball and William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: A Holy Impatience . Klappentext Beloved MIT professor Walter Lewin, whose riveting physics lectures have made him a YouTube super-star, offers a mind-opening and delightful journey through the most intriguing discoveries in physics. A wonderful raconteur, Lewin takes readers on a marvellous journey with him in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power of all that physics can reveal to us. He describes the coolest, weirdest facets of the tiniest bits of matter, the wonders of our everyday lives-such as the mysteries of why lighting strikes and what makes musical harmony happen-and the most awesome features of the outer reaches of the universe. Whether explaining why the air smells so fresh after a lightning storm or showing us that a flea is strong enough to pull a heavy book across a table, Lewin always entertains as he edifies. For the Love of Physicsis a rare gem that will change the way readers see the world. Leseprobe For the Love of Physics CHAPTER 1 From the Nucleus to Deep Space It's amazing, really. My mother's father was illiterate, a custodian. Two generations later I'm a full professor at MIT. I owe a lot to the Dutch educational system. I went to graduate school at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and killed three birds with one stone. Right from the start, I began teaching physics. To pay for school I had to take out a loan from the Dutch government, and if I taught full time, at least twenty hours a week, each year the government would forgive one-fifth of my loan. Another advantage of teaching was that I wouldn't have to serve in the army. The military would have been the worst, an absolute disaster for me. I'm allergic to all forms of authorityit's just in my personalityand I knew I would have ended up mouthing off and scrubbing floors. So I taught math and physics full time, twenty-two contact hours per week, at the Libanon Lyceum in Rotterdam, to sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds. I avoided the army, did not have to pay back my loan, and was getting my PhD, all at the same time. I also learned to teach. For me, teaching high school students, being able to change the minds of young people in a positive way, that was thrilling. I always tried to make classes interesting but also fun for the students, even though the school itself was quite strict. The classroom doors had trans...

Klappentext

In For the Love of Physics, beloved MIT professor Walter Lewin, whose riveting physics lectures made him a YouTube super-star, takes readers on a remarkably fun, inventive, and often wacky journey that brings the joys of physics to life.

“For the Love of Physics captures Walter Lewin’s extraordinary intellect, passion for physics, and brilliance as a teacher”—Bill Gates.

For more than thirty years as a renowned professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lewin’s lectures made physics not only accessible but fun, whether putting his head in the path of a wrecking ball, supercharging himself with three hundred thousand volts of electricity, or demonstrating why the sky is blue and clouds are white. In For the Love of Physics, Lewin takes readers on a marvelous journey*,* opening our eyes as never before to the wonders of physics and its amazing ability to reveal the beauty and power embedded in our world.

Could it be true that we are shorter standing up than lying down? Why can we snorkel no deeper than about one foot below the surface? Why are the colors of a rainbow always in the same order, can we stretch a hand out and touch one?

Using superbly clear and simple explanations of phenomena we’ve always wondered about, such as what the big bang would have sounded like had anyone existed to hear it, Lewin surprises and delights with physics-based answers to even the most elusive questions.

Whether showing us that a flea is strong enough to pull a heavy book across a table, or describing the coolest, weirdest facts about the tiniest bits of matter, Lewin always entertains as he edifies. “For me,” Lewin writes, “physics is a way of seeing—the spectacular and the mundane, the immense and the minute—as a beautiful, thrillingly interwoven whole.” For the Love of Physics is a rare gem that will change the way readers see the world.

Zusammenfassung
A largely autobiographical account of the author's life as one who fell in love first with physics and then with teaching physics to students.

Leseprobe
For the Love of Physics

CHAPTER 1

From the Nucleus to Deep Space

It’s amazing, really. My mother’s father was illiterate, a custodian. Two generations later I’m a full professor at MIT. I owe a lot to the Dutch educational system. I went to graduate school at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and killed three birds with one stone.

Right from the start, I began teaching physics. To pay for school I had to take out a loan from the Dutch government, and if I taught full time, at least twenty hours a week, each year the government would forgive one-fifth of my loan. Another advantage of teaching was that I wouldn’t have to serve in the army. The military would have been the worst, an absolute disaster for me. I’m allergic to all forms of authority—it’s just in my personality—and I knew I would have ended up mouthing off and scrubbing floors. So I taught math and physics full time, twenty-two contact hours per week, at the Libanon Lyceum in Rotterdam, to sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds. I avoided the army, did not have to pay back my loan, and was getting my PhD, all at the same time.

I also learned to teach. For me, teaching high school students, being able to change the minds of young people in a positive way, that was thrilling. I always tried to make classes interesting but also fun for the students, even though the school itself was quite strict. The classroom doors had transom windows at the top, and one of the headmasters would sometimes climb up on a chair and spy on teachers through the transom. Can you believe it?

I wasn’t caught up in the school culture, and being in graduate school, I was boiling over with enthusiasm. My goal was to impart that enthusiasm to my students, to help them see the beauty of the world all around them in a new way, to change them so that they would see the world of physics as beautiful, and would understand that physics is everywhere, that it permeates our lives. What …