The Great Equations [Aloud]

Robert Crease in conversation with Larry Swanson, Appleman Professor of Biological Sciences, USC
The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg

Notes (taken on a receipt that I managed to scrounge up (didn’t have a notebook with me) for something purchased 02-06-10 for *5.00 and *0.49 tx, which I now remember was a Norton Critical Edition of Death in Venice from Counterpoint):

Intro:
quote from the book comparing the growth of math to the growth of a city

Crease:

• inspiration for the book came from looking at a “e=mc^2” ornament — how equations have become symbolic and taken on cultural meaning

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• Pythagorean Theorem
• symbol of a proof
• c^2 = a^2 + b^2, rule known of well before Pythagoras, but the Greeks did the proof
• first extant example of the proof in Plato’s Meno
• people are still trying to discover new ways to prove this, there are hundreds of variations already; proving this anew is not about the contribution to mathematics but the joy of discovery
• anecdote of when Einstein was 12 and first saw this proof, idea of universal rules

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• F = ma and gravity
• Galileo as bridge between Aristotle and Newton; his idea that mass is something separate from weight
• story of apple traced back to Newton himself
• Newton would ask how? not why? (had to do with his theology)

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• e = mc^2 and general relativity
• why we know it in this form (with the corrective amount left off) due to a book on the Manhattan Project after the bombs had been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• has become a symbol for knowledge itself
• Einstein wanted to combine seemingly disparate ideas of Maxwell’s and Newton’s

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• e^(iπ) + 1 = 0
• evidence in Los Angeles trial
• (my note: see footnote pg. 199 Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea about Euler’s equation as the “paragon of mathematical beauty”)

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• entropy
• referenced across disciplines in works, for example of Stoppard and Pynchon)

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• uncertainty Heisenberg and Schrodinger
• Copenhagen play: Bohr vs. Heisenberg on making sense
• uncertainty and quantum in popular culture — painting, literature, sculpture, theology, literary criticism, humor (A cop pulls Heisenberg over. “Do you know how fast you were going?” “No, but I can tell you exactly where I am.”)
• people know that observations had an effect before Heisenberg

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• Maxwell’s equations
• didn’t actually write the equations (as we know them) himself, Heaviside did that later

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• how equations changed through history
• often given in words first, and becomes “catchier” later, such and Newton with F = ma
• at some point “=” and “+” etc. had to be invented

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• Suggested reading: David Lindley’s Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science

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• side note: several of these equations are on the steps outside of LAPL