Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

by Carlo Rovelli

was Bohr who understood that the energy of electrons in atoms can only take on certain values, like the energy of light, and crucially that electrons can only ‘jump’ between one atomic orbit and another with fixed energies, emitting or absorbing a photon when they jump. These are the famous ‘quantum leaps’.

Quant leaps

‘what’s non-apparent is much vaster than what’s apparent’.

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Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth.

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Lucretius expresses this, wonderfully: … we are all born from the same celestial seed; all of us have the same father, from which the earth, the mother who feeds us, receives clear drops of rain, producing from them bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts, offering up the foods with which all bodies are nourished, to lead a sweet life and generate offspring …

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