【书摘】Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovel
很好读的物理学科普讲座集，读着读着看到熟悉的名字就像认出了老朋友（醒醒你是疯了吗难道还被虐得不够…），Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Maxwell…
七堂课从物理学的不同分支讲起，经典力学，量子力学，统计物理，理论力学，热力学，量子的部分最详细，很有趣。（当然整本书都超级有趣）
作者是意大利物理学家，但是写作风格也有哲学的感觉，结语用了很大篇幅讲了 the relationship between human beings and the cosmos, 作者平静阐述他的观点，I don’t think human race can exist for long in the history of the whole cosmos for that all our cousin species have gone to extinction, also the premonitory problems with our planet to some extent indicate that we have to face the inevitability of our mortality. 一瞬间被震惊到几乎有跪感。
摘抄：
Every so often I would raise my eyes from the book and look at the glittering sea: it seemed to me that I was actually seeing the curvature of space and time imagined by Einstein. As if by magic: as if a friend were whispering into my ear an extraordinary hidden truth, suddenly raising the veil of reality to disclose a simpler, deeper order. Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.
In short, the theory describes a colorful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet, and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea…
To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.
A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and nonexistence and swarm in space, even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies; of the innumerable stars; of sunlight; of mountains, woods, and fields of grain; of the smiling faces of the young at parties; and of the night sky studded with stars.
Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.
Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amid the infinite arabesques of forms that constitute reality, we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes.
Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution that our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made. Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past that haunts us and serenity.
Our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable.
…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…
There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns. They are in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes. Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.
