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(More customer reviews)If physics has rock stars, Walter Lewin is one. If physicist rock stars can have groupies, I confess to being one.
As I read the publisher's text about the book, I felt a little blush. Could that refer to me?! Truly, Walter Lewin's online lectures changed MY life. Sounds silly? Well it's true. Not only did I get very interested in a subject I thought out of my grasp, but I continued my education in physics. I "discovered" a lot of application of physics to my business practice. To shorten the story, I use physics in my business and my clients have benefited greatly and my career has blasted off.
Now, the book is like listening to Dr. Lewin talk. For a fan, what could be better? The videos of his lectures might be better but they are very math intense. The book is light on the math. That's good.
I do wish the book had more than than the too brief picture collection about 2/3'ds through. I would like some illustrations to go with the topical discussions. Still, overall, I love the book but that's because I see Dr. Lewin as a sort of virtual mentor. I could never afford MIT or qualify to get in to MIT. Dr. Lein's lectures opened MIT to me.
So a physics fan, and especially a Walter Lewin fan, will love the book. I hope every one of his students will buy two copies (I did)---cherish one and give the other away. Your gift may inspire the next Einstein (male or female).
The only negative? That beautiful Dutch accent, which lends itself to physics, doesn't come through in print.
Great read.
Click Here to see more reviews about: For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge Of Time - A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics
"YOU HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE" is a common refrain in the emails Walter Lewin receives daily from fans who have been enthralled by his world-famous video lectures about the wonders of physics. "I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes," wrote one such fan. When Lewin's lectures were made available online, he became an instant YouTube celebrity, and The New York Times declared, "Walter Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube's greatest hits." For more than thirty years as a beloved professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lewin honed his singular craft of making physics not only accessible but truly 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 why clouds are white. Now, as Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, Lewin takes readers on a marvelous journey in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. "I introduce people to their own world," writes Lewin, "the world they live in and are familiar with but don't approach like a physicist—yet." 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, and would it be possible to put our hand out and touch one? Whether introducing why the air smells so fresh after a lightning storm, why we briefly lose (and gain) weight when we ride in an elevator, or what the big bang would have sounded like had anyone existed to hear it, Lewin never ceases to surprise and delight with the extraordinary ability of physics to answer even the most elusive questions. Recounting his own exciting discoveries as a pioneer in the field of X-ray astronomy—arriving at MIT right at the start of an astonishing revolution in astronomy—he also brings to life the power of physics to reach into the vastness of space and unveil exotic uncharted territories, from the marvels of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud to the unseeable depths of black holes. "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." His wonderfully inventive and vivid ways of introducing us to the revelations of physics impart to us a new appreciation of the remarkable beauty and intricate harmonies of the forces that govern our lives.
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