Epstein Secrets

impact on physics, was coincidentally born in the same year that Mi- chael Faraday made his great experimental discovery of induction. Like Newton, Maxwell also began his scientific career fascinated by color and light. Newton had explored the spectrum of visible colors into which white light splits wh

th a current of known magnitude. This force is proportional to the product of the currents. Let's call the constant of proportionality in this case B. Maxwell showed that the speed of an electromagnetic disturbance that emanates from an oscillating charge can be rendered precisely in terms of the measured

ple for whom quantum mechanics seems to offer hope of a world where any dream, no matter how outlandish, is realizable. Other familiar names, Bohr, Schrodinger, Dirac, and later Feynman and Dyson, each made great leaps into the unknown. But they weren't alone. Physics is a collaborative discipline. Too oft

e should fit together in this way, and in fact it wasn't until many years later that the equation was independently explained at an atomic level by Maxwell and Boltzmann. Thirdly, the equations do not refer to underlying microscopic mechanisms or variables. In equation (4.7a) there are no references to

l regularity and predictability in the aggregate. The Maxwell-Boltzmann-Gibbs methods of statistical mechanics

intuitively wrong. In most of the things that humans count, more is better, while with entropy less is normally better. In later sections I follow Schrodinger in using the concept of 'negentropy' (negative-entropy) to get round this problem. The important point of the energy/information debate is that the

ssipative structure approach, presumably there is a negentropy flow associated with 'maintaining' the dissipative structure in its low entropy form; Maxwell's demon is continually at work narrowing the spread of the distribution. However if this negentropy flow is smaller than the entropy flow through t

distribution [Levy & Solomon 1996]. In contrast the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of a normal thermodynamic

the question of what is negentropy. Erwin Schr0dinger first introduced the concept of negentropy, in his 1944 popular-science book 'What is life?' [Schrodinger 1944] and it was used in the discussion of living systems. Schrodinger explained his use of this phrase: if I had been catering for them [physicist

. It was the first time that, purely on the basis of theoretical notions arising from mathematics, a new particle was predicted. Think about that. Maxwell had spostdicted" the existence of light as a result of his unification of electricity and magnetism. Le Verrier had predicted the existence of Nept

These electrons have, on average, velocities that are a fair fraction of the speed of light, and to describe them, we must use Special Relativity. Schrodinger's equation worked well to describe the energy levels of elec- trons in the outer parts of simple atoms such as hydrogen, where it pro- vided a quantu