Epstein Secrets

he reproducible phenomena of Nature. Suppose certain external constraints act on a system. Examples include the solar radiation input at the top of Earth's atmosphere, the temperature gradient imposed across a Bonard convection cell, the velocity gradient imposed across a sheared fluid layer, or the f

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

jects obscure that they are actually attracted to the earth's surface at the same rate; and Darwin's epic realization that the diversity of life on Earth could arise from a single progenitor by the simple process of natural selection. None of these connections was all that obvious, at first. However,

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

rtainty principle, as the energy it can carry is so small that no visible violation of the conservation of en- ergy will occur. Thus, an electron on Earth can emit a virtual photon that could travel to Alpha Centauri, four light-years away, and that pho- ton can still produce a force on an electron the

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