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comment by fireballs619
fireballs619  ·  3381 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 10th Occasional Give Us a Quote from Your Recent Reading

    If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
- Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume 1

These lectures are fantastic. I just took a course in Mechanics, so now I am going through Feynman's treatment of the subject, and everything seems to make more sense.

By the way, I love these posts. I always end up adding a couple of books to my "To Read" just based on these quotes.





lil  ·  3381 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks fballs - I'm going to nominate you now to be a member of the ad hoc quotesporn committee. Please post another one in a month or so if the rest of us forget.

That quote by Feynman is fantastic:

    all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
That sentence is so full of metaphoric potential that it might well inspire a future #todayswritingprompt post.