Tony Rothman > Quotes

“If you ask a stupid question, you may feel stupid; if you don't ask a stupid question, you remain stupid.”
― Tony Rothman, Instant Physics: From Aristotle to Einstein, and Beyond

“* To be sure, today Tyndall would probably be called a physicist, and he is best remembered for his pioneering investigations of the absorptive properties of atmospheric gases. He seems, in fact, to have been the first person to predict the greenhouse effect, which he did in 1861: On a fair November day the aqueous vapour in the atmosphere produced fifteen times the absorption of the true air of the atmosphere. It is on rays”
― Tony Rothman, Everything's Relative: And Other Fables from Science and Technology

“In any case, the theory of Brownian motion was independently developed in 1900 by a Frenchman, Louis Bachelier. Bachelier was not actually concerned with the motion of microscopic particles suspended in a liquid. He was concerned with prices on the French stock market. Prices on the Bourse, like particles in a liquid, are subject to a vast array of random forces, so many that the prices’ behavior can only be studied probabilistically. This is exactly what Bachelier did in his remarkable doctoral thesis, “The Theory of Speculation.” Yet although his paper is couched in terms of futures and stock options and “call-o-more’s” (whatever those are), the mathematics is identical to that of Brownian motion, and Bachelier’s equation explaining the drift of prices with time is the same as the one Einstein later derived for the position of particles. In his paper Bachelier anticipated the Black-Scholes approach to options trading, and for his prescient work he has in recent years been crowned the “father of economic modeling.” At the time, though, Bachelier seems to have been ignored, and he passed into obscurity. Could Einstein have known of his predecessor’s work and merely transplanted the mathematics to particles? I am aware of no evidence that this is the case.”
― Tony Rothman, Everything's Relative: And Other Fables from Science and Technology

“as well, the chaotic jangle of microscopic particles was christened Brownian motion in his honor. Much effort throughout the nineteenth century went into explaining it, and by the 1860s at least three natural philosophers independently suggested that Brownian motion was caused by the collision of the suspended particles with invisible molecules.* This would turn out to be the correct explanation, but at the time it was speculation, which met fierce objections. A legitimate calculation of Brownian motion, not dissimilar in spirit to the one Einstein would perform in 1905, was attempted in 1900 by one Felix Exner. Unfortunately for Exner, he got the wrong answer. As the story goes, Einstein wrote his paper “blissfully unaware of the detailed history of Brownian motion,” a claim that he himself also made to Conrad Habicht. According to this version, he not only predicted the phenomenon but explained it as well. Maybe. To be sure, Einstein omits any mention of Brownian motion in the title of his paper, remarking only in the first paragraph, “It is possible that the motions to be discussed here are identical with the so-called Brownian molecular motion; however, the data available to me on the latter are so imprecise that I could not form a judgement on the question.” On the other hand: From Maurice Solovine we do know that a few years earlier the Olympians had pounced on and devoured the great”
― Tony Rothman, Everything's Relative: And Other Fables from Science and Technology