Pablo Wheels

“Vulcan is long gone, almost completely forgotten. It may seem today to be merely a curiosity, just another mistake our ancestors made, about which we now know better. But the issue of what to do with failure in science was tricky right at the start of the Scientific Revolution, and it remains so now. We may—we do—know more than the folks back then. But we are not thus somehow immune to the habits of mind, the leaps of imagination, or the capacity for error that they possessed. Vulcan’s biography is one of the human capacity to both discover and self-deceive. It offers a glimpse of how hard it is to make sense of the natural world, and how difficult it is for any of us to unlearn the things we think are so, but aren’t.”
― Thomas Levenson, The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe

“Although Einstein said comprehensibility was a “miracle” we shall never understand, that didn’t stop him from trying. He spent his entire professional life articulating exactly what it is about the universe that makes it make sense, and his thinking set the course of modern physics.”
― George Musser, Spooky Action at a Distance: Why Space and Times Are Doomed—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

“Clausius derived the word entropy from the Greek root tropy meaning “turn” and a prefix en meaning in. Thus entropy literally means “in turn” or “turn in.”
― Don S. Lemons, A Student's Guide to Entropy

“Carnot’s theorem: The most efficient heat engine is one that operates reversibly.”
― Don S. Lemons, A Student's Guide to Entropy