Thursday, June 30, 2005

Genius

Years ago, I read a book called, "Surely your Joking, Mr. Feynman", a collection of stories about the prominent physicist Richard P. Feynman, and I very much appreciated his approach to physical and other scientific problems, so I've paid a little attention to works about him and other physicists.
I've been reworking and reorganizing the basics of Physics and Chemistry lately, and I was intending to do more study yesterday, when I ran across a biography of him, entitled, appropriately enough, "Genius". I very much like his freewheeling, unbounded curiosity about physical topics.
While there is something to be said for organization of knowledge, (and I am rigorous about how I organize subjects in my notebooks), in my case too much of it tends to become overly boring and routine. I need room to backtrack and improvise.

I've already laid out the basics of how I'm organizing physics and chemistry, so I'm going to start from there and describe things I am or have been working on. I've been taking another cycle through particle mechanics, and I'm about to start revising my thoughts on particle mechanics systems. I've finally managed to pick up a chemistry book and review the parts that interested me in college chemistry, trying to tie principles of thermodynamics and chemical equilibrium back together. I've also done a sketch of solar system astronomy, which is leading back to geology. In my most recent forays through cataloging chemical substances, water appears near the top of the list, and it's important enough to geology and biology that I'd like to have the numbers at hand for what is called the heat of fusion (associated with freezing and melting), and of vaporization (associated with boiling and condensation, for those unfamiliar with the terms.

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