Book Review: The Clockwork Universe (Newton & Calculus!)

News, notes, questions on the McHenry invented James Bond Astro Spiral Jump Stunt
MSI
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Book Review: The Clockwork Universe (Newton & Calculus!)

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As part of our response to Calculus Class Ques: Was the Spiral Jump Stunt Slowed Down for the James Bond Movie?
Since this question was from high school students doing a calculus project....
We had to mention this excellent book:

THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
By Edward Dolnick

Had to add a great quote on Calculus from the book Clockwork Universe
I found my book and didn't yet find the quote BUT liked this from the book...
  • "The new tool for describing the moving, changing world was called calculus.
    With its discovery, every scientist in the world suddenly held in his hands a magical machine.
    Pose a question that asked how far? how fast? how high?
    Calculus made it easy to take a snapshot --to freeze the action at any given instant-- and to then examine, at leisure, an arrow of momentary motionless..."
From the NYTimes review of the excellent book
  • "Newton invented (and Gottfried Leibniz, the German philosopher, reinvented) the math of motion, calculus, the way of answering how fast, how far, how high? Then Newton used his calculus to show how an apple is pulled to the earth and how the earth pulls the moon into an orbit, and how these pulls are the same as the sun’s on the planets. And this universal pull, this gravity, everywhere operates on the same math: the greater the masses of the bodies and the closer they are together, the stronger the pull. Newton didn’t limit himself to explaining the solar system. Nor was he the only genius whose calculations and inventions described the underlying order of the universe in such a way that we needn’t merely take the descriptions on faith. We can believe them; they’re science."
Get the book and enjoy the read!
A Great read about the beginnings of calculus and the foundations of our understanding of the world in motion!
Enjoy calculus and the power it gives to your understanding of the world in motion!
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