The 50 IDEAS YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW series

When I was in London last September, I bought several books in the 50 IDEAS YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW series.  I started reading 50 MATHEMATICAL IDEAS and really enjoyed it.  I learned from it that if something increases exponentially at 1% per year, in 100 years it'll increase by a factor of "e" (an irrational number that comes from the series of inverse factorials, equal to about 2 and 5/7). That finding really interested me, because I was wondering why exactly that increase would lead to doubling in 72 years.  I now see that it relates to increasing in 28 years by a factor of e divided by 2.

After I finished that I started reading 50 PHYSICS IDEAS, but got bogged down in it.  Some of the stuff in it, like Newton's laws of motion and the temperature of absolute zero, were familiar enough.  But there are also things like Brownian motion and the Fraunhofer diffraction and Schrodinger's cat that are a bit over my head.

It reminds me of the time I started learning Grade 11 physics.  I was not quite 15 and not quite ready for it.  I ran into trouble learning about torque because I confused it with levers.  My father got a doctorate in physics and became a physics professor, but it wasn't for me.

One of these days I'm going to get around to finishing 50 PHYSICS IDEAS, then read others in the series. (They have books on subjects like art and philosophy too.)