Matt Landreman’s Opinion piece (Physics Today, March 2005, page 52) and the letters responding to it (September 2005, page 13) bring to mind the comment made in the 1830s by Nathaniel Bowditch, in regard to his translation of Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics : “Whenever I meet in La Place with the words ‘thus it plainly appears,’ I am sure that hours, and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover HOW it plainly appears.” Fortunately, Bowditch’s footnotes to his translation preserve for posterity his many discoveries of “how it plainly appears.”
More about the Authors
Lloyd Kannenberg.
(lloyd_kannenberg@uml.edu) University of Massachusetts Lowell, US
.
The Week in Physics" is likely a reference to the regular updates or summaries of new physics research, such as those found in publications like Physics Today from AIP Publishing or on news aggregators like Phys.org.
