“Life is full of surprises: our approximate condition for the fall of a body through a resisting medium is precisely analogous to the exact condition for the flow of an electric current through a resisting wire”
Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)
Context: Life is full of surprises: our approximate condition for the fall of a body through a resisting medium is precisely analogous to the exact condition for the flow of an electric current through a resisting wire [of an induction coil]....
m\frac {dv}{dt} = mg - Kv
This is the form most convenient for making an analogy with the "fall", i. e., flow, of an electric current.
... in order from left to right, mass m, rate of change of velocity \frac {dv}{dt}, gravitational force mg, and velocity v. What are the electrical counterparts?... To press the switch, to allow current to start flowing is the analogue of opening the fingers, to allow the body to start falling. The fall of the body is caused by the force mg due to gravity; the flow of the current is caused by the electromotive force or tension E due to the battery. The falling body has to overcome the frictional resistance of the air; the flowing current has to overcome the electrical resistance of the wire. Air resistance is proportional to the body's velocity v; electrical resistance is proportional to the current i. And consequently rate of change of velocity \frac {dv}{dt} corresponds to rate of change of current \frac {di}{dt}.... The electromagnetic induction L opposes the change of current... And doesn't the inertia or mass m..? Isn't L, so to speak, an electromagnetic inertia?
L\frac {di}{dt} = E - Ki
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George Pólya 35
Hungarian mathematician 1887–1985Related quotes

"On the Propagation of Electric Waves by Means of Wires" (1889) Wiedemann's Annalen. 37 p. 395, & pp.160-161 of Electric Waves
Electric Waves: Being Researches on the Propagation of Electric Action with Finite Velocity Through Space (1893)

“If we resist our passions, it is more through their weakness than our strength.”
Si nous résistons à nos passions, c'est plus par leur faiblesse que par notre force.
If we conquer our passions, it is more from their weakness than from our strength.
Maxim 122.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

“Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.”
2009, A New Beginning (June 2009)
Context: Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the centre of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Leçons sur les Phénomènes de la Vie Communs aux Animaux et aux Végétaux (1878-1879).
“Balls curve as a consequence of asymmetries in the resistance of the air through which they pass.”
Source: The Physics Of Baseball (Second Edition - Revised), Chapter 3, Pitching, p. 28