The History of Physics Essay

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Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution provides a comprehensive breakdown of the discoveries that defined the Scientific Revolution and the history behind them. The story of the scientific revolution truly begins with a separation between the Catholic Church and the denizens of Europe brought on by the Protestant Reformation. This separation led directly to the questioning of the church and what they deemed to be true. The growing suspicion of the church applied not only to the politics and religious views but the scientific “facts” the church was built upon. The suspicion of these scientific facts quickly grew to an open challenging of these facts, The Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution is something we have all studied in our grade school years and the discoveries of people such as Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei are well documented and arguably common knowledge but Jardine’s book Ingenious Pursuits encapsulates the scientific revolution in a new light. Jardine accomplishes this by telling the stories of some of the greatest achievements of the Scientific Revolution. These stories reveal the collaborations of some of histories most brilliant minds as well as the secrecy amongst them and uncover the motives that fueled many of these accomplishments.

The Special Theory of relativity is an acknowledged physical theory that revolutionized advancements in the relationship between space, and time. The theory is one of the most interesting discoveries that are still used today in science fiction movies such as Star Wars, and Star Trek through the use of black holes, and time travel due to it’s astonishing results, and it occurrence at speeds close to the speed light, which can be appealing to a wide range of audience. This was a harvest from six years of extremely handwork by Albert Einstein. Einstein used resources that were widely available to the public due to his economic constraints. It wasn’t until 1905, when Einstein finally had finished and published his discoveries, and gatherings

Greek mathematics and science has dramatically evolved throughout history. Ancient Greece was the birthplace of science and the ideas and concepts impacted the culture and society. Interests in science were motivated by unscientific cultural interested and biases that arose from the language and opposing theories of the time. Ancient Greeks produced great advancements in mathematics and science that are still used today. Many ancient philosophers shaped the ideas and concepts of ancient Greece and its people.

Thales of Maletus, studied astronomy and was the first to predict an eclipse of the sun. He also calculated the height and distance of things, and was considered an inventor and engineer who is also interested in electrical properties.

an important field of study, as with greater knowledge of the character of physical law,

Thales and his two successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes, were citizens in the city of Miletus and they are known

· John Waller is research fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine and author of Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery (OUP)

The theories of relativity were revolutionary. Everybody agrees that Einstein brought about this revolution. Even the people that claim that Einstein just tweaked the theories of Lorentz and Poincaré, admit that Einstein was the first to recognize the physical meaning of the formulations. He understood that the terms and concepts like those of absolute space and absolute time must lose there meaning and other concepts had to replace them, if we were to be able to understand the phenomena of electrodynamics. All this is consistent with a scientific revolution as conceived of by Kuhn. It is then possible to express the revolution in science that Einstein started in terms of Kuhn’s paradigms and paradigm shifts.

People throughout the ages have helped further society to help it get to the point it is today. Individuals such as Nikola Tesla, the father of modern electricity or Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics. These such people were some of the most knowledgeable people of their time making advances that we never could have without them. Throughout history we have declared many people as prodigies or fathers of their field, but what really defines somebody as knowledgeable? I believe that Socrates even today is still thought of as one of the greatest philosophers of our time, taking up multiple students who became just as famous as himself through his teachings. Yet many people argue if he actually knew anything.

In 1905, Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity was proposed. The reason that it is so "special" is because it was part of the more complex and extensive Theory of General Relativity, which was published in 1915. His theory reshaped the world of physics when it contradicted all previous laws of motion erected by Galileo and Newton. By mathematically manipulating these previous laws of motion, physicists in the nineteenth century were able to explain such phenomena as the flow of the ocean, the orbits of planets around the sun, the fall of rocks, and the random behavior of molecules in gases. At first, Einstein faced great opposition when he came up with his radical new theory because the previous laws of motion proposed by

Over the course of the millenniums, scientific theories have made considerable progression. At times improving sluggishly, where at times growing rapidly and skyrocketing. Some regions unprosperous than others at times, while others majorly succeeding where other nations are failing. These peaks and valleys are what provision the evolution of theories. The most significant of the preceding times was the era of Aristotle the philosopher around three hundred B.C., who helped lend a foundation for the forthcoming generations. Later on during the years four hundred through one thousand B.C., when much of the world was in stagnation, mostly Europe, the Islamic Empire was able to build a thriving scientific focal point, allowing scientific theories and ideas to emanate from within. If not for these luminous ideologies, the world would be quite different than how we see it today. Downstream through the flow of time came Galileo Galilei in the sixteenth century, the brilliant Italian who changed the view of astronomy and mathematics. Finally, there is Isaac Newton, the Father of Modern Science. Born in 1642 C.E., he changed the whole world with his striking math, laws of physics, and astronomical theories. These people, generations, and nations all completely helped influence the evolution of scientific theories to as we know it today, from Aristotle’s ancient time, to an Islamic realm that succeeded in mustering the strength of science, to Galileo’s incredible discoveries, and

We do not have a clear answer. We are living through a challenging and exciting era, in sharp contrast to the situation in the past (half) century in physics.

Classical physics is the study of physics which describes the activity of matter and energy on a scale that is relative to human experience, including astronomical bodies, thus examining the macrophysics of the world around us. However towards the end of the 19th century, scientists such as Thomas Kuhn began to find phenomena in both macro and microphysics that classical physics could not explain. His analysis of the philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions influenced two major revolutions in the development of physics that created a shift in the original scientific models of the theory of relativity ¬¬and the development of quantum mechanics.

What is the (next accessible) scale of new physics? We do not have a clear answer. We are living through a challenging and exciting era, in sharp contrast to the situation of the past (half) century in physics. The discovery of the Higgs boson, the determination of the non-zero θ13 neutrino mixing parameter, the first detection of gravitation waves, and many greatly improved experimental probes for new physics beyond the standard model mark the great triumphs of our understandings of nature. Profound puzzles of nature, such as hierarchy problem, dark matter, neutrino properties, matter-antimatter asymmetry, strong CP, flavor structure, etc., are actively being explored but yet remain to be solved. However, no