Physics
- Ch.1 Aristotelian Physics and Its Greek Inheritors published
Between the sixth century BCE and the second century CE, Greek-speaking philosophers and mathematicians began to ask, with their own evidentiary apparatus, what the natural world is made of and how it changes. The Ionian natural philosopher…
- Ch.2 The Medieval and Islamic Synthesis published
Between the seventh century CE and the fourteenth, the Aristotelian-Archimedean inheritance of Chapter 1 was carried out of the late-antique Mediterranean, translated into Arabic, reworked by scholars in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Bukhara, a…
- Ch.3 The Scientific Revolution — Copernicus to Newton published
Between 1543 and 1687 the framework Chapter 2 inherited from the medieval and Islamic synthesis was dismantled and replaced. The displacement happened in three pulses. The first was astronomical: Copernicus's heliocentric reorganisation of …
- Ch.4 Classical Mechanics — From Newton to Hamilton published
The hundred and fifty years between Newton's *Principia* of 1687 and Jacobi's *Vorlesungen über Dynamik* in the 1840s are the period during which classical mechanics was first written down completely, then rewritten three times, and finally…
- Ch.5 Electromagnetism and the Field Concept published
The hundred years from Coulomb's 1785 inverse-square-law mémoires to Hertz's 1888 detection of electromagnetic waves is the period during which two apparently separate Aristotelian curiosities — the static attraction of rubbed amber and the…
- Ch.6 Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics published
The hundred-and-some years from Sadi Carnot's 1824 *Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu* to J. Willard Gibbs's 1902 *Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics* are the period during which a question raised by the steam engine — …
- Ch.7 Special and General Relativity published
The fifteen years from Albert Einstein's 1905 *Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper* in *Annalen der Physik* 17 to Arthur Stanley Eddington's 1920 *Space, Time and Gravitation* — the British astronomer's consolidating report of the 1919 solar…
- Ch.8 Quantum Mechanics published
Between Max Planck's 1900 oscillator derivation of the blackbody spectrum and John von Neumann's 1932 *Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik*, physics produced a second mathematical theory of matter — one that did not displace classi…