Physics: a short history from quintessence to quarks
-
- 12,99 €
-
- 12,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
How does the physics we know today - a highly professionalised enterprise, inextricably linked to government and industry - link back to its origins as a liberal art in Ancient Greece? What is the path that leads from the old philosophy of nature and its concern with humankind's place in the universe to modern massive international projects that hunt down fundamental particles and industrial laboratories that manufacture marvels?
John Heilbron's fascinating history of physics introduces us to Islamic astronomers and mathematicians, calculating the size of the earth whilst their caliphs conquered much of it; to medieval scholar-theologians investigating light; to Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, measuring, and trying to explain, the universe. We visit the 'House of Wisdom' in 9th-century Baghdad; Europe's first universities; the courts of the Renaissance; the Scientific Revolution and the academies of the 18th century; the increasingly specialised world of 20th and 21st century science.
Highlighting the shifting relationship between physics, philosophy, mathematics, and technology -- and the implications for humankind's self-understanding -- Heilbron explores the changing place and purpose of physics in the cultures and societies that have nurtured it over the centuries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heilbron (Love, Literature, and the Quantum Atom), professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley, explores the influence of culture on the development of physics, from ancient Greece to modern research efforts. Greek thinkers invented the earliest "theories of everything," Heilbron writes, but their preference for explaining the world without the intervention of a creator deity was reversed by Islamic scientists, who prioritized astronomy (it helped determine the direction of Mecca) and doubted the spiritual value of physics. Heilbron describes how translations of Greek and Arabic documents allowed Europeans to "domesticate" physics for early universities, and frames the scientific revolution with Galileo's experimentation, Copernicus's heliocentric solar system, and Newton's gravity. Then he wryly cites the invention of the air pump as the basis for the Enlightenment's boom in experimenters and their illuminating public demonstrations. Coupled with advances in math and data measurement, the stage was set for modern physics and its big questions, including the origins of the universe and further theories of everything. Covering topics concisely and briskly, Heilbron's history assumes that readers know a fair amount about physics, and focuses on illuminating the cultural and historical context of the science.
