History of Physics

The Shortt clock, made in the 1920s, is the most famous accurate clock pendulum ever known, having an accuracy of one second per year when kept at nearly constant temperature. Almost all of a pendulum clock's accuracy resides in its pendulum. If the pendulum is accurate, the clock will be accurate. This book describes many scientific aspects of pendulum design and operation in simple terms with experimental data, and little mathematics. It has been written, looking at all the different parts and aspects of the pendulum in great detail, chapter by chapter, reflecting the degree of attention necessary for making a pendulum run accurately. The topics covered include the dimensional stability of different pendulum materials, good and poor suspension spring designs, the design of mechanical joints and clamps, effect of quartz on accuracy, temperature compensation, air drag of different bob shapes and making a sinusoidal electromagnetic drive. One whole chapter is devoted to simple ways of improving the accuracy of ordinary low-cost pendulum clocks, which have a different construction compared to the more expensive designs of substantially well-made ones. This book will prove invaluable to anyone who wants to know how to make a more accurate pendulum or pendulum clock.

This book records the long scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Although philosophical speculation about alien civilizations dates to antiquity, the invention of the telescope in the 17th century inspired scientists like Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Christiaan Huygens to consider the possibility of intelligent creatures living on the Moon or on the planets of our solar system. By the late 19th century, Mars became the focus of attention for astronomers searching for civilized life near the earth. The belief that Mars contained a superior civilization capable of building a global system of irrigation canals on the planet was supported by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and the American Percival Lowell. In the 1960s and 1970s, data gathered by Soviet and American spacecraft challenged the assumption that Mars was the habitat for life of any sort. As the hunt for alien civilizations in the solar system waned, a new search began for signs of intelligent life in remote parts of the universe. This search used radio telescopes to scan the skies for any messages transmitted to earth by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Distinguished modern astronomers and physicists — Frank Drake, Philip Morrison, Carl Sagan — were convinced that electronic technology would allow contact with civilizations located many light years from earth. Unfortunately, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was compromised by anthropomorphism (attributing human qualities to alien life and culture) and by an unconscious religious outlook that the superior beings living in outer space would help solve pressing social, economic, and technological problems.

Julian Schwinger was one of the leading theoretical physicists of the 20th century. His contributions are as important, and as pervasive, as those of Richard Feynman, with whom he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics (along with Sin-itiro Tomonaga). Yet, while Feynman is universally recognised as a cultural icon, Schwinger is little known to many even within the physics community. In his youth, Schwinger was a nuclear physicist, turning to classical electrodynamics after World War II. In the years after the war, he was the first to renormalise quantum electrodynamics. Subsequently, he presented the most complete formulation of quantum field theory and laid the foundations for the electroweak synthesis of Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and Abdus Salam, and he made fundamental contributions to the theory of nuclear magnetic resonance as well as many-body theory and quantum optics. Schwinger also developed a unique approach to quantum mechanics, measurement algebra, and a general quantum action principle. His discoveries include ‘Feynman's’ parameters and ‘Glauber's’ coherent states; in later years he also developed an alternative to operator quantum field theory which he called source theory, reflecting his profound phenomenological bent. His late work on the Thomas-Fermi model of atoms and on the Casimir effect continues to be an inspiration to a new generation of physicists. This first full-length biography describes the many strands of his research life, while tracing the personal life of this private and gentle genius.

This book presents a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize for Science (Physics 1979), who was nevertheless excommunicated and branded as a heretic in his own country. His achievements are often overlooked, even besmirched. Realizing that the whole world had to be his stage, he pioneered the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, a vital focus of Third World science which remains as his monument. A staunch Muslim, he was ashamed of the decline of science in the heritage of Islam, and struggled doggedly to restore it to its former glory. Undermined by his excommunication, these valiant efforts were doomed.

This book contains an edition of the Minutes of the Coffee House Philosophical Society 1780-1787, as transcribed by William Nicholson, the secretary to the society. The 1780s were exciting years for science and its applications, and experimental philosophy and industrial development were closely interwoven. This coffee house society gave a group of natural philosophers the opportunity to discuss the topics that most interested them. The minutes themselves, unique in their completeness, constitute a continuous record of the fortnightly meetings of a group of leading natural philosophers, instrument makers, physicians, and industrialist entrepreneurs. In addition to a fully edited edition of the Minute book, and brief biographies of all the members, the book includes essays by Jan Golinski on the members' discussion about phlogiston and other issues relating to the chemical revolution, and by Larry Stewart on the reforming, radical, and industrial contexts of the networks to which the members belonged. One standard criticism of English science in the late 18th century is its isolation from the rest of Europe. These minutes offer a very different picture. The members, with Irish chemist Richard Kirwan taking the most active role, discussed current issues in science and reported on scientific and industrial advances from across Europe, and even from Hudson's Bay, showing early English awareness of the latest developments. The Minute book gives a sense of history at a particular period, and is invaluable to all historians, whatever their specialism.

This book presents a vivid argument for the almost lost idea of a unity of all natural sciences. It starts with the "strange" physics of matter, including particle physics, atomic and quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity and their consequences (Chapter 1), and it continues by describing the properties of material systems that are best understood by statistical and phase-space concepts (Chapter 2). These lead to entropy and to the classical picture of quantitative information, initially devoid of value and meaning (Chapter 3). Finally, "information space" and dynamics within it are introduced as a basis for semantics (Chapter 4), leading to an exploration of life and thought as new problems in physics (Chapter 5). Dynamic equations – again of a strange (but very general) nature – bring about the complex familiarity of the world we live in. Surprising new results in the life sciences open our eyes to the richness of physical thought, and they show us what can and what cannot be explained by a Darwinian approach. The abstract physical approach is applicable to the origins of life, of meaningful information and even of our universe.

Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851), the discoverer of electromagnetism, came to be of great importance as a scientist and philosopher far beyond the borders of Denmark and his own time. The centre of an international network of scholars, he was instrumental in establishing the world picture of modern physics. Ørsted was the physicist who brought Kant’s metaphysics to fruition. His discovery of electromagnetism in 1820, a phenomenon that could not possibly exist according to his adversaries, changed the course of research in physics; it inspired M. Faraday’s experiments and discovery of the adverse effect, magneto‐electric induction; the two physical phenomena were later described in mathematical equations by J.C. Maxwell. Together these discoveries constitute the prerequisites for the overwhelming development of modern technology. But Ørsted was also one of the cultural leaders and organizers of the Danish Golden Age (together with Grundtvig, Kierkegaard, and Hans Christian Andersen, his protégé) making significant contributions to aesthetics, philosophy, pedagogy, politics, and religion. Ørsted epitomizes the synthesis of two cultures, remarkably bridging the gap between science, the humanities, and the arts. The concordance between his philosophy of ‘the true, the good, and the beautiful’ and his personal conduct of life makes him a model scholar.

Holography exploded on the scientific world in 1964, but its slow fuse had been burning much longer. Over the next four decades, the echoes of that explosion reached scientists, engineers, artists, and popular culture. Emerging from classified military research, holography evolved to represent the power of post-war physics, an aesthetic union of art and science, the countercultural meanderings of holism, a cottage industry for waves of would-be entrepreneurs, and a fertile plot device for science fiction. New working cultures sprang up to mutate holography, redefining its products, reshaping its audiences, and re-conceiving its applications. The outcomes included ever more sublime holograms and exquisitely sensitive measuring techniques — but also priority disputes, prurience, and poisonous business rivalries. New subjects cross intellectual borders, and so do their explanations. This book draws on the history and philosophy of science and technology, social studies, politics, and cultural history to trace the trajectory of holography. The result is an in-depth account of how new science emerges. Based on unprecedented interviews with pioneer holographers and extensive archival research, it reveals how science, technology, art, and wider culture are entwined in the modern world.

The introduction in antiquity of the moving sphere as a model for understanding the celestial phenomena provided the momentum for making celestial globes and mapping the stars. The globe is the most deceptive of all early scientific instruments. Invented by the Greeks as a scientific instrument imitating the phenomena such as the rising of the setting of the stars and precession, it became soon used in antiquity in education to circumvent the complicated mathematics of the sphere, and by artists for decorative purposes symbolising the world at large. The globe was also the starting-point for the construction of maps in antiquity. Although no antique celestial maps have survived medieval copies of them are included in illustrated astronomical books such as the Latin translation of Aratus's Phaenomena describing how the constellations are located with respect to each other. The cultural impact of globes is echoed in the oldest known ceiling painting of the celestial sky in the bath house of Quṣayr ^cAmra built in the first half of the eighth century. The complete absence of celestial maps other than the retes of astrolabes in the Islamic tradition is a puzzle that needs further study. The construction of globes varied greatly as it passed from Greece to the Arabic and Medieval European cultures. The constellation design of Islamic globes stands out from later western globes made in the early fifteenth century by the way constellations are drawn on a sphere. The first celestial maps in the mathematical tradition also emerged in the early fifteenth century foreshadowing the modern period in celestial cartography in the Western World.

This book interprets the book of nature for curious readers of all sorts, but especially for those looking to appreciate the power and beauty of physics without having to grapple with the mathematics. Hundreds of little diagrams take the place of the equations that physicists otherwise need to tell the tale. It is a tale, no less, of how the world is put together and how it works, of how the universe might have arisen and where it might be going.