Download or read book Physics in the Nineteenth Century written by Robert D. Purrington and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Putting physics into the historical context of the Industrial Revolution and the European nation-state, Purrington traces the main figures, including Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, and Helmholtz, as well as their interactions, experiments, discoveries, and debates. The success of nineteenth-century physics laid the foundation for quantum theory and relativity in the twentieth. Robert D. Purrington is a professor of physics at Tulane University and coauthor of Frame of the Universe.
Download or read book Energy Force and Matter written by Peter Michael Harman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1982-04-30 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By focusing on the conceptual issues faced by nineteenth century physicists, this book clarifies the status of field theory, the ether, and thermodynamics in the work of the period. A remarkably synthetic account of a difficult and fragmentary period in scientific development.
Download or read book The Science of Energy written by Crosbie Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although we take it for granted today, the concept of "energy" transformed nineteenth-century physics. In The Science of Energy, Crosbie Smith shows how a North British group of scientists and engineers, including James Joule, James Clerk Maxwell, William and James Thomson, Fleeming Jenkin, and P. G. Tait, developed energy physics to solve practical problems encountered by Scottish shipbuilders and marine engineers; to counter biblical revivalism and evolutionary materialism; and to rapidly enhance their own scientific credibility. Replacing the language and concepts of classical mechanics with terms such as "actual" and "potential" energy, the North British group conducted their revolution in physics so astutely and vigorously that the concept of "energy"—a valuable commodity in the early days of industrialization—became their intellectual property. Smith skillfully places this revolution in its scientific and cultural context, exploring the actual creation of scientific knowledge during one of the most significant episodes in the history of physics.
Download or read book From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences written by David Cahan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-09-15 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 19th century, much of the modern scientific enterprise took shape: scientific disciplines were formed, institutions and communities were founded and unprecedented applications to and interactions with other aspects of society and culture occurred. taught us about this exciting time and identify issues that remain unexamined or require reconsideration. They treat scientific disciplines - biology, physics, chemistry, the earth sciences, mathematics and the social sciences - in their specific intellectual and sociocultural contexts as well as the broader topics of science and medicine; science and religion; scientific institutions and communities; and science, technology and industry. From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences should be valuable for historians of science, but also of great interest to scholars of all aspects of 19th-century life and culture.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics written by Jed Z. Buchwald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 956 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a history of physics, examining the theories and experimental practices of the science.
Download or read book Nineteenth Century Science written by A.S. Weber and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2000-03-10 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-Century Science is a science anthology which provides over 30 selections from original 19th-century scientific monographs, textbooks and articles written by such authors as Charles Darwin, Mary Somerville, J.W. Goethe, John Dalton, Charles Lyell and Hermann von Helmholtz. The volume surveys scientific discovery and thought from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution of 1809 to the isolation of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. Each selection opens with a biographical introduction, situating each scientist and discovery within the context of history and culture of the period. Each entry is also followed by a list of further suggested reading on the topic. A broad range of technical and popular material has been included, from Mendeleev’s detailed description of the periodic table to Faraday’s highly accessible lecture for young people on the chemistry of a burning candle. The anthology will be of interest to the general reader who would like to explore in detail the scientific, cultural, and intellectual development of the nineteenth-century, as well as to students and teachers who specialize in the science, literature, history, or sociology of the period. The book provides examples from all the disciplines of western science-chemistry, physics, medicine, astronomy, biology, evolutionary theory, etc. The majority of the entries consist of complete, unabridged journal articles or book chapters from original 19th-century scientific texts.
Download or read book Wranglers and Physicists written by Peter Michael Harman and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Quantum Generations written by Helge Kragh and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-24 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the nineteenth century, some physicists believed that the basic principles underlying their subject were already known, and that physics in the future would only consist of filling in the details. They could hardly have been more wrong. The past century has seen the rise of quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology, particle physics, and solid-state physics, among other fields. These subjects have fundamentally changed our understanding of space, time, and matter. They have also transformed daily life, inspiring a technological revolution that has included the development of radio, television, lasers, nuclear power, and computers. In Quantum Generations, Helge Kragh, one of the world's leading historians of physics, presents a sweeping account of these extraordinary achievements of the past one hundred years. The first comprehensive one-volume history of twentieth-century physics, the book takes us from the discovery of X rays in the mid-1890s to superstring theory in the 1990s. Unlike most previous histories of physics, written either from a scientific perspective or from a social and institutional perspective, Quantum Generations combines both approaches. Kragh writes about pure science with the expertise of a trained physicist, while keeping the content accessible to nonspecialists and paying careful attention to practical uses of science, ranging from compact disks to bombs. As a historian, Kragh skillfully outlines the social and economic contexts that have shaped the field in the twentieth century. He writes, for example, about the impact of the two world wars, the fate of physics under Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, the role of military research, the emerging leadership of the United States, and the backlash against science that began in the 1960s. He also shows how the revolutionary discoveries of scientists ranging from Einstein, Planck, and Bohr to Stephen Hawking have been built on the great traditions of earlier centuries. Combining a mastery of detail with a sure sense of the broad contours of historical change, Kragh has written a fitting tribute to the scientists who have played such a decisive role in the making of the modern world.
Download or read book Pursuing Power and Light written by Bruce J. Hunt and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-04-08 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, science and technology developed a close and continuing relationship. The important advancements in physics were deeply rooted in the new technologies of the steam engine, the telegraph, and electric power and light. The author explores how the leading technologies of the industrial age helped reshape modern physics.
Download or read book A History of Optics from Greek Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century written by Olivier Darrigol and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a long-term history of optics, from early Greek theories of vision to the nineteenth-century victory of the wave theory of light. It shows how light gradually became the central entity of a domain of physics that no longer referred to the functioning of the eye; it retraces the subsequent competition between medium-based and corpuscular concepts of light; and it details the nineteenth-century flourishing of mechanical ether theories. The author critically exploits and sometimes completes the more specialized histories that have flourished in the past few years. The resulting synthesis brings out the actors' long-term memory, their dependence on broad cultural shifts, and the evolution of disciplinary divisions and connections. Conceptual precision, textual concision, and abundant illustration make the book accessible to a broad variety of readers interested in the origins of modern optics.
Download or read book A Short History of Physics in the American Century written by David C. Cassidy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the twentieth century ended, computers, the Internet, and nanotechnology were central to modern American life. Yet the physical advances underlying these applications are poorly understood and underappreciated by U.S. citizens. In this overview, Cassidy views physics through America's engagement with the political events of a tumultuous century.
Download or read book Physics Before and After Einstein written by Marco Mamone Capria and published by IOS Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is now a century ago that one of the icons of modern physics published some of the most influential scientific papers of all times. With his work on relativity and quantum theory, Albert Einstein has altered the field of physics forever. It should not come as a surprise that looking back at Einstein's work, one needs to rethink the whole scope of physics, before and after his time. This books aims to provide a perspective on the history of modern physics, spanning from the late 19th century up to today. It is not an encyclopaedic work, but it presents the groundbreaking and sometimes provocative main contributions by Einstein as marking the line between 'old' and 'new' physics, and expands on some of the developments and open issues to which they gave rise. This presentation is not meant as a mere celebration of Einstein's work, but as a critical appraisal which provides accurate historical and conceptual information. The contributing authors all have a reputation for working on themes related to Einstein's work and its consequences.Therefore, the collection of papers gives a good representation of what happened in the 100 years after Einstein's landmark Annalen der Physik articles. All people interested in the field of physics, history of science and epistemology could benefit from this book. An effort has been made to make the book attractive not only to scientists, but also to people with a more basic knowledge of mathematics and physics.
Download or read book A History of the Ideas of Theoretical Physics written by S. D'Agostino and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a perspective on the history of theoretical physics over the past two hundreds years. It comprises essays on the history of pre-Maxwellian electrodynamics, of Maxwell's and Hertz's field theories, and of the present century's relativity and quantum physics. A common thread across the essays is the search for and the exploration of themes that influenced significant con ceptual changes in the great movement of ideas and experiments which heralded the emergence of theoretical physics (hereafter: TP). The fun. damental change involved the recognition of the scien tific validity of theoretical physics. In the second half of the nine teenth century, it was not easy for many physicists to understand the nature and scope of theoretical physics and of its adept, the theoreti cal physicist. A physicist like Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the eminent contributors to the new discipline, confessed in 1895 that, "even the formulation of this concept [of a theoretical physicist] is not entirely without difficulty". 1 Although science had always been divided into theory and experiment, it was only in physics that theoretical work developed into a major research and teaching specialty in its own right. 2 It is true that theoretical physics was mainly a creation of tum of-the century German physics, where it received full institutional recognition, but it is also undeniable that outstanding physicists in other European countries, namely, Ampere, Fourier, and Maxwell, also had an important part in its creation.
Download or read book A Short History of Science to the Nineteenth Century written by Charles Singer and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating and highly readable study by a noted historian uses maps, charts and diagrams to trace the development of the idea of a rational and interconnected material world across two and half millennia.
Download or read book Before Big Science written by Mary Jo Nye and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notable features of the book include an insightful analysis of the parallel trajectories of modern chemistry and physics and the work of scientists - such as John Dalton, Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Linus Pauling - who played prominent roles in the development of both disciplines.
Download or read book Electricity and Experimental Physics in Eighteenth Century Europe written by R.W. Home and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the 18th century there was no science of physics as we recognise it today; by the early years of the nineteenth century, there was. The articles in this volume are concerned with the process by which this came about. They focus, in particular, on the rise of experimental physics and the interactions between experiment, theory and mathematics in the study of electricity and, to a lesser extent, magnetism and physical optics during this period. Along the way, they provide a significant reassessment of Isaac Newton’s influence on the science of his successors. A further recurring theme is the process by which ideas were disseminated within the expanding scientific community of the day, and the manner of their reception, often in a form somewhat different from that envisaged by their first inventors, as Professor Home argues took place in the case of Franklin. The social and intellectual context of the ’scientist’, indeed, is the specific subject of several essays, dealing not only with England and France, but also offering new insights into the position of science in 18th-century Russia. Au début du 18e s., la science physique telle que nous l’entendons de nos jours, n’existait pas; dès les premières années du 19e s., cela n’était plus le cas. Les articles contenus dans ce volume s’intéressent au procédé qui a provoqué ce changement. Ils s’attachent plus particulièrement à la montée de la physique expérimentale et à l’interaction entre expérience, théorie et mathématiques en ce qui concerne l’étude de l’électricité et, dans une moindre mesure, celle du magnétisme et de l’optique physique durant cette période. Ce faisant, les études fournissent une ré-évaluation significative de l’influence d’Isaac Newton sur la science de ses successeurs. Un autre thème est celui du processus par lequel les idées étaient disséminées à l’époque au sein d’une communauté scientifique en pleine expans
Download or read book When Physics Became King written by Iwan Rhys Morus and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
