Physics: a short history from quintessence to quarks - Hardcover

Heilbron, J. L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198746857 ISBN 13: 9780198746850

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

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?

J. L. 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.

About this title

About the Author

J. L. Heilbron is Professor of History, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, in physics and history; and began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. He returned to Berkeley in 1967, where he rose to become professor of history and vice chancellor. After retiring in 1994 Heilbron taught sporadically at Caltech and Yale, and lived mostly around Oxford, where he has been Senior research Fellow at Worcester College and the Oxford Museum for History of Science. He has written several books for Oxford University Press, including Galileo (2010) and Love, Literature, and the Quantum Atom: Niels Bohr's 1913 trilogy revisited (2013), with Finn Aaserud.

Review

"This title will engage those interested in history and in the philosophy of science." --Library Journal

"Heilbron leaves us rooted in lived reality. "Physics has given civilization a somber, disturbing, and challenging world picture, many fertile and some terrifying inventions, and notice of responsibility for the outcome of the human story." If [Physics], too, outsells Fifty Shades, there is hope for humanity yet." --Nature

"readers will applaud Heilbron for what he tells us-concisely, lucidly, insightfully-about an epoch-shaping science." -- Booklist starred review

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0198746857
• ISBN 13: 9780198746850
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256