From Clockwork to Crapshoot: A History of PhysicsScience is about 6000 years old while physics emerged as a distinct branch some 2500 years ago. As scientists discovered virtually countless facts about the world during this great span of time, the manner in which they explained the underlying structure of that world underwent a philosophical evolution. From Clockwork to Crapshoot provides the perspective needed to understand contemporary developments in physics in relation to philosophical traditions as far back as ancient Greece. |
From inside the book
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... geometry , the Babylonians knew the areas of right and isosceles triangles , as well as the volumes of a rectangular parallelepiped ( a solid with six faces , each a parallelogram ) , of a right circular cylinder , and of the frustum of ...
... geometry as a science . Whether he was actually able to prove all the geometrical principles and theorems he discovered we do not really know . Never- theless , he was the first person anywhere who is known to have un- derstood that ...
... geometry : the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides . The proof he is said to have given is very simple and is still taught in high schools today ( Fig . 3 ) . Pythagoras ...
... geometry . He was the first to use letters to refer to geometri- cal points and to identify lines by the letters designating their end- points , though in a somewhat more laborious fashion than Euclid did later on . The most famous of ...
... geometry and the introduction of 27 concentric spheres in order to explain the apparent rotation of the fixed stars , the moon , the sun , and the complicated motions of the planets , as seen from the earth , was the first attempt to ...
Contents
1 | |
4 | |
11 | |
Science in the Middle Ages | 41 |
The First Revolution | 67 |
Newtons Legacy | 100 |
New Physics | 121 |
Relativity | 154 |
The Quantum Revolution | 210 |
Fields Nuclei and Stars | 248 |
The Properties of Matter | 279 |
The Constituents of the Universe | 290 |
Epilogue | 308 |
Notes | 313 |
Sources and Further Reading | 316 |
Index | 322 |