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The Evolution of Physics
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The Evolution of Physics
The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta is a science book for the lay reader. Written by the physicists Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, it traces the development of ideas in physics. It was originally published in 1938 by Cambridge University Press. It was a popular success, and was featured in a Time cover story.
Einstein agreed to write the book partly as a way to help Infeld financially. Infeld collaborated briefly in Cambridge with Max Born, before moving to Princeton, where he worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein tried to get Infeld a permanent position there, but failed. Infeld came up with a plan to write a history of physics with Einstein, which was sure to be successful, and split the royalties. When he went to Einstein to pitch the idea, Infeld became incredibly tongue-tied, but he was finally able to stammer out his proposal. “This is not at all a stupid idea,” Einstein said. "Not stupid at all. We shall do it." The book was published in the United States by Simon & Schuster.
In the book, Albert Einstein pushed his realist approach to physics in defiance of much of quantum mechanics. Belief in an “objective reality,” the book argued, had led to great scientific advances throughout the ages, thus proving that it was a useful concept even if not provable. The authors conclude:
Without the belief that it is possible to grasp reality with our theoretical constructions, without the belief in the inner harmony of our world, there could be no science. This belief is and always will remain the fundamental motive for all scientific creation.
In addition, Einstein used the text to defend the utility of field theories amid the advances of quantum mechanics. The best way to do that was to view particles not as independent objects but as a special manifestation of the field itself: "Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field in which the states of the greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone."
The book has four chapters: "The Rise of The Mechanical View", "The Decline of the Mechanical View", "Field, Relativity" and "Quanta".
The authors liken science to a detective story: "In nearly every detective novel since the admirable stories of Conan Doyle there comes a time where the investigator has collected all the facts he needs for at least some phase of his problem ... The scientist reading the book of nature, if we may be allowed to repeat the trite phrase, must find the solution for himself, for he cannot, as impatient readers of other stories often do, turn to the end of the book. In our case the reader is also the investigator, seeking to explain, at least in part, the relation of events to their rich context. To explain even a partial solution the scientist must collect the unordered facts available and make them coherent and understandable by creative thought." "The first clue" the authors examine is Galileo's law of inertia, codified by Isaac Newton: "Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed therein." A further clue, returned to later, is Galileo's discovery of the equivalence principle. The authors discuss the kinetic theory of matter and how it solves the mystery of Brownian motion.
The authors discuss investigations of electricity by Charles Augustin de Coulomb, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta and Hans Christian Ørsted. Newton's corpuscular theory of light is introduced and contrasted with Christiaan Huygens's wave theory. There is a Socratic dialogue between a supporter of the corpuscular theory and a supporter of the wave theory. It was thought that light must have a medium to travel through, the luminiferous aether, but attempts to detect it yielded null results. They conclude by asking: "what is the medium through which light spreads and what are its mechanical properties? There is no hope of reducing the optical phenomena to the mechanical ones before this question is answered. But the difficulties in solving this problem are so great that we have to give it up and thus give up the mechanical view as well."
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The Evolution of Physics
The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta is a science book for the lay reader. Written by the physicists Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, it traces the development of ideas in physics. It was originally published in 1938 by Cambridge University Press. It was a popular success, and was featured in a Time cover story.
Einstein agreed to write the book partly as a way to help Infeld financially. Infeld collaborated briefly in Cambridge with Max Born, before moving to Princeton, where he worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein tried to get Infeld a permanent position there, but failed. Infeld came up with a plan to write a history of physics with Einstein, which was sure to be successful, and split the royalties. When he went to Einstein to pitch the idea, Infeld became incredibly tongue-tied, but he was finally able to stammer out his proposal. “This is not at all a stupid idea,” Einstein said. "Not stupid at all. We shall do it." The book was published in the United States by Simon & Schuster.
In the book, Albert Einstein pushed his realist approach to physics in defiance of much of quantum mechanics. Belief in an “objective reality,” the book argued, had led to great scientific advances throughout the ages, thus proving that it was a useful concept even if not provable. The authors conclude:
Without the belief that it is possible to grasp reality with our theoretical constructions, without the belief in the inner harmony of our world, there could be no science. This belief is and always will remain the fundamental motive for all scientific creation.
In addition, Einstein used the text to defend the utility of field theories amid the advances of quantum mechanics. The best way to do that was to view particles not as independent objects but as a special manifestation of the field itself: "Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field in which the states of the greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone."
The book has four chapters: "The Rise of The Mechanical View", "The Decline of the Mechanical View", "Field, Relativity" and "Quanta".
The authors liken science to a detective story: "In nearly every detective novel since the admirable stories of Conan Doyle there comes a time where the investigator has collected all the facts he needs for at least some phase of his problem ... The scientist reading the book of nature, if we may be allowed to repeat the trite phrase, must find the solution for himself, for he cannot, as impatient readers of other stories often do, turn to the end of the book. In our case the reader is also the investigator, seeking to explain, at least in part, the relation of events to their rich context. To explain even a partial solution the scientist must collect the unordered facts available and make them coherent and understandable by creative thought." "The first clue" the authors examine is Galileo's law of inertia, codified by Isaac Newton: "Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed therein." A further clue, returned to later, is Galileo's discovery of the equivalence principle. The authors discuss the kinetic theory of matter and how it solves the mystery of Brownian motion.
The authors discuss investigations of electricity by Charles Augustin de Coulomb, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta and Hans Christian Ørsted. Newton's corpuscular theory of light is introduced and contrasted with Christiaan Huygens's wave theory. There is a Socratic dialogue between a supporter of the corpuscular theory and a supporter of the wave theory. It was thought that light must have a medium to travel through, the luminiferous aether, but attempts to detect it yielded null results. They conclude by asking: "what is the medium through which light spreads and what are its mechanical properties? There is no hope of reducing the optical phenomena to the mechanical ones before this question is answered. But the difficulties in solving this problem are so great that we have to give it up and thus give up the mechanical view as well."
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