History of Fundamental Physics
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ScribdTranslationsHistory of Fundamental Physics
Uploaded by
ScribdTranslationsHistory of fundamental physics
The history of physics encompasses the
efforts made by people who have tried to
understand the why of nature and the
phenomena observed in it: the passing of the
seasons, the movement of bodies and stars,
climatic phenomena, the properties of
materials, among others. Due to its vast scope
and extensive history, physics is classified as a
fundamental science. This scientific discipline
can be dedicated to describing the smallest
particles or explaining how a star is born.
Most ancient civilizations tried from the
beginning to explain how their environment worked; they looked at the stars and thought
about how they could govern their world. This led to many interpretations of a more
philosophical than physical nature; not in vain at that time was physics called natural
philosophy. Many philosophers are found in the early development of physics, such as
Aristotle, Thales of Miletus or Democritus, since they were the first to try to find some
kind of explanation for the phenomena that surrounded them. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_de_la_f
%C3%ADsica - cite_note-1
1 The first explanations that appeared in antiquity were based on purely
philosophical considerations, without being verified experimentally. Some
misinterpretations, such as that made by Claudius Ptolemy in his famous Almagest
—"The Earth is at the center of the Universe and the stars revolve around it"—
persisted for thousands of years. Although the descriptive theories of the universe left
by these thinkers were erroneous in their conclusions, they remained valid for a long
time, almost two thousand years, partly due to the Catholic Church's acceptance of
several of their precepts, such as the geocentric theory.
This stage, called obscurantism in European science, ended when the canon and
scientist Nicolaus Copernicus, who is considered the father of modern astronomy,
received the first copy of his book, entitled De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in
1543. Although Copernicus was the first to formulate plausible theories, he is another
character who is considered the father of physics as we know it today. A mathematics
professor at the University of Pisa at the end of the 16th century would change the
history of science, using experiments for the first time to verify his claims: Galileo
Galilei. By using the telescope to observe the firmament and his work on inclined
planes, Galileo employed the scientific method for the first time and arrived at
conclusions that could be verified. His work was joined by major contributions from
other scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal and Christian
Huygens.https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_de_la_f%C3%ADsica - cite_note-medioevo-22
Later, in the 17th century, an English scientist brought together the ideas of Galileo and
Kepler in a single work, unifying the ideas of celestial movement and those of
movements on Earth in what he called gravity. In 1687, Isaac Newton formulated, in his
work entitled Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the three principles of
motion and a fourth law of universal gravitation, which completely transformed the
physical world; all phenomena could be seen in a mechanical
way.https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_de_la_f%C3%ADsica - cite_note-33
Albert Einstein.
Einstein, stop telling God what to do with his dice.
Niels Bohr.
Newton's work in this field survives to this day, as all macroscopic phenomena can be
described according to his three laws. That is why for the rest of that century and the
following one, the 18th century, all research was based on his ideas. Hence, other
disciplines such as thermodynamics, optics, fluid mechanics and statistical mechanics
were developed. The well-known works of Daniel Bernoulli, Robert Boyle and Robert
Hooke, among others, belong to this period.
In the 19th century, fundamental advances were made in electricity and magnetism,
mainly at the hands of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Luigi Galvani, Michael Faraday
and Georg Simon Ohm, culminating in the work of James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, which
achieved the unification of both branches in the so-called electromagnetism. In addition,
the first discoveries about radioactivity and the discovery of the electron by Joseph John
Thomson in 1897 occurred.
During the 20th century, physics was fully developed. In 1904, Hantarō Nagaoka had
proposed the first model of the atom,https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_de_la_f%C3%ADsica - cite_note-66 which
was partly confirmed by Ernest Rutherford in 1911, although both approaches would
later be replaced by Bohr's atomic model of 1913. In 1905, Einstein formulated the
theory of special relativity, which coincides with Newton's laws in stating that
phenomena develop at small speeds compared to the speed of light. In 1915 he
extended the theory of special relativity, formulating the theory of general relativity,
which replaces Newton's law of gravitation and includes it in cases of small masses.
Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and others developed quantum theory to
explain anomalous experimental results on radiation from bodies. In 1911, Ernest
Rutherford deduced the existence of a positively charged atomic nucleus from particle
scattering experiments. In 1925 Werner Heisenberg, and in 1926 Erwin Schrödinger
and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, formulated quantum mechanics, which includes the
preceding quantum theories and provides the theoretical tools for condensed matter
physics.
