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Drawing physics : 2,600 years of discovery From Thales to Higgs / Don S. Lemons.

by Lemons, Don S. (Don Stephen), 1949-

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The MIT Press, 2017.

Physics -- History.

9780262035903 (hc.)

Alternate title:

2,600 years of discovery from Thales to Higgs

xiv, 246 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Antiquity. Triangulation (600 BCE) -- Pythagorean monochord (500 BCE) -- Phases of the moon (448 BCE) -- Empedocles discovers air (450 BCE) -- Aristotle's universe (350 BCE) -- Relative distance of sun and moon (280 BCE) -- Archimedes' balance (250 BCE) -- Archimedes' principle (250 BCE) -- The size of the earth (225 BCE) -- Middle Ages. Philoponus on free fall (550 CE) -- The optics of vision (1020 CE) -- Oresme's triangle (1360) -- Leonardo and earthshine (1510) -- Early Modern Period. The Copernican cosmos (1543) -- The impossibility of perpetual motion (1586) -- Snell's law (1621) -- The mountains on the moon (1610) -- The moons of Jupiter (1610)-- Kepler's laws of planetary motion (1620) -- Galileo on free fall (1638) -- Galileo on projectile motion (1638) -- Scaling and similitude (1638) -- The weight of air (1644) -- Boyle's law (1662) -- Newton's theory of color (1666) -- Free-body diagrams (1687) -- Newton's cradle (1687) -- Newtonian trajectories (1687) -- Huygens' principle (1690) -- Bernoulli's principle (1733) -- Electrostatics (1785) -- Nineteenth Century. Young's double slit (1801) -- Oersted's demonstration (1820) -- Carnot's simplest heat engine (1836)-- Joules's apparatus (1847) -- Faraday's lines of force (1852) -- Maxwell's electromagnetic waves (1865) -- Twentieth Century and Beyond. Photoelectric effect (1905) -- Brownian motion (1905) -- Rutherford's gold foil experiment (1910) -- Bohr's hydrogen atom (1913) -- X-rays and crystals (1912) -- General relativity (1915) -- Compton scattering (1923) -- Matter waves (1924) -- The expanding universe (1927-29) -- The neutrino and conservation of energy (1930) -- Discovering the neutron (1932) -- Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion (1942) -- Global greenhouse effect (1988) -- Higgs boson (2012).

"Humans have been trying to understand the physical universe since antiquity. Aristotle had one vision (the realm of the celestial spheres is perfect), and Einstein another (all motion is relativistic). More often than not, these different understandings begin with a simple drawing, a pre-mathematical picture of reality. Such drawings are a humble but effective tool of the physicist's craft, part of the tradition of thinking, teaching, and learning passed down through the centuries. This book uses drawings to help explain fifty-one key ideas of physics accessibly and engagingly. Don Lemons, a professor of physics, pairs short, elegantly written essays with simple drawings that together convey important concepts from the history of physical science. Lemons proceeds chronologically, beginning with Thales' discovery of triangulation, the Pythagorean monocord, and Archimedes' explanation of balance. He continues through Leonardo's description of "earthshine" (the ghostly glow between the horns of a crescent moon), Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and Newton's cradle (suspended steel balls demonstrating by their collisions that for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction). Reaching the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Lemons explains the photoelectric effect, the hydrogen atom, general relativity, the global greenhouse effect, Higgs boson, and more. The essays place the science of the drawings in historical context, describing, for example, Galileo's conflict with the Roman Catholic Church over his teaching that the sun is the center of the universe, the link between the discovery of electrical phenomena and the romanticism of William Wordsworth, and the shadow cast by the Great War over Einstein's discovery of relativity"--Provided by publisher.

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