The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #549

by J.L. Heilbron

How does the physics we know today - a highly professionalized 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?

This Very Short Introduction introduces us to Islamic astronomers and mathematicians calculating the size of the earth while 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; and the increasingly specialized 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 THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Genres: Physics, Science, History, Nonfiction, Audiobook, History Of Science

192 pages, Paperback

Published March 25, 2018

Reviews

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short, efficient, and somehow containing all the nutrients one is allegedly supposed to want. A surprisingly great meal.

[Bojan Tunguz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Physicists are very fond of telling the stories of our field. It could be even argued that to understand Physics in large part requires understanding its origins and history. Many modern Physics concepts in particular can only be understood in the context of how we historically came to know them. Which is why, in principle, books on the History of Physics should be required reading for anyone interested in Physics in general. Unfortunately, this short introduction is just about the last such resource that I would recommend. It has an interesting take on many topics from the “prehistory” of Physics as we understand it nowadays (prior to Galileo and Newton), but it tends to meander and lose focus. It also has a decent treatment of the Physics up to through the middle of the 20th century, but just when things were getting really interesting it drops the ball and does not cover any of the most exciting latter 20th century developments and discoveries. Instead, the book quite liberally through most of its length engages in tendentious and polemical arguments and musings. Even if you agree with the author on many of the underlying points, this book is hardly the best place to bring them up and spend a considerable amount of text on debating them. A *purer* book on its core subject matter would have served the author and his audience much better.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, brief overview of the history of physics, from the competition between Aristotelian, Epicurean and Stoic physics, through to Middle Eastern physics and then Renaissance physics before finishing with 20th century physics. In particular I was impressed at the depth and breadth of the history covered, a lot of which I'd not heard before, which is pretty good considering how much of my life I've dedicated to the field.

[abding · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not a very short introduction. Definitely the wrong read for days at the base but I’m glad I gave it another shot.

This book is quite tough in that you’re learning about 20 or so different versions/iterations of physics. I don’t have a solid grasp of a single one of these versions so I don’t know why I thought this would be a walk in the park. So much of the physics went over my head. The history part was *chefs kiss* though.

Maybe I revisit this another time when I have a more intimate understanding of the subject matter.



The History of Physics

1. Antiquity
- “In antiquity, physics was philosophy, liberal art, the pursuit of a free man wealthy enough to do what he wished… nor did he want apparatus since he seldom experimented; or mathematics, since he seldom calculated.” pg 1

- “Studies of uniform text reveal a natural knowledge among the Babylonians and someways more advanced than that of the ancient Greeks….Still, the essential criterion that Aristotle used to identify his predecessors was not that they were Greek, but they had conquered a paralyzing prejudice… They believe that the natural world runs on law-like principles discoverable by the human mind and immune from interruption or cancellation by meddling gods and demons.” pg 3



2. Islam
- The Muslim effort of translating Aristotle and other Greek texts to Arabic is largely indebted to the great Nestorian (syriac-speaking christian sect—that the Quran recognized as أهل الكتاب) efforts that came before it.

- Ummayads vs Abbasids :Mid eighth century, “the Umayyad’s headquartered in Damascus, succumbed to a client with Persian backing, the Abbasid, who built a new city, Baghdad as its power base.” pg 26

- Nestorian learning found an audience “among the eclectic, urban elite, and the Syriac speaking Christian doctors soon swarmed in the new capital. They began the process of making Aristotle ‘The philosopher’ in the Arabic language.” pg 26

- The House of Wisdom: in the early night century, the Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mamun (son of Harun Al-Rashid) establishes an Academy and library at Baghdad, the House of Wisdom, which gathered works by Greek medical writers and mathematicians as well as Aristotle’s” pg 27

- “The already Abbasids favored a liberal form of Kalam”—they were Mu’tazila (e.g., Al-Biruni) who believed it was necessary to provide a rationalistic account of Islamic beliefs. Contrast that with the more popular Ash’ari (e.g., Al-Ghazali) doctrine maintained that reason was subordinate to revelation. pg 28

- “Aristotle’s indifferent God, whether pure or neoplatonized, could be Islamized, as he was Christianized, only it expense of the logical consistency of the system” pg 28

- The great figure of the house of wisdom was Alkindi, the founder of Arabic Aristotelianism. In his version, the unmoved mover, is a stationary being (Neoplatonic), in holding in its mind, the ideas and forms of created things and Qur’anic in knowing the particulars of the physical world and the characters and deeds of everyone alive and dead. With this adjustment, Al-kindi‘s world picture became the standard model of Aristotelian “physica” until the 12th century, when defenders of falsafa in Spain advocated a stricter reading of the philosopher.” pg 31

- Al Farabi received his screening from a Nestorian Christian. He became known as the “second teacher”, with our being the first. He wrote “The Attainment of Happiness”, which devices the truth seeker to begin with things, easiest to understand and proceed gradually to the material world. that means starting with numbers and geometrical figures, and then going through optics, astronomy, music, and the mechanical principal taken as our comedian abstractions to physica, the science of the things that make up the world. only then is the mind prepared to inquire about metaphysics. Only then, is it able to inquire about the being too perfect for description. To understand the nature and place of everything in the universe, including Islam.’pg 31

- Then arrives Ibn-Sina, And he writes the cure, which proposes the same project as Al-Farabi attainment of happiness, but he orders it according to the Aristotelian Canon. Despite this, Ibn Sina to seek the unification of all knowledge sanctioned by the current insistence on the oneness of God, he took on human activities, like prayer, prophecy, politics, and law. pg 32

- Then comes Al-Ghazali, a conscientious theologian well-versed in kalam and falsafa. He announces that “Kalam could resolve nothing important for faith, and that philia was inimical to it. He pointed out the unmoved mover different from the god of Islam, and it felt omitted such as essential information as the last judgment, the resurrection of souls, and dissolution of the world. He loved the practice of Kalam were helpful in persuading, wavering believers of rationalistic tendency; but, in general, he thought that theology and sophism, which he inclined would do better without it.” pg 32

- After AlGhazali comes Ibn-Rushd, who “insists on a pure Aristotle then Alkindi. His literally renderings of Aristotle and his opposition to AlGaz teachings made him the target of traditional list, who eventually secured this condemnation by a court in Cordoba”. pg 32

- Ibn-Rushd tried to separate “Aristotelian cosmology from the Neoplatonic and Islamic creations. It required since the time of Alkindi. He severely criticized both Ibn-Sina and Al-Ghazali , and allowed that Aristotle had possessed as much of the truth as a man can obtain without revelation.” pg 32

- The purges of Ibn-Rushd, thus, “left the Aristotelian corpus much as the Arab that founded 400 years earlier. It might be said of the gigantic effort of false what Omar Khayyam said of himself after hearing saints and doctors dispute: I evermore came out by the same door as I went.” pg 32

I think that’s enough summarizing for now 🤣

[Speranta]

Was really difficult to follow, maybe mainly due to its brevity. I really would have liked it to have more details on the developments post Newton. As it was, I feel that retention was about as much as it would it be reading a long wikipedia page, too impersonal to remember much.

[Mizrob A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not all subjects are suitable for a short treatment. Irrespective of the author.

[Bumbles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a simple introduction. If you do not even have a rudimentary understanding of physics or at least of the major figures and their contributions, lay off this. You will be extremely confused, Heilborn summarizes major concepts in one line and then moves on. The following is an approximation of what you can expect to be able to digest in less than 20 pages:

-al-Kindī*
-al-Fārābī (second teacher with Aristotle the first)
-Ibn Sīnā
-Averroes Ibn Rushd
“His literalist renderings of Aristotle and his opposition to al-Ghazālī’s teachings made him the target of traditionalists, who eventually secured his condemnation by a court in Cordoba.”
- removed god as a cause. When you burn cotton god is not doing that but instead it’s is a basis of natural law that fire will burn cotton. He did admit though that god has made these natural laws.

-Yockdan
“Abandoned on a desert island as an infant, Yockdan had plenty of time to think about nature and his place in it. Step by logical step, he invented a Neoplatonic universe on which, after instruction by a passing holy man, he successfully grafted Islam. Averroes declared war on Yockdan.”
““severely criticized both Avicenna and al-Ghazālī, and allowed that Aristotle had possessed as much of the truth as a man can obtain without revelation. ”

-Ibn Yūnus
““observation of the stars agrees with religious law, for it allows us to know the time of prayers and of the sunrise and sunset that mark the beginning and end of fasting’. Hence Islamic astronomers investigated assiduously topics of only passing interest to Ptolemy, like the duration of dawn and dusk, and conditions for glimpsing the first appearance of the new Moon. ”

-al-Bīrūnī
“al-Bīrūnī’s writing concerns astronomy, geography, and geodesy. Although Ptolemaic in conception, his astronomy analyses other views, for example, the possibility that the apparent motion of the stars arises from a rotation of Earth. He gave an Indian as well as a Greek source for this idea and reported Ptolemy’s objections to it (bodies dropped from a tower would land west of its foot) and the response (all bodies on a rotating Earth would participate in its motion even when falling). As many others would do, al-Bīrūnī accepted Ptolemy’s objection.”

-“al-Khayyāmī (Omar Khayyam)”
“under Khayyam’s direction, a group of astronomers issued their own zij and calculated a tropical year closer by three parts in ten million to the truth than the Gregorian rule. ”

-“Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)”
“Alhazen, took the bold position, later pushed by Averroes, that Ptolemaic astronomy had to be reworked to conform to physical principles.”
“Alhazen returned to the nested globes and marbles of Ptolemy’s Hypotheses.
““He distinguished between primary light (from self-luminous bodies), secondary light (from all points on a body illuminated by primary light), reflected light, and refracted light.”

-“Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī”
“The three directions of astronomy represented by al-Bīrūnī, Khayyam, and Alhazen came together briefly and dramatically in the work of Nasīr”
“Al-Tūsī and his collaborators disliked the Ptolemaic models on which they had to base their calculations, and, taking their manifesto from the Aristotelian physica eclipsed since al-Ghazālī’s victory over Avicenna, developed new planetary models. This departure, imitated in the 14th century by Ibn al-Shātir of Damascus, whose day job was tracking religious time, turned out to be a useful step, when, using the same models, Copernicus took a greater stride”

-“Such clocks, and many subsequent imitations, still exist, inadvertently advertising, via their astrolabic faces and solar and lunar pointers, the logo and achievements of medieval Muslim science.”

Chapter 3:
-“Venerable Bede, a Northumbrian monk”
“Local knowledge then prompted Bede’s important deduction, once acclaimed as the only original contribution to physica from the Latin West in 800 years: the difference in time between the meridian passage of the moon and the succeeding high tide is a constant at any place. The riddle of the tides thus acquired an additional complication.”
- “The Christian scholars who followed the Christian generals did not care for Arabic poetry. They wanted to learn the physica, philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics they knew they lacked; as one of them acknowledged, ‘our civilization is infantile in comparison with theirs’.”
-“Thus, in significant contrast to Islam, the Roman Catholic Church embraced rationalistic kalām and produced a scholastic philosophy in which physica had an important place.”

-“The arts masters favoured Aristotle’s philosophy as the best available knowledge attainable by reason alone. Theologians initially opposed it for its novelty, and also, more soundly, because it taught many things obnoxious to the Catholic faith. ”

-Thomas Aquinas
“The enduring correction of Aristotelian philosophy through revealed truth was the work of a cosmopolitan Saint, Thomas Aquinas”

“To adjust Aristotle to Revelation, Thomas replaced the unit Universal Mover by the triune Christian God and the Intelligences by angels, much as the Neoplatonists had done, and eliminated the naturalistic errors about Creation, the soul, the vacuum, the displacement of the world, and so on. He retained the quintessential celestial spheres, the four-ring circus of terrestrial elements, the meteorology, and all the paraphernalia of form and matter.

-William of Ockham
“held that nothing constrains God’s action but the impossibility of compassing a contradiction; that only experience, therefore, and not a priori deduction, can establish what exists; and that in explaining the apparent relations among things the fewest possible causes should be invoked (‘Ockham’s razor’).”

-nominalism : the doctrine that universals or general ideas aremere names without any corresponding reality, and that only particular objects exist; properties, numbers, and sets are thought of as merely features of the way of considering the things that exist. Important in medieval scholastic thought, nominalism is associated particularly with William of Occam. Often contrasted with realism

-Jean Buridan (14th century)
““Buridan was a nominalist concerned to carve a space for a living Aristotelian physica between the stultifications of Averroism and Ockham’s voluntarism. ”
Created the impetus gods push of the planets into motion

All the below quotations are from the text*

[Nicolas Name · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author begins by creating a word called “physica” to stand as a precursor to real physics, which is without the math and experiments and more philosophical contemplation.

It begins by saying the origins of physica being Ancient Greek, describes Aristotle and a few others there a bit. Then it goes into Islamic physica, what some scientists contributions were to field there. Then it goes into the field becoming more rigorous and serious in terms of its mathematical and experimental foundations which comes about by questioning the Ptolemaic and Aristotlean universe by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and the lot.

Then we get into further deepening of classical physics in the 18th and 19th century, and then modern physics in the 20th century. The principle figures are introduced quite quickly. For myself, since I’m in the middle of taking some physics and astronomy classes - there are some people I’m familiar with, and it can be a short review and I could have read through it relatively quickly, being reminded of the big picture of the general ideas they dealt with on a surface level and how it relates to overall bigger picture (as structured by the author), but then when it gets to authors I haven’t got to yet in my studies, I know there is a lot of depth there and I don’t understand what is happening. It’s okay though, as far as the reading goes, since I can still see who and what the author considers the big ideas and big theorists in the history of physics, and how they relate to the big picture of physics overall. So it was a good read for me at this stage in my life, and perhaps it’s targeted to people at my level? (Someone has taken 1-2 intro physics and astronomy courses at a university level, but who hasn’t gotten through the entire series yet that it’s boring).

Edit: one annoying dig in the book was at Nobel prizes in physics being given out to academics instead of people working in industry. It’s hard to look at the list of Nobel Prize winners in physics and find anyone not worthy of the award. I thought that was an unwarranted, unnecessary criticism, and pretty much everyone mentioned in the book working in the field of physics after 1900’s is a Nobel winner.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 3 out of 5]

The earliest physicists, per Aristotle, were from the town of Miletus. Aristotle divided the "theoretical sciences" into theology, mathematics, and physics - so it is a rather large catchall. This book traces its evolution into what is called physics today. A large part is essentially the history of astronomy. Over time, more fields were carved out of physics to becomes separate disciplines.

Francis Bacon is a key figure in this progression. He promised that experimental science could lead to real progress in human life. Newton soon followed. Later, Kant would argue that physics had to be quantitative: "in every special doctrine of nature only so much science can be found as there is mathematics in it", which he claimed would never apply to chemistry. Three years later, Lavoisier's Traité Élémentaire de Chimie brought this exact mathematical rigour to the field, and proved Kant wrong.

As we get closer to modern times, the focus narrows to what we recognise as contemporary physics: electrodynamics, gravity, the Standard Model. I found it interesting that when 19th-century scientists began to suspect that light was a wave, rather than a particle (as first suggested by Huygens), they were confused by the phenomenon of polarisation, which doesn't have a parallel in sound. This led them to theorise a complex model of the "ether", the medium in which light waves propagate. We now know, bizarrely, that it is both wave and particle - depending on when you look at it.

The book follows the eventual development of modern physics: highly specialised, requiring a lot of money from government or industry, often using supercomputers or massively expensive tooling to do micromeasurement of some tiny parameter. A very different world from that of the men of Miletus.

[Christopher Byram · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered the Very Short Introductions book series from a video on YouTube, uploaded by the channel Tibees, entitled "Books for Learning Physics". In the video, the narrator, Toby Hendy, a mathematics and physics graduate, is present with a guest, David Gozzard, who also has a background in physics. David mentions the Very Short Introductions book series which gives a (very short) introduction on a wide range of topics, such as business management or Islam, and that for physics, you can get the books in the series that are on physics itself, nuclear physics, particle physics, quantum mechanics and cosmology. He claims that there are over 400 of these books, and they are very small, you can read them in a few hours and pick them up for about $13. The books on physics do not go into the maths behind the physics, but they give you a very brief overview of the concepts and where the science is today. This book series is good to get you started on a subject that you do not have a background in.

[Teodora · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall I have mixed feelings. To read this requires prior knowledge of physics, so don't mistake this being a short introduction with it being an easy one.
The first chapters are thorough and focus on primarily history, whereas the later chapters on modern physics speed through (and past) a lot of important people and discoveries, making it feel more like a Wiki article.
I'd also like to note that the language the book uses is unnecessarily complicated at times. For an "introduction" there are definitely better ways to write this to make it more digestible. Just because the subject matter is complex doesn't mean the writing has to be.
In any case, I do appreciate the scope of knowledge that the book fits into a small length. It offers a pretty well-rounded understanding. I do feel I learned a fair amount, especially about the pre-physics Greek origins and the study's development over time, but as the book progresses it becomes more of a drag to read.

[Muhammad Imran Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heilbron does a great job of condensing such an enormous material in under 100 pages albeit at some instances becomes cryptic due to extra brevity. This book can be fully appreciated by someone with physics background.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think 3 stars "I liked it" might be pushing it.

[Steven Yenzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does what it says on the tin!