Questions tagged [physics]
For questions about the scientific discipline that concerns itself with analysing the laws of nature in full generality
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What cipher(s) did Isaac Newton use?
A number of sources including this one assert that Isaac Newton used encrypted messages to communicate some of his scientific discoveries, and as a way of establishing priority.
What cipher(s) did he ...
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What led to the rise of Göttingen?
this is a counter part to my other question: What led to the fall of Göttingen?.
Göttingen was a major university in which many famous physicists and mathematicians lived. It was located in ...
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Why did Einstein stop publishing so many papers in Annalen der Physik?
In his early years (actually, straight through the early 1910s), Albert Einstein published a lot of papers in Annalen der Phyisk, a very old and prominent German scientific journal. However, this ...
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What was Einstein's motivation for relativity theory?
I'm a high school student who never studied any relativity before, but I'm just wondering what was the question that Einstein asked himself before going into this field. I knew he has done lots of ...
user40003
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What was the historical importance of the discovery of high-$T_c$ superconductors?
I remember very well from my (only) class in solid state physics how enthusiastically the professor recounted the discovery of high-$T_c$ superconductors. In one particularly vivid anecdote, he ...
Danu♦
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What was the vis viva controversy, including its philosophical aspects?
Leibniz's concept of vis visa (literally translated as living force) was a precursor to our modern concept of kinetic energy. His formula for it was close to the modern non-relativistic one: $mv^2$, ...
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Why isn't Feynman's path integral taught more widely and earlier in today's academic physics curricula?
Anyone who has studied Feynman's path integral will know that it makes quantum mechanics more like classical mechanics. A student who has learned about the Lagrangian will easily understand the ...
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What became of the Boltzmann-Zermelo debate about the second law of thermodynamics?
At the end of 19th century there was a lively discussion about the nature of the second law of thermodynamics, and its relation to Hamiltonian dynamics. Boltzmann developed a position that the second ...
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Classical physics - A timeline of Mechanics
As a chemist we never really use classical mechanics much instead favouring a quantum description of the world around us. I have been lectured plenty on the origins of quantum mechanics and how the ...
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What is the story behind various uses of the word "spectrum"?
Here are five distinct uses of the word spectrum in physics and mathematics:
Spectrum (optics): The range of colors in the rainbow
Spectrum (particle physics): The range of electromagnetic ...
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Did ancient/medieval non-European cultures have a concept of energy? If so, what are the similarities and differences to the modern concept?
For example, do we find something related to the modern energy concept in Ancient China, Ancient India, or the Islamic Golden Age?
Among "similarities and differences", conservation is obviously ...
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Who invented the concepts of potential and kinetic energy? [duplicate]
Who invented potential and kinetic energy ?
Was it Newton ?
Or someone else ?
I have the impression Newton used those ideas but they already existed.
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When was conical refraction predicted and observed?
I was reading James Ladyman's Understanding Philosophy of Science, and came across the following consequence of Fresnel's theory of light:
The phenomenon is known as conical refraction and has now ...
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When were the modern notions of work and energy created
Reading through Wikipedia says that Coriolis was the first to introduce the notion of work, described as "weight lifted through a height".
Our modern conception of work is of a force that realizes a ...
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What was the reaction to Kepler's *Somnium* when it was published?
Kepler's Somnium ("The Dream") is a work of fiction that is sometimes regarded as the first example of science fiction (e.g. by Carl Sagan). In it, Kepler describes a journey to the Moon and various ...
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Whose shoulders did Newton stand on?
In a letter to Robert Hooke in 1676, Newton wrote:
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Do we know which giants Newton was referring to? And was he referring to a ...
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When was atomism first considered a scientific theory?
Of course it is difficult, if not impossible, to know whether classical philosophers that talked about atomism thought that "atoms" could be manipulated by men. However, I was startled to know that ...
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When and how was UV radiation found to be dangerous to human skin?
It is pretty common knowledge nowadays that prolonged exposure to solar ultraviolet radiation is dangerous to human skin, potentially resulting in cancers such as melanoma and photoaging.
A bit of ...
user22
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Did physicists around 1900 really believe they were close to "figuring it all out"?
I've encountered the claim that around the end of the 19th century, physicists believed that their understanding of the physical world was close to being complete.
One example of this claim can be ...
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When exactly (and why) did matrices become a part of the undergraduate curriculum?
Let me tell what I know about this. It is well-known that Heisenberg invented matrix multiplication himself, in his great paper that is considered part of the foundation of quantum mechanics. This was ...
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How did we come up with the name "atomic bomb"?
At first, my initiate question was: What is the difference between an atomic and a nuclear bomb?:
Nuclear bombs are of two types — those that depend on fission, like atomic bombs, and those that ...
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Who discovered that different objects accelerate at the same rate due to gravity?
The concept of the constant acceleration for different objects due to gravity (at the same height and ignoring atmospheric effects) is usually attributed to Galileo. In reality, Galileo merely ...
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How soon after or before the development of nuclear applications was waste disposal considered?
Nuclear applications—be it in the form of electricity production, weapon creation, etc.—inevitably involves radioactive waste.
When was it realized that there might be a need for a specialized waste ...
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What were the dominant non-atomic theories of matter in the 19th century?
From what I have read, the atomic theory of matter was cemented by a 1905 paper by Einstein in which he explained the erratic motion of a bit of pollen suspended in water using the assumption that ...
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When did physics texts start to teach Kepler's $3/2$'s power law as a result of Newton's $1/r^2$ law of gravitation, rather than the other way around?
In modern physics textbooks, we teach Newton's laws of motion, then Newton's law of Universal Gravitation, and then Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Specifically, from the $1/r^2$ form of the ...
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What data did Kepler work out his laws from?
It's well known that Kepler worked out his laws by fitting curves to Tycho Brahe's data on the trajectories of planets through the sky. What was this data? How does one record the trajectory of a ...
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Did the Digges Telescope actually exist?
There are many claimants for the first telescope. Amongst these are the claims placed at the doors of Bacon and Digges. The Bacon claim is very sketchy, boiling down to one sentence and is easy to ...
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