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On the traditional account, it was D’Alembert. Taylor did investigate the vibrating string earlier (c.1713), but he treated it as a collection of individually vibrating points and did not write down the PDE. He did not even use derivatives and gave geometric arguments instead, but he did guess the shape of the fundamental mode correctly "by means of ...
3
There are two very comprehensive books covering the whole story
Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg, The historical development of quantum mechanics,
in 3 volumes,
and
Mitsuo Taketani, Formation and logic of quantum mechanics, in 3 volumes, World Sci. 2001 (translated from the Japanse).
Some good shorter books are
Jim Baggott, The Quantum story. A ...
3
According to Wikipedia, a decay product is also referred to as a daughter product, a daughter isotope, radio-daughter or daughter nuclide.
The term possibly arose from cell biology where its common to to call the cells after dividing daughter cells, possibly because they too can go on to divide. In fact, it is documented that the term fission was borrowed ...
2
Faraday stated the law more quantitatively in the report titled On Lines of Magnetic Force read to the Royal Society in 1851. He does not specify the direction of the force (and he originally got it wrong in 1832), but the sign was already established by Lenz in Ueber die Bestimmung der Richtung der durch elektodynamische Vertheilung erregten galvanischen ...
2
Mersenne's law were first proposed by Marin Mersenne in his 1636 work, Harmonie Universalis. It described the frequency of oscillation of a stretched string in relation to its length, its density and the stretching force and gave an equation for the fundamental frequency. This was all established on the basis of experiments and not on the basis of mechanics ...
2
This explanation helped me understand Newton's language and answered my question:
"the excess of the degrees of the heat … were in geometrical progression when the times are in an arithmetical progression (by 'degree of heat' Newton meant what we now call 'temperature', so that 'excess of the degrees of the heat' means ‘temperature difference')."
...
2
I think the best book for this is B. L. van der Waerden's "Sources of Quantum Mechanics". In short, the book explains several articles of early quantum mechanics in a way that a modern reader can follow, starting from an Einstein paper from 1916 up to a Dirac paper from 1926, together with a reprint of all the original papers translated to english....
2
Space.com claims that
The term "black hole" was coined many years later in 1967 by American
astronomer John Wheeler.
Which, given Conifold's references via Wikipedia, lead me to propose that Wheeler gets credit for making the name "go viral." As with many names or inventions in science (e.g., who gets credit for television), fame goes ...
1
The notion of moment is important in rigid body dynamics. Historically speaking, this was pioneered by Archimedes in his Method where he outlined his theory of the lever.
It's worth adding that the parallelogram of forces/velocities was pioneered in the work known as Mechanica, traditionally thought to be Aristotle, but now thought to be by a student of his ...
1
In my opinion: Euler did so much already that the contributions from later physicists/mathematicians are at a level of abstraction that is beyond the scope of standard physics courses.
Among the subjects not already covered by Euler, I assume, is the quite unique case of the intermediate axis theorem. Arguably awareness of that phenomenon took off only ...
1
I suspect if the witticism had been associated to a specific individual, we'd be hearing more and more, and also competitive attributions to it. Oppenheimer (below) had a yen for adopting catchy expressions.
It was an obvious one, in the 1950s, after the discovery of mesons, hadronic resonances, hyperons, and on and on. The new accelerators and technique ...
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