24
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
For Google Books you will often want to use date-restricted searches (for some reason these don't work so well after the early 1900s, at least for me), but don't restrict to a single publication year ...
- 3,552
21
votes
Did Newton know about non-inertial frames?
TL;DR Yes, but...
1) Inertial frames
To say that Newton had the modern conception of even inertial frames (based on the laws of motion), is an overstatement. Theoretically, he did not need them ...
- 78.4k
18
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
A famous pirate site with a long legal history is Library Genesis (on Wikipedia you can read about its ups and downs). A trick that someone (not me, of course) might have used is to retrieve the ...
- 481
16
votes
What sort of impact did the discovery that water could be broken down (via electrolysis) into gas have?
First, one should note that the very notion of element was muddled at that point, and was somewhat dependent on the theory of chemical reaction one adopted.
Consider the following facts: by the late ...
- 898
10
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
Depending on how far back in time you want to go, have a look at this page I put together a couple years ago: Navigating Historical Learned Societies
This covers a couple 1600s-1700s royal societies ...
- 1,466
10
votes
How does the science community decide which scientist to credit for a particular discovery?
Squabbles over honor are just as common among scientists as elsewhere in society. Memorable examples include:
Leibniz-Newton;
Manifold destiny.
Plain facts are usually not sufficient to resolve ...
- 6,608
9
votes
Why was the Greek letter psi (Ψ) chosen to represent the wave function?
Prior to Schrodinger
There is no use of the symbol by de Broglie, Schrodinger's predecessor. In the first three short notes from de Broglie on the topic of wave mechanics (1923), there is no use of ...
- 1,466
8
votes
Use of eigenvalues of operators in quantum mechanics
Comments to answer: the question is hard to answer because, there is more than one question and more than a way to interpret it.
If the question is when discrete values and eigenvalues were introduced ...
- 3,997
8
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
You may look at my web page: https://www.math.purdue.edu/~eremenko/ where I collected some resources, for mathematics.
If you have an account in some university library, you can always use the ...
- 50.5k
8
votes
Accepted
Why Isaac Newton published his discoveries so much later than he discovered them?
The question virtually quotes some blanket statements about Newton's
willingness (or not) to publish, and about when he made certain
discoveries, etc. It is true that such statements certainly have ...
- 4,720
7
votes
Math concepts introduced by physicists and made rigorous later
The prime example is Newton's Calculus. The notions of limit, convergent series, derivative and integral were made rigorous (to our modern standard) only in 19th century.
In Newton's time, even the ...
- 50.5k
7
votes
I want to know the tricks to search for and find old academic journals for free
When researching answer for this site, I frequently make use the online collection Gallica of the Bibliothèque nationale de France when I look for French publications in mathematics and the natural ...
- 7,189
6
votes
Math concepts introduced by physicists and made rigorous later
Ok, at least as a place-holder:
Much of Euler's work. :)
George Green's 1828 idea now called "Green's function".
The "Sturm-Liouville equation" thing, c. 1830, was very good, but ...
- 1,096
5
votes
Math concepts introduced by physicists and made rigorous later
Leibniz applied his infinitesimal calculus to solve numerous problems that today would be considered elementary physics. Several such applications are analyzed by McDonough in his book
Jeffrey K. ...
- 6,608
5
votes
Accepted
When was the pseudo-vector first defined?
The history of nomenclature related to (multi)linear algebra, linear/affine geometry, and physics is complicated for many reasons, including work being overlooked and reinvented, often from a ...
- 1,781
5
votes
Searching for the first ever use of Newtonian physics
The first real uses of Newtonian physics are due to Newton himself. In his principia, he
Derived Kepler's laws from the law of gravitation,
Determined the first correct approximation for the shape ...
- 50.5k
4
votes
What is Heaviside's version of Maxwell's equations?
Are we all talking about the same "Heaviside" who wrote "On the Forces, Stresses, and Fluxes of Energy in the Electromagnetic Field", received 1891-06-09, read 1891-06-18, that you ...
- 239
4
votes
Why is electric potential denoted by $\phi$?
As @njuffa rightly says, one should first trace the earliest $\phi$ through citations. I think the answer to that is Helmholtz [1870] — a paper which (quoth W. Kaiser, p. 390) “had an enormous impact ...
- 7,789
4
votes
What are examples of serendipity in the history of the sciences and math?
In a relatively recent Physics Today article (Stern and Gerlach: How a Bad Cigar Helped Reorient Atomic Physics, December 2003, p. 53), it is argued that the fact that both Stern and Gerlach smoked ...
- 7,119
4
votes
Accepted
What did Quine say on paradox and physics?
See "On what there is" (1948) reprinted into From a Logical Point of View, page 19 of the 2nd revised edition of 1961:
"An antinomy arose between the undular and the corpuscular ...
- 15.1k
4
votes
What is the history of the classification of states of matter?
As @Mary notes in the comments, the ancient idea of "earth, water, air, and fire" maps nicely onto solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, but wasn't until the early 19th century that the idea of ...
- 1,252
4
votes
Use of eigenvalues of operators in quantum mechanics
The story is long and quite complicated. Here is a very short and necessarily incomplete sketch.
It begins with experimental observations about atomic spectra. The main fact is that each atom has some ...
- 50.5k
4
votes
What did Feynman mean when he said "Action" historically had a different meaning?
The earlier action concept is attributed to Maupertuis.
Pierre Louis Maupertuis attempted to formulate a unification of light propagation theory and mechanics theory.
In Maupertuis' time the ...
- 884
4
votes
How did Kepler devise his three laws?
Q: "How did Kepler devise his three laws?"
Of Kepler's laws (not so called by Kepler himself), the first two appeared in 1609 (in 'Astronomia Nova Aitiologetos, seu Physica Coelestis', often ...
- 4,720
4
votes
Who said in the 50s all the mathematics a physicist needed was a rudimentary knowledge of the Greek and Latin alphabet so that he can put indices on
The epigraph of chapter 2 of Streater and Wightman's 1964 PCT, Spin & Statistics, and All That says
In the thirties, under the demoralizing influence of quantum-theoretic perturbation theory, ...
- 2,707
3
votes
Accepted
Who discovered that the electromagnetic tensor is the curvature of a connection?
I still have only a partial answer to the question. Looking at Trautman's lecture notes published in 1970 (https://doi.org/10.1016/0034-4877(70)90003-0), it is more than clear that he knew for sure ...
- 181
3
votes
Accepted
In JJ Thomson's cathode ray experiment I need values for the electric field and magnetic field when net force on the cathode beam = 0
Oh I see, normally an ExB filter is called a "velocity filter" - see Wikipedia's Wien filter where there be math.
In an ExB filter charged particles go in a straight line when $v = E/B$. So ...
- 2,107
3
votes
Accepted
Who postulated the first Lagrangian for electrodynamics?
In his book on Electrodynamics (Lectures on Theoretical Physics, Vol. 3), Chapter 32-E, Arnold Sommerfeld talks about "Schwarzschild's principle of least action", developed by K. ...
- 489
3
votes
Technical papers or monographs without a single mathematical equation
I read something like that about Faraday's treatise (book?) (if I remember correctly, there was just one formula there). As for Faraday's mathematical abilities, opinions vary.
I will try to find a ...
- 1,011
3
votes
What is the origin of the $\hbar$ symbol?
It was noted at https://sci.physics.research.narkive.com/y3qeeLYf/origin-of-hbar that h-bar appeared in a German translation of Dirac's article (Zur Quantentheorie des Elektrons, Leipziger Vorträge (...
- 1,011
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