New answers tagged physics
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You make it sound as though Stephen Weinberg's work on unifying the electromagnetic force with the weak force was a piece of cake and hardly worth winning the Nobel prize along with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Lee Glashow in 1979.
Is that not enough?
Abdus Salam was known for also pioneering supersymmetry and also for establishing the Trieste Centre of Physics ...
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It's probably best not to see science and physics in nationalist terms. What's more important was the revival of science in the modern era in Europe. This was preceded by a renaissance in science in the Islamic world. In particular by Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) who wrote widely on the philosophy of Aristotle. There was in fact a movement ...
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Everyone makes mistakes. Look at Newton, even though he knew perfectly well that action at a distance was philosophically speaking, nonsense, he still went with it because he could see no way past this impasse. It was only after Einstein we see where the mistake is.
Neverthless, we don't belittle Newton for not inventing general relativity, and celebrate ...
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The short answer is yes. Under the following conditions:
Let me state the problem more exactly: suppose that a solar eclipse of at least 40% WILL occur within a year from now. Could some person in the second half of 17th century make this prediction with 100% probability?
a) prediction for short period (few months, perhaps up to a year).
b) possession of a ...
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In short, I don't know.
One problem in the 17th century was that astronomers didn't know the scale of the Sun-Earth-Moon system. The approximate sizes of the Earth and the Moon and their approximate average distance had been known since antiquity, but I doubt whether the exact distance between the Moon and a point on the Earth's surface at any specific time ...
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There's no easy answer of course, things moved quite quickly at the turn of the century. Below, I'll give an overview of what was going on and what experents were being performed, but I'll have to defer to more substantial sources for any details.
Experimental evidence begins, I would argue, with Hertz and Wallachs in the 1890s. (Experiments on black body ...
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Israel in the 60's: these experiments were probably from Gerald Stanhill (one of the discovers of global dimming). The "tubs" were probably class A evaporation pans (a fancy name for tubs!). Some of his publications on this topic include:
The control of field irrigation practice from measurements of evaporation (1962)
The use of Class A ...
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I will describe the most important experimental data which led to
creation of quantum mechanics, in the chronologic order of their explanations, not the order of experiments.
The idea of quanta was initially motivated by the theory of black body radiation. Plank derived his formula generalizing other formulas which came from experiments. To explain his ...
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According to this page, Steven Weinberg also worked in plasma physics and other fields within particle physics. The same page mentions the following:
Though his Nobel Prize was for work in unification, Weinberg made significant contributions in a wide range of areas in particle physics and even in plasma physics. Among colleagues he was known more for ...
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I know a book that is completely devoted to the history and development of trigonometric series (including of course Fourier series). But it is not in English, it is in Russian. It gives a rather detailed treatment on the method of various mathematicians who involved in this field. The title is "A.B Paplaukas Trigonometric series from Euler to Lebesgue&...
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Short Answer:
19th centry astronomers believed that the Sun and the Solar System revolved around the central point of the Milky Way Galaxy. Thus 19th centry physicists should have believed that the Sun moved with respect to the aether.
Long Answer:
By the beginning of the 19th century, astronomers were certain that the Sun was a star in the Milky Way Galaxy,...
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Heisenberg's "attitude" about the wave formulation of QM is vastly exaggerated. By 1929 he was lecturing in great detail on Schrödinger's equation at the University of Chicago, and next year he published his classic introductory book The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory covering it extensively. He understood that, as the virtual initiator ...
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Not necessarily. They did not know the velocity of the Sun with respect to aether. What they tried to do is to measure the speed of the Earth with respect to
aether. If any velocity were detected, one could infer the speed of the Sun. But no speed was detected. And the idea that the Earth is at rest while everything else moves looked absolutely implausible ...
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There were two episodes with Germain and Euler's mistake in elasticity, but neither one of them is of Germain discovering Euler's mistake. The first one is from 1811 when she was starting to work on prix extraordinaire and corresponded with Legendre on Euler's paper on elastic rods. Euler wrote an incorrect solution for certain eigenmodes, but it was ...
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It comes from the ancient Babylonian numeration system which had base 60. (The reason for the choice of such a base is simplicity of calculation: 60 is divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30. Much more convenient than base 10, whose only justification is the number of fingers on both hands).
It was used mainly in astronomy (ancient people had little need in ...
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The constant was introduced in Poynting's essay The Mean Density of the Earth that won the Adams prize at the University of Cambridge in 1893 on the subject "The Methods of determining the absolute and relative value of gravitation and the mean density of the earth". It is introduced matter of factly on p. 2 of the essay:
"We are therefore ...
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$G$ was invented after a system of units that included force was devised.
Jungnickel & McCormmach's Cavendish: The Experimental Life pt. 2, §16:
The Cavendish experiment today is often called the experiment to determine $G$, which is correct given that the experiment is the common possession of physics. It is often said that Cavendish’s object was to ...
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Chrandrasekhar's Newton's Principia for the Common Reader p. 370:
104. Proposition VII: the universal law of gravitation
We have now reached the climactic point of Philosphie naturalis Principia Mathematica. After establishing the preceding propositions, particularly, Propositions IV and VI, Newton, at long last, is ready to enunciate his law of gravitation....
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Whilst vectors are great, scalars are simpler. The gravitational potential is a scalar rather than a vector field and this helped manipulating expressions involving them.
Whilst potentials were seen as a valuable nathematical reformulation, physicists wete inclined not to see them as directly of physical relevance and were thought to be mere mathematical ...
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Indeed, Heisenberg's 1925 paper got the ball rolling, but was not recognized as matrix mechanics and transcribed/streamlined in the standard matrix language we all recognize today until later (merely 60 days!) that year in the seminal paper by Born and Jordan Zur Quantenmechanik. Z. Physik 34 858–888 (1925), detailed in Jeremy Bernstein's must-read article ...
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I have compiled some answers to my question here:
Neutrinos and neutrettos.
The history is indeed complex, but a lot of credit must be given to Sakata and Inoue, who published in 1942 a paper on a theory involving two mesons and two neutrinos. It was translated into English and published here in 1946:
Shoichi Sakata and Takesi Inoue, On the correlations ...
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