6. From old world to new

‘From old world to new’ looks at the legacies of World War I, and how the discovery of the importance of physics for national defence and industrial development changed the direction of physics. It describes key work on quantum mechanics and the discoveries of radioactivity, nuclear fission, and superconductivity. World War II’s physical science and engineering created radar, leading to microwave technologies and the laser; its atomic bombs brought nuclear power; its V-2 rocket launched the aerospace industry; and it pioneered the electronic computer. High-energy physics was then further developed by Fermilab (in America) and CERN (in Europe). The 1960s onwards saw developments in cosmology, seismology, ionospherics, meteorology, and oceanography.

Introduction: the Greek way

The Introduction explains that Greek physics—physica—with its eye to ethics, its indifference to mathematics and experiment, and its independence of states and courts, is noticeably different from the modern field of physics. This VSI describes some of the ways by which ancient physica became modern physics. It sketches the place and purpose of physica in the societies that supported it. Hence the primary sites of cultivation receive special emphasis: the independent private school (antiquity), court and library (Islam), university (later Middle Ages), court again (Renaissance), academy (late 17th and 18th centuries), university again (modernity), and university-government-industry (postmodernity).

3. Domestication in Europe

Domestication of Greek and Arabic physica and mixed mathematics in the Latin West took c.400 years: from the 12th-century first translations to the 16th-century printing of Archimedes and Ptolemy, and the revitalization of Aristotle’s ancient rivals. With the generation of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Francis Bacon, physica’s place in the body of knowledge began to slip, although the Aristotelian world picture still hung securely, if awry, in universities and theological seminaries. ‘Domestication in Europe’ explains that the slippage owed much to social factors associated, as in Islamic times, with the needs of newly centralizing states, and with the discovery of new worlds on the Earth and in the heavens.

2. Selection in Islam

‘Selection in Islam’ chronicles the developments of Muslim science. It begins with the Christian Nestorians who settled in Persia after the excommunication of Nestorius in 431 ce. They built an important school and hospital in which they enlarged their study of Aristotle and Galen. The project to render Greek science into Arabic lasted three centuries and the word falsafa was adopted for philosophy. The writings of key figures in falsafa— al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), Ibn Bājja (Avempace), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes)—are discussed along with the developments in mathematics and astronomy, which were assisted by the creation of observatories and substantial instruments such as the astrolabe.

7. The quintessential

The modern evolution of the physicists’ world picture continues the ancient programme of locating human beings in a directionless universe. Physics has given civilization a sombre, disturbing, and challenging world picture, many fertile and some terrifying inventions, and notice of responsibility for the outcome of the human story. ‘The quintessential’ explains that there is still much to learn and suggests that if humankind accepts the responsibility and the concomitant loss of providential deities and sacred dicta, the human species might beat the odds against the survival of an electromagnetic civilization; preserve the Earth; and, in the fullness of time, arrive at several satisfactory theories of everything.

5. Classical physics and its cure

During the 19th century, physics became a recognized profession and its practitioners ‘physicists’. It and they acquired special training facilities in universities and technical schools that sprang up in Europe and America after 1870. ‘Classical physics and its cure’ shows physicists of the early 20th century admiring, and setting aside, their 19th-century accomplishments as ‘classical’; building a quantum science of atoms and molecules that claimed to contain all of physics and chemistry, ‘in principle’. The work of physicists such as Faraday, Kelvin, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Einstein, Planck, Röntgen, Rutherford, Bohr, and Becquerel is outlined, along with how physics increasingly made good on Bacon’s promise that experimental science would improve the human condition.

1. Invention in antiquity

Of the four main schools of ancient philosophy, Aristotle paid greatest attention to physica. Because of his emphasis on physica and because his philosophy dominated during the Middle Ages and beyond, convenience advises taking it as normative. In antiquity, however, it had to compete with Platonic, Epicurean, and Stoic philosophies. ‘Invention in antiquity’ considers the different beliefs of these philosophies before discussing how Romans such as Lucretius, Ovid, and Seneca used these principles in their own work. The applications of Greek physical principles by Archimedes, Vitruvius, Ptolemy, and Pliny are also discussed.

4. Second creation

The throwing of all philosophy into doubt inspired three important schemes for placing physica on firm foundations or limiting its claims to secure natural knowledge. ‘Second creation’ explains that by the middle of the 18th century, Newton’s scheme had won out over those of Descartes and Leibniz, although only by reducing their rigorous logic to the easy-going ‘reason’ of the Enlightenment, and replacing their specifications of God’s place in His creation by assimilating Him in to Nature. Enlightened Newtonianism prepared the way for the invention of physics and its first standard model by overcoming the dichotomies between mixed mathematics and physica, and between celestial and terrestrial mechanics.