The historical development of physics concepts: who did what and when.
10
votes
4answers
1k views
What are the details around the origin of the string theory?
It is well-known even among the lay public (thanks to popular books) that string theory first arose in the field of strong interactions where certain scattering amplitudes had properties that could be ...
14
votes
2answers
994 views
History of interpretation of Newton's first law
Nowadays it seems to be popular among physics educators to present Newton's first law as a definition of inertial frames and/or a statement that such frames exist. This is clearly a modern overlay. ...
1
vote
1answer
6k views
What did Marie Curie do for atomic theory?
There appears to be a distinct lack of agreement in the physics community on what exactly Marie Curie did for atomic theory.
Many journals state that Curie was responsible for shifting scientific ...
2
votes
1answer
162 views
Did classical applications of density functional theory precede its use as an electronic structure method?
Density Functional Theory (DFT) is usually considered an electronic structure method, however a paper by Argaman and Makov highlights the applicability of the DFT formalism to classical systems, such ...
10
votes
2answers
743 views
How Did Paul Dirac Predict The Existence of Antiproton?
The existence of the antiproton with -1 electric charge, opposite to the +1 electric charge of the proton, was predicted by Paul Dirac in his 1933 Nobel Prize lecture.
Quotation by Wikipedia.
...
8
votes
1answer
172 views
Has a human ever perished in space?
Apollo 13 returned safely. The Challenger was leaving when it exploded. The Columbia was coming back when it burned up, as was that Russian guy who was profiled on National Public Radio (NPR) and that ...
5
votes
2answers
324 views
Accidental benefits of seeking perpetual motion? (Science history)
Newton spent much of his life in the fruitless pursuit of alchemy, but along the way discovered and worked-out much else that was real, practical science. And I was thinking about why it is that we ...
8
votes
3answers
137 views
Why did the ancients fail to discover that the Earth orbits the Sun?
The ancients observed that the Sun and the 'fixed' stars rotated about the Earth. They were also aware that the Earth was spherical. They performed many astronomical measurements on the planets - ...
1
vote
2answers
263 views
Significance of isolation of radium? [duplicate]
This is an extension of my previous question here.
Marie Curie isolated radium in 1903, which paved the way for the development of the theory of radioactivity. In regards to the techniques she used ...
2
votes
3answers
859 views
Work of Marie Curie?
I've been reading about the work of Marie Curie recently after a friend filled me in on what she did (never having had much of an idea previously) and it's all very interesting.
What I can't ...
1
vote
2answers
259 views
History of the use of the concept of phase space in engineering
Engineering textbooks constantly use the concept of 'phase space' (see e.g. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~baraff/sigcourse/notesc.pdf). That is, they think of the state of a mechanical system as a ...
5
votes
1answer
220 views
Historical and philosophical reflexions about the concept of energy? [closed]
Perhaps you know the books:
Concepts of Mass in Contemporary Physics and Philosophy
Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics
by Max Jammer, which discusses mass and force from a ...
1
vote
3answers
265 views
video documentaries about physics?
Does anyone know about good video documentaries about physics, possibly on youtube?
I've seen a couple of them about string theory, but I could not find many others.
Thanks
5
votes
3answers
301 views
Supergravity calculation using computer algebra system in early days
I was having a look at the original paper on supergravity by Ferrara, Freedman and van Nieuwenhuizen available here. The abstract has an interesting line saying that
Added note: This term has now ...
4
votes
3answers
444 views
The Superconducting Super Collider: what went wrong?
The Superconducting Super Collider was famously cancelled in 1993 after running enormously over budget. According to the wikipedia page:
During the design and the first construction stage, a ...
10
votes
2answers
947 views
Einstein's box - unclear about Bohr's retort
I was reading a book on the history of Quantum Mechanics and I got intrigued by the gendankenexperiment proposed by Einstein to Bohr at the 6th Solvay conference in 1930.
For context, the thought ...
4
votes
3answers
569 views
Why is the symplectic manifold version of Hamiltonian mechanics used in Newtonian mechanics?
Books such as Mathematical methods of classical mechanics describe an approach to classical (Newtonian/Galilean) mechanics where Hamiltonian mechanics turn into a theory of symplectic forms on ...
4
votes
3answers
340 views
How were non-Euclidean manifolds applied to physics before Einstein?
In the letter of introduction to Einstein's 1916 paper on General Relativity, he writes, "The mathematical tool sthat are necessary for general relativity were readily available in the 'absolute ...
0
votes
0answers
117 views
What has been the status of basic physics research throughout history? [closed]
I'm taking an (obligatory...) course in "Scientific history" at university level. It mainly consists of a written project: ~20 pages and oral presentation.
I have planned to study the status of ...
13
votes
4answers
1k views
History of Electromagnetic Field Tensor
I'm curious to learn how people discovered that electric and magnetic fields could be nicely put into one simple tensor.
It's clear that the tensor provides many beautiful simplifications to the ...
0
votes
0answers
210 views
Did Rutherford invent the smoke detector? [closed]
On the web I have found several pages crediting Ernest Rutherford with the invention or at least with discovering the foundation of efficient smoke detectors. The story often goes like this:
The ...
6
votes
2answers
757 views
The history and modern understanding of spin
This question was inspired by Abstruse Goose :)
http://abstrusegoose.com/342
It's well known that any attempt to describe the spin (of say an electron) in terms of non-internal spatial coordinates is ...
2
votes
2answers
1k views
What was Einsteins reasons for the work on Viscosity/Brownian Motion
About 1905 Einstein published a work about diffusion of hard spheres
and brownian motion. One effluence of that is the so called
"Viscosity Equation" which was/is very important for dertermining
...
2
votes
1answer
234 views
Interpretation of QM as discrete derivative
In a couple of letters dated 1923, Pauli writes to Sommerfeld and Lande about Zeeman effect, and he describes (a piece of) quantisation in a peculiar way: the substitution of the ...
19
votes
9answers
6k views
How did Newton discover his second law?
I've always assumed/been told that Newton's 2nd law is an empirical law — it must be discovered by experiment. If this is the case, what experiments did Newton do to discover this? Is it related to ...
10
votes
7answers
3k views
Tesla's theory of gravity
I was reading up on Tesla's Wikipedia page last night, and I came across this:
When he was 81, Tesla stated he had
completed a "dynamic theory of
gravity". He stated that it was
"worked out ...
8
votes
8answers
1k views
Myths in the history of Physics
As an example of such a historical myth that we all learned, there is the story that in his confrontation with Cardinal Bellarmine in 1632, Galileo had all the evidence on his side, won the ...
1
vote
6answers
2k views
Did Einstein prove $E=mc^2$ correctly? [closed]
In his book "Einstein's mistakes" H. C. Ohanian, the author, holds that Einstein delivered 7 proofs for $E=mc^2$ in his life that all were in some way incorrect. This despite the fact that correct ...
5
votes
7answers
762 views
Evolution in the interpretation of the Dirac equation
As I understand, Dirac equation was first interpreted as a wave equation following the ideas of non relativistic quantum mechanics, but this lead to different problems.
The equation was then ...
2
votes
1answer
385 views
In interferometry, what is the origin of the name “Airy function”?
In interferometry (specifically, in the domain of Fabry-Perot cavities), the function $$f(\phi) = \frac{1}{1 + F \sin^2 \phi}$$ , which describes the shape of the resonant structure of the cavity, is ...
6
votes
5answers
432 views
Why were the SI base quantities chosen as such?
The reasons for choosing length, mass, time, temperature, and amount as base quantities look (at least to me) obvious. What I'm puzzling about is why current (as opposed to resistance, electromotive ...
