The historical development of physics concepts: who did what and when.
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177 views
How accurate are Mayan astronomical “ephemerides”?
Because of the hype surrounding the "end" of the Mayan calendar (along with the usual cultural relativism and Western guilt) it is nearly impossible to find an objective quantitative assessment of the ...
6
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0answers
311 views
What happened to David John Candlin?
This is an ultra-soft question about relatively recent history. While reading some of Mandelstam's papers, I noticed that he cites David John Candlin consistenly whenever he does anything with ...
5
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0answers
201 views
Who invented the term “Coulomb logarithm”?
Who is the author of the term "Coulomb logarithm"? In fact, Coulomb logarithm was computed by Langmuir in his paper of 1928 where the term "plasma" was introduced into physics, but the term "Coulomb ...
2
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70 views
Origin of Laue equations?
The Bragg condition (by Bragg in 1913) can be derived by the Laue equations that is making use of the Miller indices and all the latice/crystal stuff (so basically it's bringing Bragg's law to more ...
2
votes
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93 views
Who used the concept of symmetries first?
Who "invented" the concept of symmetries? This article is quite extensive, but it blurs the history with the modern understanding.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/symmetry-breaking/
Some of the ...
1
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0answers
21 views
Phase functions non-existent in original (J. Strutt) Lord Rayleigh's work?
This is related to my previous Phys.SE question on the derivation of the phase function - upon sifting and scanning through 600 pages of John Strutt's collected work, there is absolutely no mention of ...
1
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116 views
What is the angular distance between Ptolemaic perigees of Mercury?
In his excellent treatment of the history of the science of astronomical distances and sizes, Albert van Helden says (p.29) that
The complicated [Ptolemaic] model of Mercury has the curious ...
0
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86 views
Nicholas Kollerstrom article on the history of Calculus
Today, Newton´s birthday, I read an article posted in the arXiv by Nicholas Kollerstrom
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/1212.2666
That basically claims that Newton did not invent Calculus. The article does ...
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109 views
How did Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain get purified germanium and dope it correctly?
They obviously didn't have precision semiconductor fabricating tools themselves running with semiconductor parts inside because there were none. We have so much advanced machinery to weigh out, ...
