The History of Physics, J.L. Heilbron
The History of Physics, J.L. Heilbron
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The History of Physics
A Very Short Introduction

Author: J.L. Heilbron

Narrator: Sean Runnette

Unabridged: 5 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/16/2018

Categories: Nonfiction, Science, Physics


Synopsis

How does the physics we know today—a highly professionalized enterprise, inextricably linked to government and industry—link back to its origins as a liberal art in Ancient Greece? What is the path that leads from the old philosophy of nature and its concern with humankind's place in the universe to modern massive international projects that hunt down fundamental particles and industrial laboratories that manufacture marvels?

This Very Short Introduction introduces us to Islamic astronomers and mathematicians calculating the size of the earth while their caliphs conquered much of it; to medieval scholar-theologians investigating light; to Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, measuring, and trying to explain, the universe. We visit the "House of Wisdom" in ninth-century Baghdad; Europe's first universities; the courts of the Renaissance; the Scientific Revolution and the academies of the eighteenth century; and the increasingly specialized world of twentieth and twenty-first century science. Highlighting the shifting relationship between physics, philosophy, mathematics, and technology—and the implications for humankind's self-understanding—Heilbron explores the changing place and purpose of physics in the cultures and societies that have nurtured it over the centuries.

About J.L. Heilbron

J. L. Heilbron was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, in physics and history and began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. He returned to Berkeley in 1967, where he rose to become professor of history and vice chancellor. After retiring in 1994 Heilbron taught sporadically at Caltech and Yale, and lived mostly around Oxford, where he has been Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College and the Oxford Museum for History of Science. He has written several books, including Galileo and Love, Literature, and the Quantum Atom: Niels Bohr's 1913 Trilogy Revisited, with Finn Aaserud.


Reviews

At 200 pages, this is definitely a short history. The math and formulas are kept to a minimum, but even so - this book focused more on the theories and nuances of physics than I expected. The writing is solid and moves along, but it's not as accessible as Neil deGrass Tyson.......more

Goodreads review by Nathan

For the most part, this book is an excellent and somewhat high-level look at the larger patterns of the history of physics from ancient Greece to today.  Yet there are a couple of aspects of this book that detract from its overall pleasure to me as a reader who sometimes enters the realm of reading......more

Goodreads review by Judi

This was hard going. It’s more of an undergrad text than a popular science book and assumes more physics knowledge than the average layperson would have. I’ve taken undergrad physics courses and this was really hard for me to read. It’s dense and full of unexplained Latin phrases and equations. Occa......more