Waubonsee Community College

Drawing physics, 2,600 years of discovery From Thales to Higgs, Don S. Lemons

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Drawing physics

bibliography

952700756

Don S. Lemons

2,600 years of discovery From Thales to Higgs

"The subject of 'Seeing Physics' is our understanding of the physical universe as organized into 51 one thousand-word essays each anchored in a drawing that conveys a key idea. Each essay expands on the science of the drawing and places it in a broader human context. Many people have an interest in the latest in science and technology. But many, even among this group, do not understand basic principles from the 2600-year old intellectual tradition of physics. The old ideas are still new to those who don't understand them. Some of the classic discoveries and theories Lemons discusses include Archimedes' Principle, Alhazen's early theory on the optics of vision and refracted rays, Oresme's Triangle, how Copernicus was able to discover heliocentricism, and Rontgen's accidental discovery of X-rays"--Provided by publisher

Antiquity. Triangulation (600 BCE) -- Pythagorean monochord (500 BCE) -- Phases of the moon (448 BCE) -- Empedocles discovers air (450 BCE) -- Aristotle's universe (350 BCE) -- Relative distance of sun and moon (280 BCE) -- Archimedes' balance (250 BCE) -- Archimedes' principle (250 BCE) -- The size of the earth (225 BCE) -- Middle Ages. Philoponus on free fall (550 CE) -- The optics of vision (1020 CE) -- Oresme's triangle (1360) -- Leonardo and earthshine (1510) -- Early Modern Period. The Copernican cosmos (1543) -- The impossibility of perpetual motion (1586) -- Snell's law (1621) -- The mountains on the moon (1610) -- The moons of Jupiter (1610)-- Kepler's laws of planetary motion (1620) -- Galileo on free fall (1638) -- Galileo on projectile motion (1638) -- Scaling and similitude (1638) -- The weight of air (1644) -- Boyle's law (1662) -- Newton's theory of color (1666) -- Free-body diagrams (1687) -- Newton's cradle (1687) -- Newtonian trajectories (1687) -- Huygens' principle (1690) -- Bernoulli's principle (1733) -- Electrostatics (1785) -- Nineteenth Century. Young's double slit (1801) -- Oersted's demonstration (1820) -- Carnot's simplest heat engine (1836)-- Joules's apparatus (1847) -- Faraday's lines of force (1852) -- Maxwell's electromagnetic waves (1865) -- Twentieth Century and Beyond. Photoelectric effect (1905) -- Brownian motion (1905) -- Rutherford's gold foil experiment (1910) -- Bohr's hydrogen atom (1913) -- X-rays and crystals (1912) -- General relativity (1915) -- Compton scattering (1923) -- Matter waves (1924) -- The expanding universe (1927-29) -- The neutrino and conservation of energy (1930) -- Discovering the neutron (1932) -- Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion (1942) -- Global greenhouse effect (1988) -- Higgs boson (2012)

2,600 years of discovery from Thales to Higgs