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The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction
The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction
The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction
Audiobook5 hours

The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction

Written by J. L. Heilbron

Narrated by Sean Runnette

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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About this audiobook

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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 16, 2018
ISBN9781977330482
The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction
Author

J. L. Heilbron

J. L. Heilbron is Class of 1936 Professor of History and History of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science (California, 1986), among many other books. Since 1985, Robert W. Seidel has been the Administrator of the Bradbury Science Museum at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and has written numerous articles on the history of the DOE national laboratories and on the history of military laser research and development.

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Science is supposed to be unbiased. This was not followed by this Author. The chapter on Islamic physics was respectful and interesting. The next Chapter on Christian European, with the cherry picking and lack of contex, allowed the author to grind many of his axes and virtue signal his world view. Once past this, the sections from Newtonian to Post WW2 Science do provide a fair overview.