The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction
Written by J. L. Heilbron
Narrated by Sean Runnette
4/5
()
About this audiobook
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.
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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Reviews for The History of Physics
28 ratings1 review
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Science 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.