Drawing physics: 2,600 years of discovery from Thales to Higgs

262 Pages·2018·4.376 MB·English

by  Lemons, Don Stephen

Drawing Physics

Drawing Physics
2,600 Years of Discovery from Thales to Higgs
Don S. Lemons
with drawings by Jesse Graber
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Illustrations © Jesse Graber and Don Lemons, reprinted with permission
(unless otherwise noted).
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying,
recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in
writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lemons, Don S. (Don Stephen), 1949- author.
Title: Drawing physics : 2600 years of discovery from Thales to Higgs /
Don S. Lemons.
Description: Cambridge, MA ; London, England : The MIT Press, [2017]
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016028491| ISBN 9780262035903 (hardcover ; alk.
paper) | ISBN 0262035901 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Physics--History. | Physics--History--Pictorial works.
Classification: LCC QC7 .L44 2017 | DDC 530.09--dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028491
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface ix
Dedications and Acknowledgments xiii
Antiquity 1
1 Triangulation (600 BCE) 2
2 Pythagorean Monochord (500 BCE) 5
3 Phases of the Moon (448 BCE) 8
4 Empedocles Discovers Air (450 BCE) 12
5 Aristotle’s Universe (350 BCE) 15
6 Relative Distance of the Sun and the Moon (280 BCE) 19
7 Archimedes’s Balance (250 BCE) 23
8 Archimedes’s Principle (250 BCE) 27
9 The Size of the Earth (225 BCE) 31
Middle Ages 35
10 Philoponus on Free Fall (550 CE) 36
11 The Optics of Vision (1020 CE) 40
12 Oresme’s Triangle (1360) 44
13 Leonardo and Earthshine (1510) 49
vi  Contents
Early Modern Period 53
14 The Copernican Cosmos (1543) 54
15 The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion (1586) 58
16 Snell’s Law (1621) 62
17 The Mountains on the Moon (1610) 66
18 The Moons of Jupiter (1610) 70
19 Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion (1620) 74
20 Galileo on Free Fall (1638) 78
21 Galileo on Projectile Motion (1638) 82
22 Scaling and Similitude (1638) 86
23 The Weight of Air (1644) 90
24 Boyle’s Law (1662) 94
25 Newton’s Theory of Color (1666) 100
26 Free-Body Diagrams (1687) 104
27 Newton’s Cradle (1687) 108
28 Newtonian Trajectories (1687) 112
29 Huygens’s Principle (1690) 116
30 Bernoulli’s Principle (1733) 121
31 Electrostatics (1785) 125
Nineteenth Century 131
32 Young’s Double Slit (1801) 132
33 Oersted’s Demonstration (1820) 137
34 Carnot’s Simplest Heat Engine (1836) 141
35 Joule’s Apparatus (1847) 145
36 Faraday’s Lines of Force (1852) 150
37 Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Waves (1865) 155
Contents  vii
Twentieth Century and Beyond 159
38 Photoelectric Effect (1905) 160
39 Brownian Motion (1905) 164
40 Rutherford’s Gold Foil Experiment (1910) 168
41 X-rays and Crystals (1912) 173
42 Bohr’s Hydrogen Atom (1913) 177
43 General Relativity (1915) 182
44 Compton Scattering (1923) 186
45 Matter Waves (1924) 190
46 The Expanding Universe (1927–1929) 194
47 The Neutrino and Conservation of Energy (1930) 198
48 Discovering the Neutron (1932) 202
49 Nuclear Fission and Nuclear Fusion (1942) 206
50 Global Greenhouse Effect (1988) 211
51 Higgs Boson (2012) 216
Afterword 221
Notes 223
Bibliography 231
Index 237