History of physics

Physics word derived from the Greek word fusis which means nature or natural thing. Physics is the branch of science that deals with interactions between physical systems and it is one of the most fundamental scientific discipline to study, how the universe behaves.

                                                     

History of physics
History of physics

Thousand of years of physics research and discoveries has configuration the world. We live in modern era today from technologies we operates all the time to machine, inventions, infrastructure, development  that change the hole world.  All the discoveries of physics and it oriented towards application the natural science and proceed toward development and technology.

In seventh and sixth century BC , Thales of Miletus (624 BC -546 BC) is traditionally regarded as the first philosopher and mathematician he explain the phenomena through theories and hypothesis rather than mythology. 

He had was that all matter was made up of a single substance that was the water, called as arche. Thales observed the prominence of water in the world and thus concluded that land floated on water. He able to augur as solar eclipse on may 28th 585BC and these eclipse known as the Eclipse of Daly's  

In 5th century BC when philosophers came up with a new theory that Matters not made up of just water but a collection of elements.

Aristotle: 

Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Northern Greece. Aristotle formalized the gathering of scientific knowledge and he discover that all matter is made up of indivisible particles called atoms. 

Several year latter Aristotle also suggested a fifth element known as aether that made up celestial bodies and stars probably would not be of the same elements down on earth. he definitely would have been shocked to learn that they are in fact made up of the elements found here on earth but even though these classical elements to be wrong , they do align quite well with these four states of matter

1: Liquid, 2:  Solid, 3: Gas, 4: Plasma we all known us.

Archimedes :

Archimedes principle states that the upward buoyant force on an object equals the weight of the fluid displaced. The 3rd century BC scientist, engineer and mathematician Archimedes who contributed more to the world than any other scientist of ancient times. Archimedes  need to calculate the density of supposedly gold crown to determine whether some silver had been substituted by dishonest Goldsmith. He was not allowed to melt the crown to a normal shape in order to perform calculations, his most famed contribution was made while he was taking a bath he saw the level of the water rise as he got in and he used this principle to determine the volume of the crown since the crown would displace his own volume in water. He was able to calculate the relationship between volume, mass, density and concluded it was less than that of gold proving that silver had in fact been mixed in , later on  Archimedes went to write on floating bodies where he continued his research into submerged objects and this he describes what is known as Archimedes principle which states how the upward  buoyant force exerted on a  body in a fluid is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.

Now physics is not just a foundational science but it's also the basis of technologies new physics discoveries today leads to new technologies and more developments tomorrow. During the ancient times many Greeks were interested in development of machines.

For examples ; Archimedes is recognized for the invention of various networks of pulleys and levers and his famous quote is give me place to stand and i will move the earth this of course has to do with mechanical  advantage in the amplification of applied force which make very helpful for machines that use of mechanical advantage allow us to let's say lift a car using only our own strength. One of the notable invention of his was the claw of Archimedes they use mechanical advantages as a weapon to defend a portion of Syracuse's city wall during the Second  Punic War its exact design is unclear but it worked kind of like a crane using pulleys and levers to lift enemy ships slightly out of the water causing them to eventually flood and sink.

Hasan Ibn al Haytham: 

In 11th century when a physicists known as al Haytham changed the way we think about light. He published a seven volume collection of books known as the book of optics where he proved that light travels in a straight line. Through his one of the first scientific experiments ever as a lot of previous theories were simply speculation. One experiments Haytham performed the first to vision occurs when light reflects from an object and then passes to one eyes. He developed analytical geometry by establishing the linkage between algebra and geometry and also discovered a formula for adding first natural number.

When he cut a small hole in wall and hung two lanterns at different locations in an adjacent room. He observed that the light illuminated single spots in the opposite room and each formed a straight line with the hole and one of the lanterns also for hundreds of year that was believed that his eyes  actually emitted rays of light that would bounce off objects allowing us to see. He was the first to say that in fact light travels from objects and enters our eyes, which is now known to be correct. When he research on rainbows he supposed rainbows were an image of the sun formed from a curved mirror due to water within clouds. It wasn't until the year 1300 that Theodoric of Freiburg use spherical flasks and glass globes to simulates water droplets that occurred during rainfall, he observed that light refracted  onto the droplets reflected back out or they were refracted again although Haytham did not contribute to our understanding of rainbows directly Theodoric Freiburg relied on AL- Haytham spoke of optics to further understanding them.  

About 2,000 years ago, the first compass was invented and although people did eventually use these for navigation, no one truly know that it was invented in China during the Han Dynasty. How they worked for over a thousand years that was until the turn of the 17th century. It was assumed for a long time that comes as were attracted to a large magnetic island on the North Pole. 

That was until William gilbert came in and wrote his book where he proved that earth one giant magnet in experiment in which he miles the earth using something called the a sphere made out of a naturally magnetized material.

 William Gilbert also did work in electricity he created with inventing the word electricity and many consider him the father of  Electrical engineering . One of Gilbert's inventions with the electroscope (1600) the first instrument to measure the presence of electric charge. Over 300 years later physicist Victor Hess would use the electroscope to discover something that would win him the Nobel Prize. 

Galileo: (1564-1642)

In 1590 the scientist Galileo dropped spheres of different masses from the Learning Tower of Pisa to show that their time to reach the ground was independent of mass which we now know to be true. He also showed that the relationship between distance and time could be represented by this equation and the basic physics here proved to be accurate many historians believe that the story isn't but rather it was a thought experiment then Galileo did work on pendulums , but also gives the idea of relativity that would be greatly enlarge  by Einstein .

Galileo stated that the laws of physics are the same in any system that is moving at constant speed in a straight line it means there is no such thing as absolute motion. If you were in a rocket ship moving through space at a constant velocity there is no way to determine if you were moving or actually stationary. Galileo's work not only set the foundation for Einstein but also provided the framework for what Isaac Newton would go on to discover. In 1687 Newton published a book called Principia, they laid out the foundations of classical mechanics and is regarded as one of the most impact scientific publications.

Newton stated that gravity pulls masses together. The earth exerts a force on you just as you actually exert a force on the earth. He explains what this force obeys an inverse-square law so, if you get twice as far from something the gravitational force becomes four times weaker and of course as three laws of motion were discussed here,

Newton's law of motion 

Law 1: Every object remain in its state of rest, or uniform motion in straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by external force.

Law 2: Second law state that acceleration of an object is depend on the net force acting on an object, is in the direction of the net force and is inversely proportional to the mass of the object. 

Law 3: Whenever one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite.

It was believed for a long time that celestial bodies orbit in perfect circles but Newton proved that actually an  elliptical path would form as a result of the inverse square law that governed gravity.

Newton also contribute to field of optics in fact he create the term spectrum in order to explain the colors that come out when white light enters a prism during his studies he invented the first known functioning reflecting telescope or the Newtonian telescope. But seem to be the first to make a working one reflecting telescope are very simple in design and did not use a lens which offered certain advantages a few decade earlier Galileo design was known as a Galilean telescope. They used refraction instead of reflection it continued two lenses and it magnify images about 30 times in size but flaws in the design give rise to image to be distorted.

However, these flaws did not Galileo from being able to observe craters on the moon or various moons of Jupiter. Reflecting telescope while not predict did not contain some of these flaws such as unwanted refraction. Otherwise known chromatic aberrations.

In 1745 when a well Ewald Georg von Kleist was connecting metal foil to the inside surface of a glass jar that was then filled with water. The goal is to charge the water by connecting it to a generator that could produce on electric charge. When Kleist touched the foil his hand, he experienced a very strong electric shock when that was arguably life-threatening but what was going on was that the jar was storing electricity this become known as a Leyden jar that the name not be familiar to some of you but the Leyden jars also considered the first ever capacitor.

Capacitor exist in all sorts of electronics nowadays and what they do is store charge ( Leyden Jar \ Capacitor -  1745) .

The application of capacitor can be used to represents binary within a digital system it also used to supply large amounts of current to things like lasers and particle accelerators . They can be used as sensors, it can adjust the power and high voltage systems as need and so on.

Isaac Newton became a very  powerful figure in the scientific community very few were willing to challenge his ideas and this continued even after his death but he was not correct about everything and the late 1700s and early 1800s Thomas Young would challenges Isaac Newton's view of optics .

In 1678  the scientist Christian Huygens actually proposed that light was a wave but Isaac Newton disregarded this and put forward his own theories. Light is a wave that can transfer energy without transferring matter. 

Isaac Newton viewed light as a stream of particles since he could use his laws of motion to describe them better. In late 1700s Thomas Young defended Huygens theory and in 1804 all doubt had disappeared we reported the results of his double slit experiment one of the most famous experiments in all of physics. He firstly observed how water waves would behave in a ripple tank he saw that the waves were either combine or cancel each other out making some kind of interference pattern.

When he performed this experiments with light and shine it through two small slits. He saw the same patterns emerge proving. James Prescott joule give types of energy and established the relationship between heat, work and temperature. That light was in fact a ways now shifting gears in 1843 James Joule devised an experiment to measure the mechanical equivalent of heat, then it seemed as though these were two very different things heat being transferred versus the physical motion of something he eventually showed that these were interchangeable what he did was meet a device such that you could turn a handle causing two weights to rise and fall This would then turn a paddle that would stir the water within a container. When the weights fall he noticed a rise in temperature as measured by a thermometer after raising and lowering the weight several times he calculated a value of about four point one four joules being equivalent to one calorie this is the amount of energy to raise one gram of water one degree kelvin.

This was a little off as we know is about 4.18 joules per calorie. It also showed that energy did not disappear it was just transferred in different forms this then led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. Just a few years late in 1842 a man named Julius Robert mayor wrote a paper that discussed the concept of energy not being created nor destroyed as well as the interchangeability of mechanical work and heat. Unfortunately for mayor he was not an actual physicist, but rather a physician so his papers were widely ignored by experts in the field. He read up on others experiments and use his own observations on come up with ideas  but not of the train to present his findings in the proper way this led to some disappointment when he found out years later that Joule got the credit for many of topics. 

Maxwell (1831-1879):

Maxwell was born in 1831   Edinburgh Scotland, he published his first academic paper a new method of mechanically plotting mathematical curves using a piece of twine at the age of fourteen. He was appointed Chair of natural philosophy at university of Aberdeen when he got the job he was just 25 years old a decade or more younger that most of the professor's. Saturn's rings  Galileo had first seen the rings in 1610. Maxwell proved that a solid ring wouldn't be stable and that a liquid ring would break into blobs because of wave action he concluded that it must be made up of what he called brickbats numerous small particles all orbiting the planet. He published a set of equations now known as Maxwell's equations and he proved that light, electricity, magnetism all came from the same force now we called the electromagnetic force.  

 Marie Curie ( 1867-1934)

Marie Curie began investigating these rays and eventually coined the term radioactivity although Becker L did not get the rays named after him the unit for how many atomic nuclei decay no substance per second is now called Becker. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie  along with Becker L the three of them found that thorium was also radioactive. The Curry's additionally went on to discover two new radioactive elements polonium named after Poland where Marie Curie grew up and also radium Then in 1903 the Curry's as well Becker L were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in radioactivity.

Pierre Curie died just in few years later in 1906 and is best known for the discovery of the Curie point a temperature in which a magnet loses its magnetism. Marie Curie went on to be the first person to won two Nobel prizes one in physics and another in chemistry in 1911 .

Ernest Rutherford began working with uranium as well and discovered two types of radiation one that can be blocked by a thin sheet of paper which was going alpha radiation that consists of two protons and neutrons. But radiation can be blocked by something like aluminium. This radiation and much dangerous to be exposed to. The most dangerous of these three is discussed is known as gamma radiation and was discovered in 1900 by Paul Villard this gamma radiation was coming off radium, which the Curry's had recently discovered Gamma rays are not composed of subatomic particles but instead are very high-energy electromagnetic waves gamma rays can only be stopped by thicker barriers made up of things like lead and iron. These are dangerous because they are extremely wavelength and  high energy makes us that they extremely small wavelength and high-energy makes us that they can interact with human cells causing illness and even cancer.

Radiation is used in medicine to diagnose and treat illnesses. Radiation therapy is where we use radiation specifically kill the slowed the growth of cancer cells.