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An innovative integrated approach to classical physics and the beginnings of quantum physics through a sequence of historical case studies.
List of contents
Preface and acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; Case Study I. The Origins of Newton's Laws of Motion and of Gravity: 2. From Ptolemy to Kepler: the Copernican Revolution; 3. Galileo and the nature of the physical sciences; 4. Newton and the law of gravity; Case Study II. Maxwell's Equations: 5. The origin of Maxwell's equations; 6. Maxwell (1865): A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field; 7. How to rewrite the history of electromagnetism; Case Study III. Mechanics and Dynamics: Linear and Non-Linear; 8. Approaches to mechanics and dynamics; 9. The motion of fluids; 10. Dimensional analysis, chaos and self-organised criticality; Case Study IV. Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics: 11. Basic thermodynamics; 12. Kinetic theory and the origin of statistical mechanics; Case Study V. The Origins of the Concepts of Quantisation and Quanta: 13. Black-body radiation up to 1895; 14. 1895-1900: Planck and the spectrum of black-body radiation; 15. Planck's theory of black-body radiation; 16. Einstein and the quantisation of light; 17. The triumph of the light quantum hypothesis; Case Study VI. Special and General Relativity: 18. Special relativity: a study in invariance; 19. An introduction to general relativity; Case Study VII. Cosmology and Physics: 20. Cosmology; 21. Dark matter, dark energy and the inflationary paradigm; Notes; Author index; Subject index.
About the author
Malcolm Longair, CBE, FRS, FRSE, was Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1980 to 1990 and Head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1997 to 2005. His books with Cambridge University Press include High Energy Astrophysics (2011), The Cosmic Century (2006), Quantum Concepts in Physics (2013), and Maxwell's Enduring Legacy (2016), a scientific history of the Cavendish Laboratory.
