Physics: a Short History from Quintessence to Quarks by Heilbron John L.;

Author:Heilbron, John L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2015-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 20. A physics institute around 1900. The size, fit with local architecture, and arrangement of lecture halls, laboratories, and utilities at the University of Manchester were typical of institutes built around 1900. Rutherford was professor and director there from 1907 to 1919.

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Classical Physics and its Cure

During the nineteenth century, physics became weightier in several senses. The number of imponderables fell almost to zero. Physics became a recognized profession, whose British practitioners received (though they did not welcome) the name “physicist.” In professionalizing, physicists acquired special training facilities in university institutes and technical schools that sprang up in Europe and America after 1870 primarily to train students as schoolteachers and electrical engineers (see Figure 20). During the last third of the century the perpetually shifting border between physics and mathematics moved again as physicists competent in contemporary mathematics set up as theorists; and again, as in the discovery of the gas types, concerns more chemical than physical brought in such fertile concepts as the ion and the table of the elements.

Nineteenth-century physics aspired to a theory of everything. A new standard model or project, mechanical reduction, replaced the program of imponderable fluids. The mechanical project penetrated more deeply than the imponderable one; for whereas the latter obtained superficial unity by describing many distinct substances in similar ways, the former premised an ultimate reduction to the same matter in diverse modes of motion. Once again Descartes did battle with Aristotle, accomplished a mighty synthesis, and prepared the way for something new. The physicists of the early twentieth century admired, and set aside, their nineteenth-century accomplishments as “classical,” and built a quantum physics of atoms and molecules that, they claimed, contained all of chemistry, “in principle.”

From the middle of the nineteenth century, physics increasingly made good on Bacon’s promise that experimental science would improve the human condition. New industries competed to supply electric communication, light, and power, and to invent electrical appliances for the home and the workplace. New governmental agencies, national and international, came into existence to regulate services and standardize products. Old universities introduced new curricula to compete with new technical higher schools and replaced academies as the primary loci of research. At the same time, societies of physicists sprang up to see to the professional interests of their members.

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