History of Physics

1) Elements of the philosophy of science. Characteristics of science. Popper's demarcation criterion: falsifiability. Scientific reasoning: deduction, induction, and abduction. The problem of rational justification for induction. Hempel's covering law of scientific explanation. Reductionism. Realism and idealism.
2) The history of Greek physics. The sources problem (survival of the text, copying, translation, and selection problems). The main sources of Hellenic physics: the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics and Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers. Aristotle's theory of the four causes: material, efficient, formal, and final cause. Relevant terms in Hellenic physics: kosmos, pan, aletheia, physis, logos. Aristotle's cosmology. The five elements: earth, water, air, fire, and aether. Natural motions (gravitas and levitas) and natural places. The center of the cosmos (meson) as the physical center. Earth's sphericity. The violent motion. The non-existence of the void. Hellenism. Characteristics of science during the Hellenistic period. The Museum and Library of Alexandria. Euclid's optics. Archimedes' physics. Hellenistic astronomy. Eratosthenes's measurement of the Earth's size. Aristarchus's measurement of the distances and sizes of the Moon and Sun. Aristarchus's heliocentric system. Apollonius's models: astronomy as a mathematical discipline. The retrograde motion of the planets. Ptolemy's geocentric system: the Almagest.
3) Science in the Roman Empire. Latin encyclopedism. The Eastern commentary. The theory of John Philoponus. Arabic science. The Carolingian Renaissance. The birth of the university. Physics during the Scholastic period. Bacon's experimental method and the rainbow. The calculatores of the Merton College (Oxford). Buridan's theory of impetus. Nicholas of Oresme's De latitudinibus. The Renaissance. Translations from Greek. Neoplatonism and the spread of magic, astrology, and alchemy. The printed book. The new world. The academies. The concept of scientific revolution. The scientific revolution according to Kuhn: normal science, the paradigm, the anomaly, the revolution. A critique of the concept of scientific revolution. The analogy with political revolution. The astronomical revolution.
4) Copernicus. The problem of the order of the planets in astrology. The solution: the heliocentric system. The Commentariolus and the seven petitiones. The reduction of retrograde motions to appearances. The publication of De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium and its acceptance. The relationship with magical thought. A semi-Copernican: William Gilbert and the magnetic soul of the Earth. An anti-Copernican: Tycho Brahe, the Tychonic system, and criticisms of Aristotelian astronomy. A Copernican: Johannes Kepler. The Mysterium cosmographicum and the physical truth of Copernicanism. The Astronomia nova and Kepler's first two laws. Celestial dynamics and magnetic force. The Harmonices mundi, celestial music, and the third law.
5) Mechanicism. Galileo Galilei: the mechanicism of matter and mathematics. The comparison between Galileo and Kepler: the different uses of geometry and the different considerations of astrology. The mathematization of motion, the unification of terrestrial and celestial physics, the unification of physics and mechanics. Uniform circular motion. The use of the inclined plane. Falling bodies and the law of falling bodies. The telescope and astronomical discoveries: mountains on the Moon, stars in the Milky Way, Jupiter's satellites. The Sidereus Nuncius. Galileo's policy in support of Copernicanism. The Assayer and the problem of atomism. The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: the refutation of the evidence against the Earth's motion, the principle of relativity, the theory of the tides. The trial of Galileo. Speeches and mathematical demonstrations surrounding two new sciences. Elements of Cartesian physics: three types of matter, vortices, cosmology, Cartesian mechanics.
6) Isaac Newton. The role of alchemy and religion in Newtonian thought. Newtonian mechanics. Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis. Definitions: mass, momentum, internal force, impressed force, centripetal force. The scholium on space, time, position, motion, absolute and relative. The three axioms of mechanics. The structure of the Principia. The first book: theorems on inverse square forces; Kepler's laws. The second book: frictional motion in a medium and the refutation of Cartesian mechanics. The third book: the system of the world. The law of universal gravitation. Newtonianism. The role of mechanics as a paradigmatic discipline. The search for the expression of other forces. Newton's optics. Opticks as an inductivist treatise. Experiments with the prism. The composite nature of sunlight. The experimentum crucis for the corpuscular and wave theories of light. Christiaan Huygens: the discovery of Saturn's rings, the isochronous pendulum, the wave theory of light. James Bradley: measuring the Earth's velocity from stellar aberration. Robert Hooke: Micrographia. Otto von Guericke: the vacuum pump. Ole Roemer: astronomical measurement of the speed of light. Edmond Halley: the periodicity of comets, the transit of Venus, and the measurement of the Earth-Sun distance.
7) Science in the 18th century: academies, correspondence, journals. The idea of ​​conservation. The conservation of momentum. The problem of Newton's third law; the principle of conservation of momentum. The connection with the homogeneity of space. Leibniz's vis viva and vis mortua. Work. Helmholtz's principle of conservation of energy. The connection with the homogeneity of time. Rotational motion and Kepler's second law. The conservation of angular momentum. The connection with the isotropy of space. The minimum principles in mechanics. Leibniz's principle of economy. Fermat's principle of least time and the controversy with Descartes. Maupertuis and Du Châtelet and the introduction of Newtonianism in France. Maupertuis's action. The principle of least action. Lagrange and variational calculus. The Lagrange function, the Lagrange equation. Analytic mechanics. Hamilton. An Account of a Theory of Systems of Rays: the wave function. General Methods in Dynamics: the Hamilton function, Hamilton's equations. On a General Method of Expressing the Paths of Light and Planets by the Coefficients of a Characteristic Function: the analogy of corpuscular mechanics with ray optics. Hamilton's action.
8) The physics of imponderable fluids. The domain of Newtonian mechanics. Post-Newtonian optics. Thomas Young and the wave theory of light (diffraction and interference). Malus: the polarization of light. Fresnel's wave theory. The Experimentum Crucis: measuring the speed of light in water. Triboelectricity. Franklin's one-fluid electric model. Dufay's two-fluid electric model. Coulomb's law of electrostatics. Voltaic electricity from the chemical contact between dissimilar metals. Volta's pile. Electromagnetism. Ørsted's experiment. Ampère's ponderomotive force. Seebeck's thermoelectricity. Ohm's law. Joule's experiments on circuits. A reinterpretation of Kirchhoff's circuits. Michael Faraday's research: the homopolar motor, lines of force, the field, electromagnetic induction, the unity of different types of electricity. Unifying theories: Weber's fundamental law, Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory, Helmholtz's theory. The electromagnetic wave equation and the speed of light. Displacement current and Hertz's experiments. Thermology. The caloric fluid. Specific caloric. Latent caloric. Temperature. Thermodynamics. The relationship between physics and engineering. Conservation of energy. Kuhn's simultaneous discovery. The first law of thermodynamics (Mayer, Helmholtz). The studies of Sadi Carnot. The second law of thermodynamics (Clausius, Lord Kelvin). The asymmetry between mechanical work and heat flow. Entropy. Kinetic theory. Statistical mechanics.
9) Introduction to twentieth-century physics. Main characteristics of Big Science. The problem of media and sources. Material sources and their conservation Issues. The overlap areas between mechanics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics. Some problems of the overlap areas: Brownian motion, electromagnetism in systems moving with respect to the aether, the blackbody thermal spectrum. Emission/absorption spectral lines. Characteristics of the blackbody spectrum. Experimental analysis with cavity radiation. Analysis of blackbody radiation by Lord Rayleigh and Wien. Planck's solution: the quantum of action. Einstein's 1905 paper on the quantum of radiation: the photoelectric effect law. Atomic theory in chemistry. Experimental studies on cathode rays. The particle nature of cathode rays: Thomson's experiment. The discovery of X-rays. The discovery of radioactivity. Experimental research on radioactivity by the Curies and Rutherford. The age of the Earth. Thomson's atomic models (plum-cake and planetary).
10) Albert Einstein. The problem of Maxwell's equations in systems other than the aether; the Earth's velocity relative to the aether. The Michelson-Morley experiment. Fitzgerald's contraction of dimensions; Lorentz's proper time. Engineering problems of synchronizing clocks at a distance; international time problems (transportation, telegraphs, time zones). Einstein's 1905 paper: the asymmetry in Maxwell's theory; the operational definition of synchronization. The theory of special relativity: the relativity postulate and the speed of light postulate. The second paper of 1905: the relationship between mass and energy. Observational evidence for the theory of special relativity.
11) Atomic theory. Einstein's 1905 paper: Brownian motion, the atomic-molecular nature of matter. Atomism in physics. Thomson's models of the atom: the plumcake model and the planetary model. Rutherford: the discovery of the atomic nucleus. Rutherford's nuclear/planetary model of the atom. Spectroscopy. Hydrogen spectroscopy: the Balmer series and the Rydberg formula. Bohr's atom: orbits with quantized actions. Quantum numbers: principal, azimuthal, and magnetic. The introduction of the spin quantum number. Quantum mechanics. A new interpretation of the birth of relativity and quantum physics as transformations of classical physics. The eight sources of quantum mechanics (black body, photoelectric effect, hydrogen spectrum, Stark effect, Einstein's black body, de Broglie's wave-particle duality, Heisenberg's optical dispersion, specific heats, and Bose-Einstein statistics). The crisis of the old quantum theory. Bohr's correspondence principle. Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Schrödinger's wave mechanics. Born's probabilistic interpretation. Atomic orbitals. Dirac's quantum mechanics.
12) Nuclear physics. Energy scales (macroscopic, atomic-molecular, nuclear). Radioactivity. The structure of the nucleus formed by protons and electrons. The impossibility of electrons existing in nuclei. Rutherford's neutron as a bound proton-electron structure. Chadwick's discovery of the neutron. Curie and Joliot's artificial radioactivity. Enrico Fermi: Fermi's theory of beta decay; the neutrino. Research on nuclear fission, the atomic bomb. Elementary particles. The first particles: the electron, the proton, the photon. The positron: Dirac's prediction, and Anderson's discovery. Blackett and Occhialini's discovery of electron-positron pairs. The problem of the beta spectrum: the prediction of the neutrino. The problem of the nucleus: the prediction of the neutron. Cosmic rays. The meson: Yukawa's theory of interacting particles; Anderson's discovery; The Conversi-Pancini-Piccioni experiment; Powell and Occhialini's discovery of the pion. The Standard Model: leptons and quarks.
13) Archaeoastronomy. Rational Greek astronomy. Newton's universe: the problem of its size and the number of stars. The Kant-Hershel-Laplace planetary nebula hypothesis. Hershel's Galaxy. Development of telescopes for other radiation bands. The problem of the missing mass. The observed structure of galaxies. The birth and life of a star. Eddington's model equations. Thermonuclear cycles (pp., CNO). Modern cosmology: Hubble's expanding universe. The big bang theory and the steady-state theory. The cosmic microwave background.