Physics And Culture

Brian Cotterell

• Publisher: WSPC (EUROPE)
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781786343789
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

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The role of physics in our culture is examined from the time of Newton to the present day. It has three parts: an introduction to physics and two parts covering the roles of Newtonian and Modern/Postmodern physics. It is shown how popularization enabled physics to become part of our culture, while the topics discussed include religion, philosophy, politics, literature, the visual arts, and music. An underlying theme is that physics is an intimate part of our culture which, together with the other sciences, has had a wide general influence that cannot be ignored.

The book has been written for all that are genuinely interested in culture. It is well referenced and illustrated, and suitable for the general public, students and academics who are interested in bridging the sciences and humanities in today's era of specialization.

--> Contents:

• Introduction:
  • Outline of the Physics
• Newtonian Period:
  • Religion
  • Popularization of Classical Newtonian Physics
  • Philosophy and Politics
  • Imaginative Arts
• Modern and Postmodern Period:
  • Philosophy, Politics, and Religion
  • Popularization of Modern and Postmodern Physics
  • Modernism and Postmodernism

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--> Readership: General public interested in the influence of physics in culture, students and academics of physics and the humanities. -->
Keywords:Newton; Newtonian Methods;Culture;Physics;Literature;Politics;Modern Physics;Postmodern PhysicsReview:0

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Outline of the Physics

In this chapter the revolutions in physics and their main developments are outlined. There have been two revolutions in physics, which did not occur in isolation but were part of wider cultural revolutions. The first revolution in physics, which led to Newtonian physics,¹ was part of a cultural revolution that was also about the replacing of the scholastic tradition by Erasmian humanism, as has been well argued by Barbara Shapiro.² In the seventeenth century the new scientific ideas were shared by the educated in England and became an integral part of their culture.³ The second cultural revolution, which began at the end of the nineteenth century, led to modernism and postmodernism. In physics, the revolution was caused by the realization that Newtonian physics, while it explained most physical phenomena on a macroscale, was not exact at either the incredibly small scale or on the very large cosmic scale. Pure physics, while an important influence on the general modernist and postmodernist culture has perhaps not played quite such large role in this second cultural revolution. However, if pure physics is combined with the applied physics of modern technology, its influence on culture has been even greater. However the effect of technology on culture, which has always been important,⁴ is not considered here.

The fundamental principles of classical physics were established by Isaac Newton (1643–1727) in his epoch-making Philosophiae Naturali Principia Mathematica,⁵ commonly known as the Principia, first published in 1687 and in his Opticks⁶ published in 1704. Newtonian physics has been continually evolving since then. The world of Newtonian physics is mechanical. Every effect has its cause and if everything was known at a certain date, in theory, everything after then could be predicted. By the end of the nineteenth century it was clear that some predictions of Newtonian physics were not correct. Modern physics, which is not mechanical, is not completely deterministic.

Modern physics has similarities to the modernist movement in the arts that also began in the late nineteenth century. Both modernisms caused the certainty of the Enlightenment to be at least partially rejected. The main developments in modern physics have been the theory of relativity on the cosmic scale, which is indelibly linked to Albert Einstein (1879–1955), and quantum mechanics on the incredibly small scale.

In the late twentieth century, physics has seen the development of string theory whose foundation is not experimental and has similar characteristics to postmodernism in the arts.⁷ The fundamental particles in string theory, which are point particles in quantum theory, have extension albeit extremely small. Gabriele Veneziano is considered to have written the first paper on string theory in 1968 but its origins, in the concept that some at least of the fundamental particles had extension, go back to 1943 and the S-matrix of quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976).⁸ The postmodernism of string theory, which has not become fully accepted, has not yet caused a revolution in physics.

1.1.Newtonian Physics

Newtonian physics was the culmination of the first scientific revolution but it did not start from a vacuum. As Newton recognized himself in a letter to Robert Hooke (1635–1703) written in 1676:⁹ ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ Newton’s Giants extended back to the Ancient Greeks and even earlier. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) led the revolution in science that enabled Newton to synthesize terrestrial and celestial mechanics. The Principia consists of three books, the first deals with forces and motion in free space, the second expands the treatment of motion to resisting media and the third book applies the first two books to the System of the World. At first Newton tells in the introduction to Book 3 he had originally intended to present this last book in a popular style but decided later that it would lack clarity and lead to misunderstanding and so wrote it in the same mathematical style as the first two books. However he told William Durham (1657–1735), a natural philosopher and rector at Upminister, that he made it difficult ‘to avoid being baited by little Smatterers in Mathematicks’.¹⁰

1.1.1.Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)

In the beginning of the sixteenth century the cosmology was that of Claudius Ptolemaeus (ca. 90–168), known in English as Ptolemy, who lived in Egypt, which was then part of the Roman Empire, and died in Alexandria. The Earth was at the centre of the universe in Ptolemy’s astronomy. The fixed stars revolved around the Earth on perfect circular orbits, but the Sun and the planets moved relative to the fixed stars and could not follow exact circular orbits. In particular the superior planets like Jupiter or Saturn, which are further from the Sun than Earth, seem at times to have retrograde motion and at some periods of the year appear to move westwards relative to the stars instead of in the usual easterly direction. To account for this apparent motion, Ptolemy had the planets and the Sun follow epicyclic paths (a curve traced by a point on a circle which rolls around another circle). Even then the centre of the main circle had to be displaced from the centre of the Earth to account for the known apparent motion of the planets and the Sun. Copernicus placed the Sun at the centre of the universe and had the Earth and the planets revolve around it. He assumed that the Earth moved uniformly on a circular orbit.¹¹ The planets rotated around the Sun on circular orbits modified by epicycles, not to account for their retrograde motion but in order that their paths could reasonably accurately predicted since he believed, like the Greeks, the orbits had to be based on the circle because that was the perfect figure. The uniform apparent motion of the stars was explained by their being at an immense distance from the solar system. We now know that the orbits of the planets are near elliptical but, apart from Mercury the planet nearest the Sun, the orbits of the now recognized eight planets are actually not far from circular. Although Copernicus had basically finished his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, by about 1532, he did not publish it until just before his death only seeing the first copy on the day that he died. The book was dedicated to Pope Paul III and escaped official Catholic condemnation until the time of Galileo despite Scripture’s central position for the Earth as expressed in Psalm 93:1 ‘the world ... is stablished, that it cannot be moved’, because Copernicus was careful to include statements that the theory was only put forward as a hypothesis. The shifting the Earth from its central position was essential for astronomy, but Copernicus was not the first to suggest that the Earth and the planets revolved around the Sun. Anaxagoras of Samos (ca. 310–230 BC) had previously advanced the idea of heliocentricity, but his idea did not survive very long.

1.1.2.Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)

The German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, who established the orbits of the planets, was the next important figure to produce the ground work necessary for Newton. Kepler was the first major astronomer to adopt the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. His work on the orbits of the planets used not his own observations but those of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) who, without the aid of a telescope, made systematic observations of the positions of the stars and planets with a median error of only 1.5 minutes of arc. However, Tycho Brahe, himself had a hybrid version of the universe where the Sun and the Moon revolved around the Earth, but the planets revolved around the Sun. Kepler briefly worked as an assistant of Brahe in the year before Brahe’s death. Even before Kepler started to work for Brahe he had some ideas about the motion of the planets. Brahe would only let Kepler have access to his data on the orbit of Mars and Kepler used this data to formulate the first two of what are now known as Kepler’s laws for Mars: that it revolves around the Sun on an elliptical orbit sweeping out equal areas in equal time, which were published in the Astronomia Nova in 1609. Kepler published his third law: that the square of the period of revolution of a planet is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the Sun, in the Harmonices Mundi, published in 1619. Finally in the Epitome Astronomia Copernicanae completed in 1621 Kepler published all three laws generalizing the first two for all planets. There is some controversy about how widely Kepler’s work was appreciated before Newton used it in his Principia. The young English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks (1618–1641) certainly embraced Kepler’s work and showed that the Moon’s orbit was elliptical. He also predicted the transit of the Sun by Venus in his Ephemerides (table of astronomical positions) for the years 1629–1639,¹² Kepler had predicted the transit of the Sun by Mercury in 1631 but died before he could observe it. Kepler also predicted a transit of Venus in the same year.¹³

1.1.3.Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

Galileo is one of the greatest of the founders of classical physics. Perhaps his best legacy was the understanding of the importance of acceleration in dynamics. His two major works were the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632 and Discourse Concerning the Two New Sciences, published in 1638.¹⁴ Both books were written in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Colour Plates
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The Newtonian Period
• Part III Modern and Postmodern Period
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index