Turning Points in Physics

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  Beyond the 80/20 Principle

  The Science of Success from Game Theory to the Tipping Point

  • Richard Koch(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • John Murray Business

    (Publisher)

  Part Two

  The Physical Laws

  Newtonian and Twentieth-Century Physics

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  Introduction to Part Two

  In Part Two, we try to understand matter and energy, and the power laws that drive them. Because physics is about the nature of matter and energy, it clearly has implications for the nature of the universe itself. The power laws of physics rapidly become the way in which we perceive the universe. The way that physical laws operate supplies the template, metaphors and patterns for much else besides—for our models of thinking; our views of society, industry and markets; our view of how individual humans behave and what we are; and even our most fundamental views about God and the coherence or meaning of life itself.

  Chapter 6 recounts the wonderful impact on the world of Newton’s Laws of Motion and Gravity . Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, as we’ll see in Chapter 7, Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity began the process of subverting Newton’s physics. Initially just a bizarre curiosity, and yet to find any practical application, the theory of relativity has gradually changed our view of reality, time, and space. It does have interesting implications for business, as long as we don’t spend too much time pondering them!

  The real hammer blow to humanity’s ordered universe came with Quantum Mechanics . Chapter 8 tells the story. Although initially the implications of quantum theory brought perplexity and despair, some popular science writers have recently developed a populist ‘quantum philosophy’ that domesticates the theory and suggests some fashionable implications for individuals, business, and society. We examine these theories with a sympathetic yet ultimately skeptical commentary. We can, however, learn from Quantum Mechanics

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  A Theory of Everything (That Matters)

  A Short Guide to Einstein, Relativity and the Future of Faith

  • Alister E McGrath(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Hodder Faith

    (Publisher)

  Robert Millikan, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923, recalled his days as a student in New York during the 1890s. He was constantly ridiculed by other students for his devotion to ‘a “finished,” yes, a “dead subject,” like physics’. Why not work in a more interesting field that was going somewhere?

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  Others, however, were much more cautious. It was true that the nineteenth century had made significant advances in the field of physics – above all in developing mechanical models to explain many aspects of the natural world. Yet enigmas and anomalies remained. Some observations just didn’t fit neatly into the best theories of that age. The question was this: Were those enigmas and anomalies simply intellectual irritations that would soon be resolved? Or were they really signs that the existing scientific consensus was wrong and needed radical revision? Nobody really knew.

  The historian Thomas Kuhn developed the idea of a ‘paradigm shift’ – a radical change in the way in which scientists see our world. 15

  He saw this kind of shift in the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century, in which the view that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth was displaced by the very different view that the Earth was another planet revolving around the sun. Yet Kuhn’s interest lay mainly in the way in which a dominant paradigm collapsed and gave way to something new. A tipping point was reached. It was realised that the old way of thinking just couldn’t cope with the anomalies, opening the way to new ways of thinking that could make sense of these otherwise puzzling observations.

  Let’s look at one of these anomalies that troubled physicists at the end of the nineteenth century. Technically, this is known as the ‘advance of the perihelion of Mercury’. The Curious Behaviour of the Planet Mercury

  Newton’s theory of planetary motion triumphantly explained the way the planets orbited the sun on the basis of his theory of universal gravitation and the laws of motion. It was widely seen as an intellectual marvel of the eighteenth century. The astronomer Johannes Kepler had earlier identified three basic laws of planetary motion. Yet these were simply summaries of the way the planets orbited around the sun. They did not explain

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  A History of Western Thought

  From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century

  • Nils Gilje, Gunnar Skirbekk(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  chapter 25 New advances in the natural sciences    

  EINSTEIN AND MODERN PHYSICS

  In recent times there has been an explosive growth in the research community. This applies both to the number of active researchers and to the number of topics and approaches. This expansion applies to all branches of research, but especially to the natural sciences and their offshoots in the development of technology. The civilian and military industries are both closely involved in many of these activities. We may point out three scientific-technological revolutions of our time: those of physics, informatics, and biology. We will glance at the development of modern physics, emphasizing the relation between scientific development and technology. But our concluding remarks on the need for interdisciplinary and public discussion also apply to the problems of information technology and biology.

  FROM ‘SEEING NATURE AS TECHNOLOGY’ TO ‘SEEING NATURE WITH TECHNOLOGY’

  Galilean-Newtonian physics inspired the mechanistic world-view with its basic concepts of material particles and mechanistic causes. In Renaissance science, ‘the book of nature’ was assumed to be written in mathematical language: geometry allowed access to the inner structure of nature, beyond the knowledge of natural phenomena attainable by immediate perception. The laws of physics and astronomy were thus formulated in mathematical terms. Geometry became an integral part of architecture and art as well as technology. And there was a close connection between geometry and technology: if comprehensible in the language of geometry, nature could at the same time be handled technologically, since in the new perspective nature was seen not only as mechanical movements of material particles, but also as material objects formed according to geometric design – in terms of straight lines and angles, plane surfaces, and circles and spheres, and of balance wheels and pendulums, with linear and circular movements. Nature was thus seen as a gigantic machine. Hobbes, a proponent of the mechanistic-materialistic world-view, compared society with a watch, and Harvey saw the heart as a pump. Epistemology accordingly distinguished between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, man as perceiving subject seeking to perceive nature as a technological system.

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