| This book is a survey of the history of physics, together with the associated astronomy, mathematics, and chemistry, from the beginnings of science to the present. I pay particular attention to the change from a deterministic view of nature to one dominated by probabilities, from viewing the universe as running like clockwork to seeing it as a crapshoot. Written for the general scientifically interested reader rather than for professional scientists, the book presents, whenever needed, brief explanations of the scientific issues involved, biographical thumbnail sketches of the protagonists, and descriptions of the changing instruments that enabled scientists to discover ever new facts begging to be understood and to test their theories.
As does any history of science, it runs the risk of overemphasizing the role of major innovators while ignoring what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science.” To recognize a new experimental or observational fact as a discovery demanding an explanation by a new theory takes a community of knowledgeable and active participants, most of whom remain anonymous. The book is not a detailed history that judges the contributions of every one of the individuals involved in this enterprise, important as some of them may have been, nor does it trace the origin of every new concept to its ultimate source. More modest in scope at the historical micro-level, its focus is on the general development of ideas. |
