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How physics ideas took shape

Follow important people, experiments, and changing ideas through time. Each article includes physics diagrams you can open and edit.

Ancient foundations

  1. The Rope That Moved a Ship The king saw a marvel. Archimedes saw force and distance trading places along a rope.
  2. Vitruvius Turned the Marvel into Instructions The pulley left the hero's hands and entered a public language of beams, pins, ropes, and reproducible work.
  3. Ptolemy's Bowl of Angles A ray entering water became a table of measurements, even though the law behind it was still centuries away.

Medieval inquiry

  1. Philoponus Refused to Let Air Push the Arrow An arrow kept flying after it left the string. Philoponus moved the cause of that motion from the air back into the arrow.
  2. Ibn Sahl Gathered Sunlight into a Point To draw a lens that would truly focus light, Ibn Sahl found the hidden ratio between the angles of refraction.
  3. The Lamp Before the Mirror A lamp, a mirror, and repeatedly measured angles turned optics from an argument with authority into an experiment that could be done again.
  4. The Stone the Air Did Not Have to Push Buridan gave a thrown stone something carried within its motion, loosening an old explanation before inertia existed.

Measurement and motion

  1. The Earth Became a Wanderer Copernicus moved Earth out of the still center and discovered how much physics changes when the frame changes.
  2. The Slope That Slowed a Fall Galileo did not observe falling bodies faster. He slowed them until time left a measurable trace.

Laws of nature

  1. The Pendulum That Kept the Beat Huygens connected Galileo's pendulum to a clock, then chased the small error that refused to disappear.
  2. The Window Newton Closed A sunbeam, a prism, and a dark room changed white light from purity into a mixture.
  3. Hooke's Hidden Law A secret sentence about springs became a compact rule for instruments, clocks, and oscillations.
  4. Halley's Question A dinner-table question about planetary orbits pushed Newton toward the book that remade mechanics.
  5. Atwood Slowed Gravity Down Free fall was too quick to time, so Atwood let two weights almost cancel and left a small acceleration that could be measured.
  6. The Thread Cavendish Watched Twist Inside a sealed shed, four lead balls gave Earth its first measured mean density.
  7. Carnot's Perfect Engine Steam engines were already roaring when a young officer asked what no engine could ever do.
  8. Faraday's Ten-Year Current A current could make magnetism. Faraday spent years asking whether changing magnetism could return the favor.
  9. Joule's Wheel in the Cellar Falling weights stirred water and helped turn heat from a substance into a form of energy.

Fields and matter

  1. Maxwell Wrote Light Into the Equations Electricity and magnetism predicted a wave whose speed was already famous.
  2. The Formula on Boltzmann's Grave If every molecule obeys reversible mechanics, why does heat flow only one way?
  3. The Ether Wind That Wasn't There Michelson and Morley turned their instrument and found no convincing trace of Earth's motion through ether.
  4. Hertz Found the Spark A tiny spark across a wire loop made Maxwell's invisible waves visible.
  5. The Rays Rontgen Would Not Name A glowing screen in a dark room let people see inside a living body without a knife.
  6. Thomson Made the Ray Turn Electric and magnetic fields forced a glowing ray to reveal a particle smaller than any atom.
  7. The Ore the Curies Boiled An anomalous reading led Marie Curie through tons of residue and into the atom's hidden energy.

Modern physics

  1. Planck's Reluctant Quantum A physicist devoted to continuity introduced a tiny packet of energy because the data left him nowhere else to go.
  2. Einstein Gave Light a Packet When wave theory was at its strongest, Einstein argued that light sometimes arrives in individual portions.
  3. Simultaneity Beneath Bern's Clocks Einstein began not by asking how fast time flows, but how distant clocks can be said to agree.
  4. The Particle That Came Back A few alpha particles rebounded from gold foil and forced most of the atom into a tiny nucleus.
  5. Bohr Stopped the Electron Classical physics made Rutherford's atom collapse, so Bohr declared that only certain orbits were allowed.
  6. Starlight Bent During an Eclipse Two expeditions used a total eclipse to test whether spacetime curves around the Sun.
  7. De Broglie Gave Matter a Wave If light can behave like particles, why should particles not also possess a wavelength?
  8. Pauli's Rule: No Two Alike One prohibition organized atomic shells and helped explain why matter has structure.
  9. Heisenberg Threw Away the Orbits Unable to picture the electron's path, Heisenberg built a theory only from quantities experiments could reach.
  10. The Wave Schrodinger Found De Broglie's matter wave entered an equation, and discrete energies emerged instead of being imposed.
  11. The Extra Answer in Dirac's Equation Combining quantum mechanics with relativity produced a particle no one had asked for.
  12. The Neutral Particle Chadwick Caught Penetrating radiation with no charge supplied the missing mass inside atomic nuclei.
  13. Meitner's Calculation in the Snow During an exile's winter walk, a puzzling experiment became nuclear fission.
  14. Fermi's Reactor Beneath the Bleachers Graphite, uranium, and careful control produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.