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Physics Milestones Prompts
You are required to develop, revise, and submit one essay that deal with one milestone in the
history of physics. The essay should be 3 or more pages in length, and should be double-spaced
with 1-inch margins, and 12 pt. font such as Times New Roman. You should address, at a
minimum, the following points in your Physics Milestones essay. Please number and head each
of your responses in this essay with the points below. Feel free to include additional information
and reflections by adding additional numerated points.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Describe the historical/geographical context (paragraph #1)
Give background information on the physicist (paragraph #2)
Explain the physics concept and its implication (paragraph #3)
Give your opinion on the usefulness of the concept (paragraph #4)
You must submit the essay and research notes by November 15th 2013, no late work
accepted.
NO PLAGIARISM!!!
Prompts
1543 - Nicholas Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies is published. It is the
first work on astronomy to provide an analytical basis for the motion of the planets, including
Earth, around the sun.
1592 - Galileo Galilei is appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Padua. While
there, he performs experiments on the motions of bodies.
1609 – New Astronomy, by Johannes Kepler, is published. In it, Kepler demonstrates that the
orbit of Mars is elliptical rather than circular.
1678 – Christiaan Huygens completes the bulk of his Treatise on Light, in which he presents
his model of secondary wavelets, known today as Huygen’s principle.
1687 – Isaac Newton’s masterpiece, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, is
published. In this extensive work, Newton systematically presents a unified model of mechanics.
1712 – Thomas Newcomen invents the first practical steam engine. Over 50 years later, James
Watt makes significant improvements to the Newcomen engine.
1738 – Daniel Bernouilli’s Hydrodynamics, which includes his research on the mechanical
behavior of fluids, is published.
1752 – Benjamin Franklin performs the dangerous “kite experiment”, in which he demonstrates
that lightning consists of electric charges. He would build on the 1st studies of electricity
performed earlier in the century by describing electricity as having + and - charges.
1785 – Charles Agustin de Coulomb publishes the results of experiments that will
systematically and conclusively prove the inverse-square law for electric force. The law has
been suggested for over 30 years by other scientists, such as Daniel Bernouilli, Joseph
Priestley, and Henry Cavendish.
1798 – Benjamin Thompson demonstrates that energy transferred as heat results from
mechanical processes, rather than the release of caloric, the heat fluid that has been widely
believed to exist in all substances.
1800 – Alessandro Volta develops the first current-electricity cell using alternating plate of
silver and zinc.
1801 – Thomas Young demonstrates that light rays interfere, providing the first substantial
support for a wave theory of light.
1814 – Augustin Fresnel begins his research in optics, the results of which will confirm and
explain Thomas Young’s discovery of interference and will firmly establish the wave model of
light first suggested by Christiaan Huygens over a century earlier.
1820 – Hans Christian Oersted demonstrates that an electric current produces a magnetic field.
(Gian Dominico Romagnosi, an amateur scientist, discovered the effect 18 years earlier, but at
the time attracted no attention). Andre-Marie Ampere repeats Oersted’s experiments and
formulates the law of electro-magnetism that today bears his name.
1831 – Michael Faraday begins experiments demonstrating electromagnetic induction. Similar
experiments are conducted around the same time by Joseph Henry in the United States, but he
doesn’t publish the results of his work at this time.
1843 – James Prescott Joule determines that mechanical energy is equivalent to energy
transferred as heat, laying the foundation for the principle of energy conservation.
1844 – Samuel Morse sends the first telegraph message from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore.
1850 – Rudolph Clausius formulates the second law of thermodynamics, the first step in the
transformation of the thermodynamics into an exact science.
1873 – James Clark Maxwell completes his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In this
work, Maxwell gives Michael Faraday’s discoveries a mathematical framework.
1888 – Heinrich Hertz experimentally demonstrates the existence of electromagnetic waves,
which were predicted by James Clerk Maxwell. Oliver Lodge makes the same discovery
independently.
1898 – Marie and Pierre Curie are the first to isolate the radioactive elements polonium and
radium.
1905 – Vol. 17 of Annalen der Physics contains three extraordinarily and important papers by
Albert Einstein. In one paper he introduces his special theory of relativity. In another he
presents the quantum theory of light.
1913 – Niels Bohr – building on the discoveries of Ernest Rutherford and J.J. Thompson, and
the quantum theories of Max Planck and Albert Einstein – develops a model of atomic
structure based on energy levels that accounts for emission spectra.
1926 – Erwin Schrodinger uses the wave-particle model for light and matter to develop the
theory of wave mechanics, which describes atomic systems. About the same time, Werner
Heisenberg develops a mathematically equivalent theory called quantum mechanics, by which
the probability that matter has certain properties is determined.
1938 – Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman achieve nuclear fission. Early the next year, Lise
Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch explain the process and introduce the term fission to
describe the division of a nucleus into lighter nuclei.
1942 – Shin’ichiro Tomonaga proposes an important tenet of quantum electrodynamics, which
describes the interactions between charged particles and light at the quantum level. The theory is
later independently developed by Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.