Drawing physics: 2,600 years of discovery from Thales to Higgs

Description

'Drawing Physics' is a collection of 51 essays each one organized around a simple, informative, line drawing that conveys a key idea in the history of physics. The essays, each approximately 1000 words long, are chronologically ordered from Thales, who around 600 BCE explained and used the principles of triangulation, to Peter Higgs, who received the Nobel Prize in 2012 for his prediction of the Higgs boson.;Antiquity; Triangulation (600 BCE) -- Pythagorean monochord (500 BCE) -- Phases of the moon (448 BCE) -- Empedocles discovers air (450 BCE) -- Aristotle's universe (350 BCE) -- Relative distance of sun and moon (280 BCE) -- Archimedes' balance (250 BCE) -- Archimedes' principle (250 BCE) -- The size of the earth (225 BCE) -- Middle Ages; Philoponus on free fall (550 CE) -- The optics of vision (1020 CE) -- Oresme's triangle -- Leonardo and earthshine -- Early Modern Period; The Copernican cosmos -- The impossibility of perpetual motion -- Snell's law -- The mountains on the moon -- The moons of Jupiter -- Kepler's laws of planetary motion -- Galileo on free fall -- Galileo on projectile motion -- Scaling and similitude -- The weight of air -- Boyle's law -- Newton's theory of color -- Free-body diagrams -- Newton's cradle -- Newtonian trajectories -- Huygens' principle -- Bernoulli's principle -- Electrostatics -- Nineteenth Century; Young's double slit -- Oersted's demonstration -- Carnot's simplest heat engine -- Joules's apparatus -- Faraday's lines of force -- Maxwell's electromagnetic waves -- Twentieth Century and Beyond; Photoelectric effect -- Brownian motion -- Rutherford's gold foil experiment -- Bohr's hydrogen atom -- X-rays and crystals -- General relativity -- Compton scattering -- Matter waves -- The expanding universe (1927-29) -- The neutrino and conservation of energy -- Discovering the neutron -- Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion -- Global greenhouse effect -- Higgs boson (2012).