Talk:History of physics

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Islamic physics and possible Jagged_85 sock.

Please see here [[1]]. IP 157.14.207.111. I cleaned up a bit removing claims that Tusi and his pupil discovered elliptical orbit(!), or that Avempace anticipated Newtons third law of motion. I can't access "Gracia, Jorge J. E. (2007-11-26), "Philosophy in the Middle Ages: An Introduction", A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages", which is used to claim that " Ibn Bajjah was a critic of Ptolemy and he worked on creating a new theory of velocity to replace the one theorized by Aristotle. Two future philosophers supported the theories Avempace created, known as Avempacean dynamics. These philosophers were Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic priest, and John Duns Scotus.[22] Galileo went on to adopt Avempace's formula "that the velocity of a given object is the difference of the motive power of that object and the resistance of the medium of motion". If somobody can varify it that would be great.

The section on Alhacen and Al-biruni should also be rewritten more neutrally. DMKR2005 (talk) 02:06, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! The only edits from 157.14.207.111 are to this article with these edits in April 2019 although mention of "elliptical orbit" was already in the article then. Johnuniq (talk) 03:13, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, Thanks. It seems claims on Alhacen and Al-biruni mostly relies on non-academic authors like Jim Al-Khalili or Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa(an educator), or pretty fringe view within historiography of science, like Rozhanskaya and Levinova. I've read a lot of history science books, but never seem anybody outside of them said that Al-biruni intoduced "scientific method" in to mechanics, let alone creating "medieval hydrodynamics"(whatever this means). I am going to add Mark Smith opinion on Alhacen, where he criticized tendency of some popular author to exaggerate modernity of Alhacen experimentation. Not sure what to do with Al-biruni. DMKR2005 (talk) 20:13, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Maxwell section is a jumble

The Maxwell statistical mechanics is mixed up with his electromagnetism work. Johnjbarton (talk) 21:02, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I edited the section on Maxwell to remove the parts on electricity and magnetism. Those were moved to #electromagnetism.

One thing from the old text that I didn't carry over: that Maxwell stated unequivocably in his 1873 treatise that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon. He said that the speed of electromagnetic waves as measured in the laboratory was "of the same order of magnitude" as the speed of light determined from astronomy. He said, "It is to be hoped that, by further experiment, the relation between the magnitudes of the two quantities may be more accurately determined." (Volume 2, pages 387-388) Julian in LA (talk) 04:32, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Articles on the history of physics

The "Articles on the history of physics" section overlaps Outline of the history of physics and in my experience these will diverge and both be somewhat inaccurate as articles are renamed, added, and deleted.

A better solution would transclude one section into the other, but of course that would make them identical. Is there a reason they can't be identical? Johnjbarton (talk) 17:28, 28 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why is this article so long?

Writing about the "history of physics" is like the "history of North America." The various threads are usually treated separately, because trying to discuss them all at once makes it unintelligible. Thermodynamics, for example, has little to do with the Law of Gravity. Shouldn't these be separate articles? Julian in LA (talk) 17:51, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion, the ideal form for this article would be a series of summary sections with {{main}} wikilinks to sub-histories. If we have to have the Great Men, then they would also get a paragraph summary. In this way the article becomes almost an annotated outline.

In structure the article matches this goal, but the summaries are just way too long. Cutting them back while ensuring that the wikilinked articles have the material and references here would be a great step forward.

Of course a history of physics needs to cover both gravity and thermodynamics as these are both physics. Johnjbarton (talk) 18:05, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ancient history

All of the topics mentioned in the section of ancient physics are branches of physics. There is no clarification on what separates ancient history of physics from all other physics enough for these to not be utilized as the starting point of its history instead of "17th century" (as declared in the start of the article); except from saying that current physics were drawn from those topics, and mentioning that they stemmed from geometry (research that resulted in the study of physics anyways).

I would like to share my disagreement with this under the argument that this information could nullify past contributions of many other cultures throughout history. If agreed upon, I can edit this section and add information to the introduction. Cloudbongee (talk) 00:39, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm confused by your post. The article does not have a "Ancient physics" section. It has "Ancient history", which is an odd title. I think "Natural philosophy" would be better title.

The starting point in the article is "Ancient history" not "17th century". Moveover the current organization clearly makes "the scientific revolution" exactly that separation of ancient and all other. So I guess I don't agree with your comments to the extent I understand them. Johnjbarton (talk) 00:48, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Physics emerged from the scientific revolution of the 17th century" from the introduction of the article.

I am trying to draw attention at this quote in contrast to the ancient history section, this is not the emergence of physics if considered its origin from what you deem "Natural philosophy". This is where my argument lies. There is no question over what draws the line between ancient and the other many kinds of physics historically, but rather questioning whether the starting point should be marked at 17th century physics, and if that is the case, why is it "17th century" and not before. Cloudbongee (talk) 02:29, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I changed the intro to include a sentence reflecting the section "ancient history". Johnjbarton (talk) 18:09, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]