Physics in the Nineteenth Century

Physics in the Nineteenth Century
Author: Robert D. Purrington
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1997
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780813524429

Putting physics into the historical context of the Industrial Revolution and the European nation-state, Purrington traces the main figures, including Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, and Helmholtz, as well as their interactions, experiments, discoveries, and debates. The success of nineteenth-century physics laid the foundation for quantum theory and relativity in the twentieth. Robert D. Purrington is a professor of physics at Tulane University and coauthor of Frame of the Universe.

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell
Author: Raymond Flood
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2014-01-09
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0191641251

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) had a relatively brief, but remarkable life, lived in his beloved rural home of Glenlair, and variously in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, London and Cambridge. His scholarship also ranged wide - covering all the major aspects of Victorian natural philosophy. He was one of the most important mathematical physicists of all time, coming only after Newton and Einstein. In scientific terms his immortality is enshrined in electromagnetism and Maxwell's equations, but as this book shows, there was much more to Maxwell than electromagnetism, both in terms of his science and his wider life. Maxwell's life and contributions to science are so rich that they demand the expertise of a range of academics - physicists, mathematicians, and historians of science and literature - to do him justice. The various chapters will enable Maxwell to be seen from a range of perspectives. Chapters 1 to 4 deal with wider aspects of his life in time and place, at Aberdeen, King's College London and the Cavendish Laboratory. Chapters 5 to 12 go on to look in more detail at his wide ranging contributions to science: optics and colour, the dynamics of the rings of Saturn, kinetic theory, thermodynamics, electricity, magnetism and electromagnetism with the concluding chapters on Maxwell's poetry and Christian faith.

Maxwell on Heat and Statistical Mechanics

Maxwell on Heat and Statistical Mechanics
Author: James Clerk Maxwell
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
Total Pages: 564
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780934223348

. These papers shed light on the formation of Maxwell's ideas and theories within the structure of a professional scientific discipline, physics, that had only recently taken shape. While Maxwell responded to and relied on the work of his colleagues, his interpretations often placed his work apart from theirs, to be exploited by later generations of physicists.

The Culture of Diagram

The Culture of Diagram
Author: John Bender
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 591
Release: 2010-01-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0804773254

The Culture of Diagram is about visual thinking. Exploring a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, the book foregrounds diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equations, or sensations. This book traces practices that ran against the grain of both Locke's clear and distinct ideas and Newton's causality—practices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling. Today's digital technologies are rooted in the ability of high-speed computers to correct errors when returning binary data to the human sensorium. High-tech diagrams echo the visual structures of the Encyclopedia, arraying packets of dissimilar data across digital spaces instead of white paper. The culture of diagram broke with the certainties of eighteenth-century science to expand the range of human experience. Speaking across disciplines and discourses, Bender and Marrinan situate our modernity in a new and revealing light.