✎ Physics from History [The Physics Travel Guide]

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====== Physics from History ======

A different way of approaching physics is to follow the historical line of discoveries.

This means, for example, to understand [[theories:classical_theories:classical_mechanics|Classical Mechanics]], we try to understand how Newton historically came to his conclusions.

Similarly, to understand [[theories:classical_theories:electrodynamics|Classical Electrodynamics]], we try to understand how Faraday, Maxwell etc. came to their conclusions.

While the [[roadmaps:traditional|traditional roadmap]] follows the historical line of development, the focus is not on the stories that ultimately lead to the discoveries.

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As an example, here is a great story that helps to understand how the Schrödinger equation came about:

-->History of the Schrödinger equation#
<blockquote>In Peter Debye's class in introductory physics Felix found
what he desired and felt later that he learned more from
that class than from all his other courses together. Coming
across Sommerfeld's famous book.....

In 1926 an event occurred that had a great influence on
his career. He described this in an article for Physics Today
in December 1976. He (Felix Bloch) writes:
Once at the end of a colloquium I heard Debye saying something
like: "Schrodinger, you are not working right now on very important
problems anyway. Why don't you tell us some time about that thesis of de
Broglie, which seems to have attracted some attention?"

So in one of the next colloquia, Schrodinger gave a beautifully clear
account of how de Broglie associated a wave with a particle and how he
could obtain the quantization rules of Niels Bohr and Sommerfeld by
demanding that an integer number of waves should be fitted along a
stationary orbit. When he had finished, Debye casually remarked that this way of
talking was rather childish. As a student of Sommerfeld he had learned
that, to deal properly with waves, one had to have a wave equation. It
sounded quite trivial and did not seem to make a great impression, but
Schrodinger evidently thought a bit more about the idea afterwards.
Just a few weeks later he gave another talk in the colloquium which
he started by saying: "My colleague Debye suggested that one should have a
wave equation; well I have found one!"
And then he told us essentially what he was about to publish under
the title "Quantization as Eigenvalue Problem" as the first paper of a series
in the Annalen der Physik. I was still too green to really appreciate the
significance of this talk, but from the general reaction of the audience I
realized that something rather important had happened, and I need not
tell you what the name of Schrodinger has meant from then on. Many
years later, I reminded Debye of his remark about the wave equation;
interestingly enough he claimed that he had forgotten about it and I am not
quite sure whether this was not the subconscious suppression of his regret
that he had not done it himself. In any event, he turned to me with a
broad smile and said: "Well, wasn't I right?"
This quotation not only illustrates an important event in
Felix's career but demonstrates as well how charmingly he
could write and tell stories.

<cite>Felix Bloch 1905-1983 A biographical memoir by Hofstadter R</cite>
</blockquote>
<--

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There is a great book that presents physics exactly like this and exemplifies perfectly how physical theories come about.

It's called

**Theoretical concepts in physics by Malcolm Sim Longair.**

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