Download e-book for iPad: A Cultural History of Physics by Károly Simonyi

By Károly Simonyi

ISBN-10: 1568813295

ISBN-13: 9781568813295

While the actual sciences are a consistently evolving resource of know-how and of knowing approximately our international, they've got turn into so really expert and depend upon quite a bit prerequisite wisdom that for plenty of buyers the divide among the sciences and the arts turns out even more than it used to be whilst C. P. Snow brought his well-known 1959 lecture, "The Cultures."

In A Cultural background of Physics, Hungarian scientist and educator Károly Simonyi succeeds in bridging this chasm by means of describing the experimental tools and theoretical interpretations that created clinical wisdom, from precedent days to the current day, in the cultural surroundings within which it used to be shaped. in contrast to the other paintings of its type, Simonyi’s seminal opus explores the interaction of technological know-how and the arts to express the sweetness and pleasure of medical improvement through the a while.

These pages comprise an abundance of excerpts from unique assets, a big selection of transparent and simple factors, and an spectacular wealth of perception, revealing the ancient development of technology and welcoming readers right into a discussion with the nice clinical minds that formed our present knowing of physics.

Beautifully illustrated, actual in its clinical content material and wide in its ancient and cultural viewpoint, this booklet should be a useful reference for students and an notion to aspiring scientists and humanists who think that technological know-how is a vital part of our tradition.

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The focus then shifts from the psychology of creativity to the laws of how the structures of physics evolve. From these structures one can then only with difficulty tease out the individual achievements and individual laws. The result of all this is Kuhn's theory, according to which the history of physics is the chronicle of a series of revolutionary transformations, in which one paradigm is replaced by another. 16). According to this theory, the history of physics is not cumulative; indeed, subtraction as well as addition plays an important role.

14: The appearance of solutions is an essentially irrational event, and the role of logic is relevant only in their communication. Naturally we do not mean to say here that the discovery, the creative act, is entirely a result of irrational factors: To the creation of the waiting state, of the empty tense state of readiness, also belongs the laborious preparation, the traversal through the well-worn paths of logic. From this point of view, the history of physics is the history of the great physicists, and the chapters of a book on the subject could be named for the great physicists.

However, while emphasizing the determinative, primary character of this foundation, historical materialism is aware of the opposite force of the superstructure on the foundation; that is, it recognizes the active role of the superstructure in societal progress. A very large obstacle in realizing this program is that of placing physics and more generally the natural sciences in the above simplified model: They belong neither to the foundation nor to the superstructure. The history of mankind is a unique and unrepeatable process.

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A Cultural History of Physics by Károly Simonyi


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