Humans have curiosity about their origin since time unknown. Ancient humans observed the rains,the thunderstorms, the fire and the seasons which made them think about why they occur. Here come out two ways of thinking. One,(quite simpler one) GOD did it. Two,(quite harder one) We'll have to THINK. Everyone must ask questions and try to find their answers. But how did this great quest for knowledge begun?
In older times (even before the birth of Christ) there used to be flocks of philosophers of various thinking streams. No one will call us wrong if we'd say these philosophers were early physicists. They used to regard works to be done by using own hands to be less sacred. This is the reason why Chemistry and even experimental physics were born after theoretical physics. As you and me are living in modern times,it becomes quite harder to believe what I just said. How can one propose a scientific theory without any experiments? But they did! They'd just sit in a armchair, flying kites of imagination higher and higher and nothing mattered to them. There were Plato, Socrates,Aristotle and so many great minds to think. For me, contribution (though it can't be called'contribution') of Aristotle seems to be pioneering. His thoughts and theories made no sense...but since they supported Bible,they were all right! Where these philosophers went wrong is in making assumptions. They put living and non living things in the same shelf. They gave non living things human emotions and this isn't the way Science works!
The image above must probably have rendered you! But this was Aristotle's universe. This model is called Geocentric model of the universe. Where earth is considered to be at the centre of universe and sun and all other planets revolving around it. But it was the man Nicolas Copernicus who stopped the sun!
He wrote a book named "
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" which means "
On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres" Where he proposed his model where sun was considered at the centre and earth and all other planets revolving around it!
This was quite right but he was afraid of Church and wasn't ready to publish it. But a friend of him published it. Still Copernicus was ignored because,the publisher added a kind of 'disclaimer' on the first page which somehow meant that all the thoughts expressed in the book are purely imaginary and Copernicus was survived!
Now you'd ask,"Then who was the first REAL PHYSICIST?" Answer is...
Galileo Galeli. The mad Italiano who built a telescope overnight to impress his king before Deutsch inventors could impress him in the morning!What he didn't do! He build base of theory of Gravitation,build base of theory of relativity,made accurate observations of the night sky. Still the Catholic church hated him.
His thoughts were against the stream of thinking of his times and it was kind of indigestive to the Catholic church. Even his dead body was thrown into dump after his death. (So many things changed further,so many discoveries took place-even that of indeterministic Quantum Physics...but Catholic church forgived Galileo in 1992...350 years after the legend's death!)
Who can dare to say Physics is complete without Issac Newton? Being a strange,alone, arrogant and crazy guy he did brave deeds! His greatest (and most importantly correct) assumption that built his theories was considering motion of body with uniform velocity and state of rest of the body to be the same. He first wrote his book
Opticks where he put forward his
corpuscular theory of light where he told light has particle nature and explained phenomena like reflection and refraction.
At the same time Christian Huygens (The guy who gave us concept of centre of mass) pulled out his wave model of light! Which was also explaining all phenomena of light but was totally opposite to Newton's corpuscular theory. To prove this guy wrong, Newton wrote his another legendary book of all time "
Philosopæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica"Or just 'Principia' Where he wrote about his thoughts related to mechanics,theory of Gravitation, relativity and even calculus to support his assumptions and theories. Fun fact here is Newton loved watching people vying for solving the problems he already had solved. He loved watching their die hard efforts! He even didn't like anyone understand his theories and hence he wrote his books in Latin so that no one could ever understand them!(We do... that's other thing!) He was also not ready to publish his works too early. But Huygens and Robert Hooke(Yeah,the first man who saw a cell)(He was also a Physicist and did significant works in study of elasticity.) irritated Newton so much that he threw
Principia on their faces and silenced them. He created his own level at such an extent that even after hundreds of years if someone dared to find something in Physics would think,"If Newton couldn't do this,I must have been wrong somewhere"(!)
Great quests haunted by physicists of all time are like What everything is made of? What is time? What is light? How did it all begin? Is there a God? Is time travel possible? Is anyone out there except us? and much more like this! Further came Ampere, Kirchoff, Faraday with Electricity, Magnetism and Electromagnetism(
Changing electric field induces magnetic field and vice versa) Later came out Maxwell corrected everything and stated light is an electromagnetic wave! Henry and the Curie couple discovered the Radioactivity.
Later came Max Planck with his Quantum Theory which was revolutionary in history of Physics!
He told that light is discrete supply of energy in form of photons and no energy is possible less than his constant h (6.626×10–³⁴) and if you want to exchange energy, you'll have to do it only in integral multiples of 'h'.
De Broglie said light has dual(both light and particle) nature. Einstein pulled out relativity...
Even modern Physicists like Heisenberg,Pauli, Feynman,Gamow, Hawking,Lewin continued the quest!
And we're damn sure this quest will continue until humanity lasts!
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