What is the history of physics?

From ancient times to the 5th century, it is an ancient historical period. The 5th-13rd century was the Middle Ages; 14 to 16 is the Renaissance. The period from 16 to 17 was the period of scientific revolution, during which modern science represented by N. Copernicus, Galileo and Newton appeared. Since then, science has developed with the changes of the century. In the past half century, according to the historical characteristics of physics, people roughly divided its development into the following stages:

It is an ancient period from ancient times to the Middle Ages.

② The Renaissance to19th century is the period of classical physics. Newtonian mechanics reached its peak in this period, and its views on time and space, matter and causality influenced all disciplines of light, sound, heat and electromagnetism, and even affected natural science and social science except physics.

(3) With the advent of the 20th century, quantum theory and relativity appeared one after another; The new concepts of time and space, probability theory and uncertainty relation have replaced the related concepts of Newtonian mechanics in macro and micro fields, and people call this period the period of modern physics.

Extended data:

Physics comes from rational materialism in ancient Greece. Early philosophers raised many extensive questions, such as the origin of the cosmic order, the diversity of the world and the origin of various varieties, and how to explain the relationship between matter and form, movement and change.

Especially the atomism represented by leucippus and democritus, and later developed to Epicurus and Lucretius, and the Stoicism represented by Zhi Nuo all advocated the continuity of nature, and made their own explanations on the structure, movement and change of nature. Since18th century, atomism has exerted great influence on chemistry and physics.

At the beginning of the formation of classical physics, mirror grinding and mirror-making techniques have helped and promoted physics and astronomy. The earlier invention of glasses and the sudden appearance of telescopes and microscopes around 1600 brought convenience for physicists such as Galileo to observe celestial bodies, and also prompted a large number of optical scientists such as Fresnel, Descartes and Newton to study geometric optics.

The achievements of the latter contributed to the emergence of reflecting telescope, refractive telescope and achromatic refractive telescope in the17-18th century. The progress of various telescopes has promoted the development of physics, such as observing Europa's erosion and finding aberrations. When Newton established the classical mechanics building, the theoretical foundations of all modern engineering technologies, such as machinery, civil construction, transportation, aerospace and so on, were initially established.

The industrial revolution that began in the 1960s was marked by the widespread use of steam engines. At first, the efficiency of the steam engine was only about 5%. In order to improve the efficiency of steam engines, a large number of physicists have carried out thermodynamic research. J Watt once improved the steam engine in terms of technical factors (adding condenser) according to J Blake's "latent heat" theory.

However, no one realized at that time that the heat of the cylinder was only partially converted into mechanical work. From then on, Carnot established the cycle principle of thermal power conversion, which pointed out the direction for improving the efficiency of heat engines in theory. Therefore, the internal combustion engines of N. Otto and R. Dissel appeared in the second half of the19th century.

In addition to the relationship between physics and technology, in the history of scientific development, physics has a close relationship with neighboring astronomy, chemistry and mineralogy, and the relationship between physics and mathematics is even closer. The concepts, theories and methods of physics also contribute to the establishment and development of other disciplines, such as meteorology, earth science and biology. The relationship between physics and philosophy is also very special.

Baidu encyclopedia-history of physics