Birth of Modern Physics
At the end of the 19th century, physics had evolved to the point at which classical mechanics could cope with highly complex problems involving macroscopic situations; thermodynamics and kinetic theory were well established; geometrical and physical optics could be understood in terms of electromagnetic waves; and the conservation laws for energy and momentum (and mass) were widely accepted. So profound were these and other developments that it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement. However, around 1900 serious doubts arose about the completeness of the classical theories - the triumph of Maxwell's theories, for example, was undermined by inadequacies that had already begun to appear - and their inability to explain certain physical phenomena, such as the energy distribution in blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect, while some of the theoretical formulations led to paradoxes when pushed to the limit. Prominent physicists such as Hendrik Lorentz, Emil Cohn, Ernst Wiechert and Wilhelm Wien believed that some modification of Maxwell's equations might provide the basis for all physical laws. These shortcomings of classical physics would never to be resolved and new ideas were required. At the beginning of the twentieth century a major revolution shook the world of physics, which led to a new era, generally referred to as modern physics.
Read more about this topic: History Of Physics
Famous quotes containing the words birth of, birth, modern and/or physics:
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (18311910)
“But the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 1:13-15.
“Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.”
—Marshall McLuhan (19111980)
“Although philosophers generally believe in laws and deny causes, explanatory practice in physics is just the reverse.”
—Nancy Cartwright (b. 1945)