Physics In History

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In the 7th century, negative numbers were used in calculations in India which was innovative because Europeans dismissed these numbers as absurd until the 17th century, when they gained widespread acceptance due to their practical use in accounting and bookkeeping.

Robert Oppenheimer on freedom to question ✍️

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. - Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Sir Isaac Newton was chronically lonely for most of his life. He never married, had few intimate friendships, and often withdrew from society for long periods. His contemporaries described him as reserved and solitary.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and his uncle C. V. Raman form a rare Nobel legacy in one family. Raman won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the Raman Effect, and Chandrasekhar followed decades later with the 1983 Nobel Prize for his profound work on the structure and evolution of stars.

A graph showing the number of ways an even number can be written as the sum of two primes (4 ≤ n ≤ 1000000).

The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations of the electromagnetic field. -- A. Einstein

Richard Feynman on UFOs 🛸 It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is. Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said “I don’t think there are flying saucers”. So my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No”, I said, “I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely”. At that he said, “You are very unscientific. If you can’t prove it impossible then how can you say that it’s unlikely?” But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all.

On this day in 1690 Christian Goldbach was born-- a Prussian mathematician best known for proposing the famous Goldbach Conjecture in 1742, in a letter to Leonhard Euler. The conjecture states that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers—a claim that remains unproven to this day. Goldbach worked in number theory and served as a mathematician and diplomat at the Russian Imperial Court.

What's your opinion on dark energy? ✍️

On December 17, 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann experimentally discovered nuclear fission by bombarding uranium with neutrons, splitting its nucleus into lighter elements like barium. This groundbreaking discovery was confirmed and theoretically explained shortly after by physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch, who coined the term "fission." Their work revealed the release of immense energy during the process and opened the door to further research on nuclear energy and weapons. This pivotal breakthrough laid the scientific foundation for nuclear reactors and the atomic bomb, transforming both science and global geopolitics.

Because there are ~ 8 x 10⁶⁷ possible ways to arrange a 52-card deck, the number of different orders is unimaginably large. Even if every person on Earth shuffled a deck every second for billions of years, we wouldn’t come close to exhausting all possibilities. That’s why, when you thoroughly shuffle a deck, the exact order of cards in your hands has almost certainly never existed before in the entire history of the universe.

Happy Birthday to Georg Ohm (b. 1789). He was a German physicist best known for formulating Ohm’s Law, which describes the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance in an electrical circuit. His work laid the foundation for modern electrical engineering, and the unit of electrical resistance, the ohm (Ω), is named in his honor.

In order to be a perfect member of a flock of sheep, one has to be, foremost, a sheep. -- A. Einstein

Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions. -- John Searle

Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments? -- W. Heisenberg

In a famous 1959 lecture called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," Richard Feynman laid the conceptual groundwork for manipulating matter at the atomic level, effectively launching the field of nanotechnology.

During World War II, Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology with composer George Antheil to prevent the jamming of radio-guided torpedoes.

Here it is standing: atoms with consciousness; matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering: I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe. - Richard Feynman

Albert Einstein had a mysterious daughter who vanished from history. Before marrying his first wife, Mileva Marić, Einstein fathered a daughter named Lieserl in 1902. She is never mentioned in family letters after 1903, and her fate remains unknown. Some scholars believe she died from scarlet fever, while others think she may have been given up for adoption.