Physics, as it Was and Is

Physics by itself, is pristine.. (as the name of the group suggests). It is a vast subject, and must be foregone with passion. Physics is the way the universe runs, the laws are the same everywhere, and thus it comes to importance. Nature wants itself to be explored and physics is a means for us to do so. Physics is about finding relations between things, symmetries,and thus portrays immeausurable elegance. It is meant for those who are on a quest to understand the universe, search its inner depths ,(not possible actually, just kidding) for the sublime truth. Physics is the basis of all study, the fundamental science. The beauty of physics can be best conveyed in the form of mathematics. Mathematics, shall we say, can be imagined as an uncle to Physics. Physics obeys the rules of mathematics but yet takes advantage of it, to increase its own potential. Physics has evolved abundantly through the ages,  and continues to leave a trail of embezzlement behind it. In ancient Greece, people like Aristotle were thought of as "God-men" and were revered for their "magic".But, the usage of mathematics had been implied earlier by the likes of Pythagoras. He had his own school of thought and built and entire temple around him of young students who believed in what he had to say, today known as the pythagorans. Now, let us jump to the 17th century. There were two men, apparently enemies, fighting over some copyright issue. It seemed that somebody had come up with  a neat little piece of mathematics that could be used to explain the basic laws of nature. The men were Gottfried Leibniz and Sir Issac Newton. The copyright issue was a mathematical method called Calculus. It had proved to be an effective way to portray the laws of physics. Calculus stuck on and has been in usage, since. There have of course been many alterations and extentions but the basic principles remain. Then moving on to the 18th century, the epicentre of physics moves to France, where the likes of Joseph Lagrange and Pierre Laplace held base. Lagrange came up with an entirely new formaism for the contemporary mechanics, what we call today: Lagrangian mechanics. Laplace was an exponent of mathematics and theoretical astronomy. 

There was atheism before this period, but nothing like it now. Then, comes along William Rowan Hamilton who has some addition to make to Lagrange's mechanics and there we begot the Hamiltonian Operator. He was also the pioneer of abstgract non-commutative algebra with his introduction of quaternions. He was so excited by his discovery that he etched them on a bridge in Ireland that stands till today. Now, begins the era of experimental physics due to the likes of Ampere, Coloumg, Faraday, Dulong, Petit, etc. that eventually led to the theory of electromagnetism. James Clerk Maxwell can be regarded as one of the best physicists evr as he single-handedly came up with the equations of electromagnetism. Contemporarily, arose the laws of thermodynamics. From a series of thermodynamical experiments, a new statistics was formulated by one Ludwig Boltzmann, from the behaviour of classical particles like gas or dust. Along this time too, philosophy came to play a hand in physics as people sided with Kantian realism or Machian positivism. This marked the basis for the 2 different approaches to quantum mechanics as we shall see later. The 20th century was a piece of outstanding glamour for theoretical physics, starting with a young clerk from Germany explaining the cause for Brownian motion of particles and coming up with the theory of Special Relativity that shattered Newtonian dreams. This of course was helped by conributions of differential geometry by Hermann Minkowski, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincare and others. The highlight of this was the favourable Lorentz transformations and the familiar mass-energy equivalence E=mc^2. About 10 years later,  another theory was out from the young clerk, but this time, it was a generalized version of the previous theory, taking into account the phenomenon of gravity. It had some fancy mathematics that nobody could understand , but Arthur Eddington, a leading experimentalist at the time. Thus evolved the most beautiful masterpieces of all time: The general theory of relativity. Contemporarily, a series of experiments had been conducted to prove that things were not self-sustainable, but were made up of fundamental units called atoms. This led to the propositions of many atomic models but the closest one was by one young Danish professor at Copenhagen. Following this, the photoelectric effect was discovered by the experimentaltist Heinrich Hertz and the phenomenon could be explained by the above-mentioned clerk from Germany.
He said that light was made of "particles" called photons as opposed to the more benign theory that light was made up of waves. This wave-particle duality led to what is known as the Quantum theory of light. The credit for this must be given to Max Planck for attributing black-body radiation to light traveling in "packets" called quanta. Thus was evolved the other great theory of the 20th century: Quantum Mechanics. People from all over Europe came in to contribute to this rather abstract theory, but the primary contributors were: Born, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauli and Dirac.Heisenberg came up with a non-commutative algebra called matrix-mechanics, while Schrodinger introduced his own formulation of the wave equations. Lets not go into further details, but a new theory was born, a premature, undernourished one later well fed by the Dirac equation. Then came along a series of physicists: Wheeler, Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga who attempted to unify quantum mechanics with Maxwell's electrodynamics. This resulted in a series of Nobel Prizes being awarded to these amazing people. Now, sine quantum mechanics and electrodynamics was succesfully unified, matters shifted to the more important problem of the day: unifying QM with GR. As a remedy for this, String Theory was introduced by politician-turned-physicsist Ed Witten and his group. The new theory proposed that matter be made of strings that oscillate frequently. Many are inconsiderate toward this theory and prefer a morse subtle unification called Loop Quantum Gravity that offers to reconcile by using a timeless ADM formalism. Thus now, it is a battle of the 2 theories. Attempts have been made to concile them, but they have not been succesful. 

This is physics. Surely, its interesting now?

By Madhavan Venkatesh (Admin at PdeP)