Print this page The History of Physics: A Human Story

How did we come to understand the universe? This course explores the history of physics through the people and ideas that transformed our view of the natural world. Beginning with the ancient Greeks and continuing through Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein and the pioneers of quantum physics, we trace the development of our understanding of motion, gravity, energy, light, atoms, space and time. Rather than focusing on mathematics, this course emphasises the human story of discovery: the debates, mistakes, rivalries and insights that shaped scientific progress. Along the way, you will see how major breakthroughs emerged and how they continue to influence modern technology and our understanding of reality.

DELIVERY MODE

Face to face

COURSE RESOURCES

• Arthur Koestler — The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959).  
• Bill Bryson — A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003).
• J. L. Heilbron — The History of Physics: A Very Short Introduction (2018).
• Carroll, Sean — The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion. Penguin (2022)

COURSE OUTLINE

• The Structure of the Universe: From the ancients to our modern picture of space and gravity: the Greeks, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Newton and Einstein.
• Thermodynamics and the Arrow of Time: Heat, energy, entropy and why time appears to have a direction: Carnot, Joule, Clausius and Boltzmann.
• Electricity and Magnetism: From mysterious electrical and magnetic phenomena to Maxwell’s great unification: Gilbert, Franklin, Coulomb, Volta, Faraday, Maxwell and Hertz.
• Light and Special Relativity: What is light, how fast does it travel, and how did it change our understanding of space and time? Newton, Huygens, Young, Maxwell and Einstein.
• Quantum Physics: From the ancient idea of atoms to the strange quantum world: Democritus, Dalton, Planck, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Pauli and others.
• Nuclear Physics: The discovery of radioactivity and the atomic nucleus, nuclear fission and fusion, and the atomic bomb: Becquerel, Marie Curie, Rutherford, Szilard, Fermi and Oppenheimer.
• Are We There Yet?  The great questions that remain; matter and antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity, and the search for a deeper theory of nature.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Describe the major milestones in the development of physics, from the ancient world to modern physics. 
• Explain, in non-mathematical terms, some of the fundamental ideas of physics, including gravity, heat, electricity and magnetism, light, atoms, relativity and quantum physics. 
• Identify some of the key scientists whose discoveries transformed our understanding of nature and the Universe. 
• Understand how scientific knowledge develops through observation, experiment, debate, mistakes and the revision of earlier ideas. 
• Appreciate the historical and human context in which major scientific discoveries were made. 
• Recognize how discoveries in fundamental physics have shaped modern technology and our understanding of the world.