The History of Dynamics

Galileo’s Moons in the History of Science

A look at the role of the Galilean Moons in the history of science from the problem of longitude to the speed of light, from the birth of astronomical interferometry to the beginnings of exobiology

A Short History of Hyperspace

The history multiple dimensions.

Paul Lévy’s Black Swan: The Physics of Outliers

Black swans and data outliers in physics

Paul Dirac’s Delta Function

The history of the delta function from Cauchy to Dirac.

A Short History of Quantum Entanglement

The back-story of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

A Short History of Quantum Tunneling

The historical origins of quantum tunneling.

The Anharmonic Harmonic Oscillator

The historical origins of anharmonicity in oscillations.

Hermann Minkowski’s Spacetime: The Theory Einstein Overlooked

The historical origins of spacetime.

The Many Dimensions of Oskar Klein

Klein-Gordon equation and Superstring theory

The Bountiful Bernoullis of Basel

The amazing mathematical clan from Basel

Henri Poincaré and his Homoclinic Tangle

The beginning of chaos theory.

Brook Taylor’s Infinite Sequence

The history of the Taylor Expansion.

Timelines in the History and Physics of Dynamics

Timeline with links to primary texts

Johann Bernoulli’s Brachistrochrone

The brachistochrone problem

Huygens’ Tautochrone

Curves of equal time

George Green’s Theorem

George Green’s biography and the development of his theorem

George Stoke’s Law of Drag

The law of viscous drag

The Solvay Debates: Einstein vs Bohr

The Bohr-Einstein debates on quantum theory

Who Invented the Quantum: Einstein vs Planck

The origin of the quantum of light

Karl Schwarschild’s Radius

Karl Schwarzschild’s wide range of physics

Chandrasekhar’s Limit

Merging gravity and quantum mechanics

George Duffing’s Equation

Nonlinear spring equation and chaos

Galileo Unbound: The History of the Physics of Motion (Oxford, 2018)

The history of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems.