As someone who struggled with physics in high school, I have found a new appreciation for the subject by looking at its history, and the incredible humans that revolutionised our understanding of the world.
Inspired by Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models and David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality:
Eventually our theories will become so general, deep and integrated with one another that they will effectively become a single theory of a unified fabric of reality.”
This list surprisingly includes all 4 strands proposed by David Deutsch: quantum physics, evolution, computation and epistemology.
- first, we have Copernicus (1473 - 1543) who proposed Heliocentrism, a model of the Solar system where planets orbit around the sun and not the other way around. This is in contrast to geocentrism, the idea that Earth was at the centre.
- then Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) came and used the telescope to gather observational evidence of the Copernican heliocentric model. He also observed Jupiter’s moons, the phases of Venus and mountains on the Moon.
- Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630) derived the 3 laws of planetary motion and demonstrated that planets move in elliptical orbits.
- then came Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727): he formulated the 3 laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation and unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics: same universal laws explain what makes an apple fall and what makes the Moon orbit the Earth.
- Moving to biology, Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) proposed evolution by natural selection in the famous On the Origin of Species.
- At the same time, James Maxwell (1831 - 1879) unified electricity, magnetism and light into a single theory of electromagnetism.
Then came the 20th century: - Max Planck (1858 - 1947) introduced the quantum hypothesis and marked the birth of quantum theory.
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) gave us special relativity, general relativity and explained gravity as the curvature of spacetime.
- Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962) proposed the quantum model of the atom.
- Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976) developed matrix mechanics and formulated the uncertainty principle.
- Erwin Schrodinger (1887 - 1961) developed wave mechanics and introduced the Schrodinger equation.
And for computer geeks: - Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) founded theoretical computer science and defined the concept of universal computation.
- John von Neumann (1903 - 1957) gave us the design of computer architecture, principles of game theory and the mathematical framework for quantum mechanics.
- Claude Shannon (1916 - 2001) founded information theory and laid the foundations of Information Age.