White Harvey E., White Donald H., Gould Mauri. Physics an experimental science

Princeton, New Jersey, London, Toronto, Melbourne: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1968. — 779 p.Physics is a natural science concerned primarily with the principles and laws governing the behavior of the inanimate world around us. As a science, it is a continuous time-ordered process by which civilized man, through experimentation, reasoning, and mathematical analysis, learns more and more of the seemingly endless detail of natural phenomena. In attempting to establish the origin of science, many historians go back in time, more than two thousand years, to the era of the great philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Archimedes, Ptolemy, and their contemporaries. Others prefer to begin with Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, William Harvey, and men of science who lived less than a thousand years ago. All of these men are considered great, because in their respective lives they exhibited a keen sense of observation, and they applied their powers of reasoning to the explanation of many natural phenomena. Many of the concepts they formulated showed remarkable insight. However, progress was relatively slow, because they overlooked one all-important factor-they failed to recognize the importance of experimentation. Herein lies the secret to the rapid advancement of science in this, the twentieth, century. The two most powerful tools of modern science are the empirical method, often called experimental physics and the method of mathematical analysis, often called theoretical physics. Because these two methods supplement each other, we can well expect both to find their way into this book. In the following pages, then, we will see not only the development of the experimental method through the explanation of many experiments, but also the application of the simplest mathematical relations to the recorded measurements made during the experiments.