Section
Classics
The stories of the original researchers who built the foundations: Faraday, Maxwell, Gauss, Oersted, and onward. Scouted from Kathy Loves Physics, written from the historical primary sources.
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Faraday and the Invisible Field
A bookbinder with almost no mathematics found the link between magnetism and electricity, and changed the world by trusting what his experiments showed him.
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Chandrasekhar and the Mass Limit of Stars
A maximum mass exists for white dwarf stars, beyond which gravity always wins.
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How a Sheet of Gold Foil Revealed the Empty Heart of Matter
Ernest Rutherford's interpretation of a surprising experiment revealed that atoms are mostly empty space with a tiny, dense, positive core.
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Millikan Measures the Electron's Charge
Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment precisely measured the fundamental unit of electric charge, revealing that electricity comes in discrete packets.
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Max Planck and the Quantum of Energy
In 1900, Max Planck found that energy is emitted in discrete packets, an idea that launched quantum physics.
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Marie Curie and the Energy Inside the Atom
Marie Curie's pioneering work revealed that atoms themselves are sources of immense energy, fundamentally changing our understanding of matter.
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Heinrich Hertz Confirms Maxwell's Electromagnetic Waves
A German physicist built a simple device that sent sparks across a room with no wires, proving invisible electromagnetic waves were real.
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Maxwell and the Unified Nature of Light
James Clerk Maxwell unified the laws of electricity and magnetism, revealing that light is an electromagnetic wave.
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James Joule and the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat
James Joule precisely measured how mechanical motion could be converted into heat, proving that both are forms of the same fundamental quantity: energy.
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The Unbreakable Limit on All Engines
Sadi Carnot discovered a fundamental ceiling on how efficiently any engine can convert heat into useful work, a limit determined solely by temperature differences.
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The Sum of Simple Waves
Joseph Fourier showed that almost any complex signal, from heat in a bar to a digital photo, can be built from simple repeating waves.
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Ampère and the Force Between Electric Currents
André-Marie Ampère discovered that electric currents exert forces on each other, founding the field of electrodynamics with a precise mathematical law.
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Oersted's Compass and the Birth of Electromagnetism
A simple experiment in 1820 revealed a profound connection between electricity and magnetism, paving the way for modern technology.
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Thomas Young's Double-Slit Experiment
Thomas Young's simple experiment in the early 1800s showed that light behaves as a wave, not just a stream of particles.
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Newton's Universal Gravitation
Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation unified the physics of Earth and the cosmos, showing one rule for everything that falls or orbits.
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Ole Rømer and the First Measurement of the Speed of Light
In 1676, astronomer Ole Rømer used Jupiter's moon Io as a cosmic clock to show that light travels at a measurable, finite speed.