Learning physics from experimental accounts

Question

My background is mathematics and am trying to learn some science in my spare time. In university we had mathematical physics courses such as EM and QM, but I didn't devote much energy towards them as I had no understanding of the experimental motivations for the given axioms, so it just felt like going through the motions of making calculations rather than gaining an intuitive understanding of the natural world.

So over the years I try looking at physics textbooks (eg. Griffiths for EM), but it's basically the same thing. A few pages of brief historical summary here and there followed by laws (Maxwell/Schrodinger/etc.) followed by calculations for the remainder. Obviously the mathematical consequences of the laws are important but it's the same situation as before.

Of course these textbooks primarily exist to serve the university system where there is a need to train students for industry or as research assistants in a short space of time, so I understand the choice of material. But I wonder if there's any better texts available for people who want to focus on gaining an understanding of the scientific method that lead to our current understanding. I know there are plenty of physics history books, but I imagine most require knowledge of the contents of the standard textbooks to get the most out of.

I don't need to see excruciating detail of theoretical developments from the time of ancient Greece (eg. History of Mechanics by Dugas), but are there any relatively comprehensive texts (including calculations) that present a 'spanning' set of experimental accounts that lead up to the theoretical model?

Answer 1

I'm just getting started so I was thinking of EM/QM/SR.

Dover Publications do some books on the history of physics including :

• Great Experiments in Physics
• Thirty Years that shook physics

This is going to sound a little odd if you are thinking in terms of books, however Wikipedia has many pages on the development of various subjects which are good starting points and a good place to start exploring the development of these subjects from.

So pages like :

• History of Relativity
• History of Quantum Mechanics
• History of Electromagnetic Theory

I suspect what you are really missing that a full time physics student would be generally required to do is experiments in the lab.

Normally a physics student at B.Sc. level would be required to complete lab work duplicating (or at least similar to) many key experiments in physics as far as that is practical. This does tend to connect you to the theory in a way that reading and abstract problem solving usually does not. So reading about this history and key experiments may not be quite enough.

Answer 2

Your question contained your own answer

there are plenty of physics history books

What you are looking for is the history of physics, and as you say there are many such books available.

The problem that you are running into is that history books are not about learning the physics, they are about the history. A historical investigation is a very inefficient way to learn about physics because history is filled with many false starts and wrong turns. Investigating these is essential for learning history but distracting for learning physics. You will not effectively learn physics in that way.

What you should probably a do, if you want to learn physics with the historical context is to get a pair of textbooks, one on physics and the other on history. As you study the physics textbook, whenever you find yourself curious about the history, then skip to the relevant part of the history book. But always follow the order of the physics presentations, not the historical order.

Answer 3

This is a long comment on the subject.

If you keep following the site you will see that the majority of questions and answers are on these lines, i.e. assuming that a particular theoretical model forms the data that can incidentally check the validity of the theory. Few people are grounded on the fact that physics theories are just using mathematics to model data and observations so that there could be predictions for new data and systems.

As I have been working with experimental particle physics since the 1967 my answers are grounded on the observational side, and I try to remind that all physics theories are based on extra axioms and postulates derived from data and observations; that the theories were built on them in order to fit the data and give predictions. See this answer of mine and this.

I have decided that people interested in physics are of two types:a) those mathematically inclined and believing that mathematics creates reality, whom I call platonists, and those who believe that observations and measurements are described by mathematics with extra axioms, which I call pragmatists/realists. :) See also this and this..