The Oxford handbook of the history of physics (Q2846519)

This weighty volume, edited by the prominent historians of the history of physics, J. Z. Buchwald and R. Fox, collects scholarly contributions that are to be considered as examples of what the editors consider a modern trend of the historiography of science. This trend does not try to understand ``the truths of the physical world by a succession of great thinkers'', but ``has to require a sensitivity both to the content of a physicist's individual contribution and to the cultural, institutional, and economic context in which the contribution was made''.NEWLINENEWLINEThe ``Handbook'' contains studies on physics from the seventeenth century until the present day. It presents no continuous story of the history of physics, however, the contributions are grouped so that certain periods of the historical development can be recognized. The essays, independently written from each other, show the variety of approaches and methods developed and used on the way to an understanding of the ``physical world''. The editors state: ``It would be extravagant to attempt to draw general conclusions from a collection of essays conceived and executed in this way. But certain trends are clear enough.'' And in their introduction to the volume they are briefly summarized. There are name and subject indices which, to some extent, allow one to use the volume as reference work, too.NEWLINENEWLINEThe contributions are grouped into four parts: I. Physics and the new science (starting with the question: ``Was there a scientific revolution at any time between 1550 and 1800?'', continuing with the central contributions of Galilei, Descartes, and Newton, and ending with a paper on the mutual influences between mathematics and the new science that emerged); II. The long eighteenth century (as the editors say, the contributions show that this century was strongly influenced by Newton and ``was bearing fruit in mathematical and experimental approaches to scientific enquiry'', but was ``tempered in important ways by traditions whose Newtonian pedigree was either absent or coloured by other approaches''); III. Fashioning the discipline: From natural philosophy to physics (with contributions mainly on optics, electrodynamics, and thermodynamics and the related question as to what constituted physics and demarcarted it from chemistry and older systems of natural philosophy); IV. Modern physics (containing contributions on quantum and relativity theories including cosmological implications of them, on the conceptual changes, and -- so the editors -- on the ``ever closer integration of physics in the world of industry and the military'').