Physics
J.L. Heilbron
Oxford Univ., $18.95
Modern physicists like to compare themselves to the ancient Greeks — searchers for knowledge about the ultimate foundations of reality. But science historian John Heilbron argues in his latest book, Physics, that modern physics is not much like the Greeks’ contemplation of nature.
“In antiquity, physics was philosophy, a liberal art, the pursuit of a free man wealthy enough to do what he wished,” Heilbron writes. In Greek philosophy, “physics … inquired into the principles regulating the physical world from the high heavens to the Earth’s center, and from the human soul to the life of the least of living creatures.” It was about defining man’s place in nature, for the purpose of identifying “the ethical consequences of … the way the world began and persists.”