Theoretical Physics

In addition, the development of precise means of measurements allowed experimental confirmation to be sought even for extremely subtle effects, which previously would have remained in the domain of theory alone. For example, the luminiferous ether, through which light was supposed to move, was widely assumed to exist by nineteenth century physicists. Once its effects became measurable, experimentalists sought to identify them--and failed to find them, triggering a crisis resolved only with the development of Special Relativity in 1905. Apart entirely from crises brought on in one way or another by experimental findings, however, physics was by the late years of the century embroiled in a purely theoretical crisis. This crisis may be briefly characterized as the crisis of mechanics. To understand how it developed in the last years of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to look back a few decades to the second quarter of the century, when what is now called classical mechanics appeared to be both triumphant and secure.

As a theory explaining the behavior of large discrete bodies, classical mechanics had its roots in Newton

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ve been likened to billiards shots. A subtle but key virtue of this picture of physics is its directness and simplicity; one can use a vivid visual picture to support and psychologically confirm mathematical results. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, however, cannot readily be simplified to the interaction of a few billiards balls; it applies to bodies interacting in numbers far too large to be visualized in this way. The second challenge posed by this law to classical mechanics was closely related: the Second Law is statistical and probabilistic in nature. It was not clear to nineteenth-century physicists why an entity such as Maxwell's demon could not, at least in principle, override this law (and, among other things, make perpetual-motion engines possible. Quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle are necessary in order to understand why Maxwell's demon cannot exist. Lacking this perspective, late nineteenth-century physicists found themselves perplexed by the Second Law. Some argued that the Second Law was not in fact a fundamental law of physics. Others went a different direction, and began to question the very basis of the mechanical view. Ernst Mach, for example, argued that atoms were only a conceptual
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)