Gravity’s century turned philosophy into physics
Physics studies matter and energy—topics ancients debated without separating cause from superstition. The seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, especially gravity’s law, began specialised accumulation. Eighteenth-century math birthed classical mechanics and experimental thermodynamics; the nineteenth found electromagnetism and statistical mechanics.
Early twentieth-century shocks—quantum mechanics, relativity, atomic theory—split a classical inheritance from modern physics still taught as two rough chapters.
Each century added tools: calculus for orbits, heat engines for thermodynamics, field equations for light and charge, then spacetime and quanta.
The raw materials came from astronomy, optics and mechanics, tied together by geometry and pursued in antiquity by Babylonians and Hellenistic writers such as Archimedes and Ptolemy. Sumerians, Egyptians and the Indus Valley civilisation could already predict the motions of Sun, Moon and stars before 3000 BCE, and historian Asger Aaboe traces all Western exact science to late Babylonian astronomy. Thales of Miletus, dubbed the father of science, rejected supernatural explanations, and Leucippus and his student Democritus proposed that matter is made of indivisible atoms. Around 240 BCE Eratosthenes estimated Earth's circumference with a celebrated experiment, while Aristarchus of Samos, against Aristotle, put the Sun at the centre.
Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived from 287 to 212 BCE, founded hydrostatics and statics and worked out the mathematics of the lever, and Hipparchus mapped the heavens geometrically well enough to predict solar eclipses and estimate distances to the Sun and Moon. Much was lost: almost nothing survives of Hipparchus's fourteen or more books, and only about 30 of some 150 works attributed to Aristotle. In India, Kanada was first to develop atomism systematically, later refined by the Buddhist thinkers Dharmakirti and Dignāga. In China the Mozi, from the fourth century BC, describes light through a pinhole forming an inverted image, and the polymath Shen Kuo first described the magnetic-needle navigation compass and the idea of true north.
Source: History of physics
