How does the physics we know today - a highly professionalised enterprise, inextricably linked to government and industry - link back to its origins as a liberal art in Ancient Greece? John Heilbron's crisp and witty book tells the 2500-year story and highlights the implications for humankind's self-understanding.

• Introduction


• 1: Invention and Diversity in Greece and Rome


• 2: Selection and Development in Islam


• 3: Domestication in the West


• 4: A Second Creation


• 5: Classical Physics and its Cure


• 6: From Old World to New


• 7: By Way of Conclusion


• References and Further Reading


• Index

John Heilbron was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, in physics and history; and began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. He returned to Berkeley in 1967, where he rose to become professor of history and vice chancellor. After retiring in 1994 Heilbron taught sporadically at Caltech and Yale, and lived mostly around Oxford, where he has been Senior research Fellow at Worcester College and the Oxford Museum for History of Science. He has written several books for Oxford University Press, including Galileo (2010) and Love, literature, and the quantum atom. Niels Bohr's 1913 trilogy revisited (2013), with Finn Aaserud.