In the 17th century,
natural philosophers began to mount a sustained attack on the
Scholastic philosophical program, and supposed that mathematical descriptive schemes adopted from such fields as mechanics and astronomy could actually yield universally valid characterizations of motion. The
Tuscan mathematician
Galileo
Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational
astronomy the "
father of modern physics", the "father of
science",
and "the Father of Modern Science".
Stephen Hawking says, "Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.
Galileo used his 1609 telescopic discovery of the
moons of Jupiter, as published in his
Sidereus Nuncius in 1610, to procure a position in the
Medici court with the dual title of mathematician and philosopher. As a court philosopher, he was expected to engage in debates with philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition, and received a large audience for his own publications, such as
The Assayer and
Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences, which was published abroad after he was placed under house arrest for his publication of
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632.
Galileo’s interest in the mechanical experimentation and mathematical description in motion established a new natural philosophical tradition focused on experimentation. This tradition, combining with the non-mathematical emphasis on the collection of "experimental histories" by philosophical reformists such as
William Gilbert and
Francis Bacon, drew a significant following in the years leading up to and following Galileo’s death, including
Evangelista Torricelli and the participants in the
Accademia del Cimento in Italy;
Marin Mersenne and
Blaise Pascal in France;
Christiaan Huygens in the Netherlands; and
Robert Hooke and
Robert Boyle in England.
New physical theories
Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
Radical new physical theories also began to emerge in this same period. In 1905
Albert Einstein, then a Bern patent clerk, argued that the speed of light was a constant in all
inertial reference frames and that electromagnetic laws should remain valid independent of reference frame—assertions which rendered the ether “superfluous” to physical theory, and that held that observations of time and length varied relative to how the observer was moving with respect to the object being measured (what came to be called the “
special theory of relativity”). It also followed that mass and energy were interchangeable quantities according to the equation
E=mc2. In another paper published the same year, Einstein asserted that electromagnetic radiation was transmitted in discrete quantities (“
quanta”), according to a constant that the theoretical physicist
Max Planck had posited in 1900 to arrive at an accurate theory for the distribution of
blackbody radiation—an assumption that explained the strange properties of the
photoelectric effect. The Danish physicist
Niels Bohr used this same constant in 1913 to explain the stability of
Rutherford’s atom as well as the frequencies of light emitted by hydrogen gas.
Einstein is considered as Father of Astrophysics.
Still contradictory remarks are there. Some consider Newton as Father of Physics and Lavoisier as Father of Chemistry.
-K A Solaman
