University of Maryland - Spring 2005
HIST 402
Study Questions for Topic 3

See instructions for Topic 1 Study Questions.

1. What was Nature Philosophy? How did it affect the progress of physics?
2. What was Young's double-slit experiment? What was the significance of its result?
3. What was the nature of the interaction between electricity and magnetism as discovered by Oersted? How did it violate a presupposition about forces embedded in Newtonian physics?
4. Why do we call the unit of electrical current the "amp"? What was the original experiment, now used to define its value?
5. Discuss the validity of "Planck's Principle" and "Popper's Principle" in the history of theories of the nature of light before 1900.
6. How did Newton retard progress in optics around 1801?
7. What was the experiment on the speed of light that might have caused physicists to choose the wave theory of light over the particle theory? Why didn't it?
8. Identify: Benjamin Franklin.
9. How did the Second Law of Thermodynamics undermine the Clockwork Universe philosophy?
10. Discuss the first quantitative determination of the speed of light. How did Roemer estimate the time taken for light to travel a specified [but not yet measured] distance? What additional information was needed to calculate the speed of light, c? Where did that information come from, and who was the first to use it to find an approximate value for c?
11. Who first showed that the speed of light is finite, not infinite? How did he do it? When?
12. What was Newton's theory of color? How does its history violate an assertion of Karl Popper?
13. What is electromagnetic induction? Who discovered it, and what was the technological consequence of the discovery?
14. What is light, according to Maxwell? What is the best evidence for his conclusion?
15. (No question)
16. Identify: Heinrich Hertz. What was his major discovery in physics? What theory did he support that was later found to be incorrect?
17. What "crucial experiment" was needed to decide whether the Descartes-Newton or the Huygens theory of light was correct. What prediction did each theory make about the result of this experiment?
18. How did Newton show that white light is composed of colors (i.e. that the colors are not produced by the action of a prism)?

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