Where did the original scope of physics in our modern scientific age come from?   Galileo, the founder of modern physics, laid down the rules which governed the scientific method to be used.  These rules were based in the first place on Galileo’s conviction that he, as the observer of physical phenomena, had no connection whatever [...]

If we could get into one of those wonderful Wellsian time machines, all shining oak and glass, with polished brass handles and instruments, and ride it back to some time in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we would encounter a very different world from the one of today.  Especially for Americans, it is [...]

For Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest physicist of the twentieth century, everything in the physical world had to have an independent reality.  That is, it had to exist independently of any observation or measurement of it.  This applied to large objects as well as to particles, like the electron.  This concept of an independent realityof [...]

 Many people, who vaguely remember their school physics classes, would have some trouble differentiating between “mass” and “matter”.   Modern physics, however, is beginning to show that these two words really refer to two different physical manifestations.  All matter that we can perceive on earth, and all the billions of stars and galaxies that we can [...]

We are all pretty sure we know what force is.  Gravity, for instance, is a force and gravity needs no further explanation.   Newton was the first scientist to state the law of gravity in mathematical terms and for many years we thought that this was the final answer to what the force of gravity really [...]

Most people remember Galileo, if they remember their schooldays at all, as the champion of the Copernican model of the solar system, with the sun at the center.  Perhaps they might even remember the story that he dropped a heavy and a light weight together, from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa, to [...]