Natural Philosophy: Physics with a Personal Computer

Physics books tend to fall into two classes, those in the early years provide an overview but in an epistolatory form that is rarely even approximately chronological. I have seen some that start with relativity and stop when the mathematics become advanced for graduate material that is specialized to a subject. The problem with this is that physics is a subject that has been built over the centuries. It is necessary to know what came before to understand how it was built. It is not possible to present information in chronological order because different fields of physics were being built in parallel with cross fertilization. For example, the idea of electrical fields drew heavily on fluid flow that preceded it. This is an objective of this book - to try to capture the romance of the subjects. To present the range of personalities. Some were highly religious, some were not. At least one was a Nazi others contributed to the destruction of the Nazis. One committed suicide from peer pressure. Some were poor and disadvantaged, one was a prince. The original concept was to span the space from statics to particle physics including solid state. I ran out of time and ability. The modern personal computer gives a facsimile of a laboratory in your home. It allows the numerical calculation and plotting of results that were not previously practical. When I started this book, ~15 years ago, the Basic computer language was ubiquitous. The book includes 81 computer programs (provided as downloadable files) with bilinear explanations of each line of programming. To run these requires the Basic language running in DOS or adaptation to C or Visual Basic. Nevertheless these exercises are valuable for the use of numerical methods. I include mathematical tricks learned in graduate school and even one discovered for this book i.e. the use of the magnetic monopole for deriving Ampere’s first law. It covers subjects not usually found such as musical harmony, hydrodynamics, nuclear criticality, accelerators and beam transport. It more or less ends with relativistic quantum mechanics and what I call the quantum paradox that may show transmission at greater than the speed of light. The book is broken into 17 Adobe Acrobat pdf files. These are mostly chapters but two chapters had to be broken to get them to convert to pdf. The first file contains a detailed Table of Contents to facilitate locating the desired subject. The last of the last file contains a detailed index. To aid the reader in finding a file of particular interest, the Chapter Selection Table is provided with the beginning page number -1 (offset) of the file since the Adobe Reader numbers pages starting at 1. To select a page in the Acrobat editor it is necessary to subtract the offset from the page number given in the Table of Contents. With all the editing, it may be that the page numbering is slightly off from that indicated in the Table of Contents and other tables but they are approximately correct but may be off by a page or two. If you have corrections, comments or recommendations, my email is rrfullwood@yahoo.com. Happy physics! Ralph