A. D'Abro

This sets out to give the reader a view of the route taken from the classical physics of the 19th century to the relativistic and quantum physics of the first part of the 20th.

It starts out by presenting the reader some philosophical context for the classical formulation and describing the positions taken by some of the researchers who shaped the development of both classical theory and its successors.

Mr. D'Abro then describes the mathematical tools in use for the classical formulation using enough of the explicit math to give the reader a reasonably good qualitative feel for what is being expressed formally. This overview occupies a substantial part of the work.

The second part describes the interactions of the main researchers' formulations of a revised view of the world and the experimental evidence tthat was paralleling the theoretical work. The suggestions for theoretical frameworks accounting for physical observations by individual researchers are described and the predictive power compared to other frameworks. This is where the "working on getting it right" part of the development of a useful theory is illustrated. D'Abro holds personalities in the background and lets the framework suggested by the individuals compete.

For a person (such as myself) that is interested in not only what theory was developed but the process by which it was arrived at, this is a quite interesting work. Reading it in parallel with Dewey's "Theory of Inquiry" adds to the interest - Dewey was setting down a formulation of research itself as a process and Mr. D'Abro provides a narrative to track Mr. Dewey - or to serve as a counterexample. As it happened, both the Dewey work and the D'Abro work were being written essentially simultaneously - a comparison of the two may well illustrate what was "in the air" of the time.

Mr. D'Abro's snapshot of quantum theory is dated - 70 years is a while - but I don't believe the way physics is being developed has changed: experiment and theoretical explication are still what "doing physics" is.… (more)