Oxford Physics And The Modern World: How A Great Research School Emerged

This book, Oxford Physics and the Modern World, aims to provide the first general history of physics at Oxford that covers the whole of its development from the Middle Ages to the present. Oxford was a pioneer of quantitative understanding of the physical world in the Middle Ages, of experimental physics in the mid-seventeenth century, and of positional astronomy in the eighteenth. The book focuses in particular, however, on the remarkable growth of Oxford physics over the twentieth century from what had in the Victorian period become an academic backwater into one of the leading university physics departments in Britain. In low temperature physics, condensed matter physics, atomic and laser physics, nuclear and particle physics, atmospheric physics and climate science, astronomy and astrophysics, and in the instrumentation and technological spin-offs arising from them, Oxford has taken a progressively wider and deeper role in shaping both physical understanding and its application to the practical purposes of life.