Can Physics Attain Its Goals: Extending D’Agostino’s Analysis to the 21st Century and Beyond
摘要
In his 2000 seminal book, Salvo D’Agostino provided the detailed overview of the history of ideasIdeas underlying nineteenth and twentieth century physicsPhysics. Now that we are two decades into the twenty-first century21st Century, a natural question is: How can we extend his analysisAnalysis to the twenty-first century physics—and, if possible, beyondBeyond, to try to predict how physics will change? To perform this analysis, we go beyond an analysisAnalysis of what happened and focus more on why paradigmParadigm changes happened in the history of physicsHistory of Physics. To better understand these paradigm changes, we analyze not only what were the main ideasIdeas and results of physics, but also on how (and why) the objectives of physics changed with timeTime.