Physics

A hundred true stories trace the history of physics - the field of enquiry that underpins every other science. Galileo noticed the principles of pendulums while watching a lamp swing in church. Isaac Newton realised that the force holding the Moon in orbit was the same one pulling apples to the ground. Julius von Mayer stumbled on how energy behaves while stitching up a wounded sailor, and Richard Feynman worked out how subatomic particles move by watching a spinning lunch plate. Each entry - called a Ponderable - follows a puzzle that became a discovery, showing how physicists have gradually changed the way we understand the universe.