How the picture changed, and the arguments that changed it.
9 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman · 1974
Scientific integrity means bending over backwards to show how you might be wrong — everything else is imitation.
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger)
Galileo Galilei · 1610
Reports what a telescope shows that the naked eye cannot — mountains on the Moon, four moons circling Jupiter, and countless unseen stars — evidence…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Novum Organum
Francis Bacon · 1620
Rejects Aristotelian deduction from first principles and proposes systematic induction from observation and controlled experiment as the reliable…
+7 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Richard Feynman
Scientific integrity means bending over backwards to show how you might be wrong — everything else is imitation.
Assumes no prior reading at all — it is a commencement address about honesty, not a physics paper
≈4,000 wordslink checked 17 Sept 2026John Tyndall
A colleague's tribute to Faraday's working method, arguing that his experimental persistence rather than mathematical training is what let him discover induction and diamagnetism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard Feynman (Christopher Sykes)
Refuses to explain magnetism in terms of anything more familiar, arguing that every 'why' answer bottoms out in a framework the questioner already accepts, and that physics can only say which framework.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Galileo Galilei
Reports what a telescope shows that the naked eye cannot — mountains on the Moon, four moons circling Jupiter, and countless unseen stars — evidence that undermined a perfect, Earth-centred cosmos before any theory had to.
about 2 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026James Franck et al.
Argues, from inside the Manhattan Project, that the bomb should first be demonstrated rather than used on a city, because using it without warning would forfeit any chance of international control of nuclear weapons after the war.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Werner Heisenberg
Argues that quantum mechanics forces physics to give up the idea of a reality existing independently of how it is observed, and defends the Copenhagen interpretation on those terms.
212 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Surveys the case that successful theories are probably at least approximately true of an observer-independent world, and the no-miracles and pessimistic-induction arguments for and against it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Francis Bacon
Rejects Aristotelian deduction from first principles and proposes systematic induction from observation and controlled experiment as the reliable route to natural knowledge.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lewis Campbell & William Garnett
The first full biography of Maxwell, drawing on his private letters and notebooks to trace how a Scottish landowner's son became the physicist who unified electricity, magnetism and light.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Emmy Noether
Proves that every continuous symmetry of a physical system's action corresponds to a conserved quantity, deriving conservation of energy and momentum from symmetries of space and time rather than assuming them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky & Nathan Rosen
Argues that quantum mechanics must be incomplete, because it lets two particles that once interacted retain a definite correlation that no local, pre-existing reality can explain.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Niels Bohr
Answers Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen by arguing that 'physical reality' cannot be defined independently of the experimental arrangement used to measure it, denying their premise rather than their logic.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.