Map of physics as of 1939

Post date: Aug 27, 2012 5:43:55 PM

Interesting article on the field of physics, with a beautiful map. 

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/579-a-1939-map-of-physics

Here's the concluding paragraph:

But maybe the map is flawed on a much deeper level: “[It] emphasizes the continuity in the development in physics, rather than the revolutionary character of the discoveries in the previous decades. In the 1920s and 30s, a group of physicists - among others Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac and Werner Heisenberg, discovered quantum mechanics, which was a theory which altered our understanding of how the universe works from a fundamentally deterministic one to one which is fundamentally probabilistic. We can speculate that either the person who made this map failed to appreciate this, or that he continued to hold out for a deterministic universe. It was not until the 1964 and the brilliant work of John Bell that it was shown that any such worldview is fundamentally incompatible with experimental facts.”

Sounds like we need a new map!