Drawing Physics: 2,600 Years of Discovery From Thales to Higgs

Drawings and short essays offer engaging and accessible explanations of key ideas in physics, from triangulation to relativity and beyond.

Humans have been trying to understand the physical universe since antiquity. Aristotle had one vision (the realm of the celestial spheres is perfect), and Einstein another (all motion is relativistic). More often than not, these different understandings begin with a simple drawing, a pre-mathematical picture of reality. Such drawings are a humble but effe...