Physics Museum

The Physics Museum is my small collection of scientific instruments, most of which would typically have been used in schools in the early 20th C. This was an era of "brass and glass'' and mahogany with well-engineered dovetail joints. The period saw the transition from 'classical' to 'modern' physics, e.g. from Newtonian dynamics to Einsteinian Relativity; from Rutherford's solar-system atomic model to Schroedinger's quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Yet previously, physicists had been certain that there was little new left to discover, all that remained was to refine their measurements to more decimal places. The period also saw Hilbert's program to secure the logical foundations of mathematics shattered by Goedel's incompleteness theorems ('you can't prove everything'). The comfortable clockwork universe proved to be unsustainable and untenable; reality's bedrock was a chaotic quantum foam from which emerged a Universe more wonderful and amazing than we could have imagined, and modern scientific instruments such as Hubble and CERN probe further and deeper, revealing beautiful images of a fantastic cosmos.