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The expansion of the universe according to the Big Bang theory in physics

Physics is the scientific study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.

Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines. Over much of the past two millennia, physics, chemistry, biology, and certain branches of mathematics were a part of natural philosophy, but during the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, these natural sciences branched into separate research endeavors. Physics intersects with many interdisciplinary areas of research, such as biophysics and quantum chemistry, and the boundaries of physics are not rigidly defined. New ideas in physics often explain the fundamental mechanisms studied by other sciences and suggest new avenues of research in these and other academic disciplines such as mathematics and philosophy.

Advances in physics often enable new technologies. For example, advances in the understanding of electromagnetism, solid-state physics, and nuclear physics led directly to the development of technologies that have transformed modern society, such as television, computers, domestic appliances, and nuclear weapons; advances in thermodynamics led to the development of industrialization; and advances in mechanics inspired the development of calculus. (Full article...)

Featured article -

This is a Featured article, which represents some of the best content on English Wikipedia.

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False-color image of aurorae on the north pole of Jupiter, as viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope

The magnetosphere of Jupiter is the cavity created in the solar wind by Jupiter's magnetic field. Extending up to seven million kilometers in the Sun's direction and almost to the orbit of Saturn in the opposite direction, Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest and most powerful of any planetary magnetosphere in the Solar System, and by volume the largest known continuous structure in the Solar System after the heliosphere. Wider and flatter than the Earth's magnetosphere, Jupiter's is stronger by an order of magnitude, while its magnetic moment is roughly 18,000 times larger. The existence of Jupiter's magnetic field was first inferred from observations of radio emissions at the end of the 1950s and was directly observed by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in 1973.

Jupiter's internal magnetic field is generated by electrical currents in the planet's outer core, which is theorized to be composed of liquid metallic hydrogen. Volcanic eruptions on Jupiter's moon Io eject large amounts of sulfur dioxide gas into space, forming a large torus around the planet. Jupiter's magnetic field forces the torus to rotate with the same angular velocity and direction as the planet. The torus in turn loads the magnetic field with plasma, in the process stretching it into a pancake-like structure called a magnetodisk. In effect, Jupiter's magnetosphere is internally driven, shaped primarily by Io's plasma and its own rotation, rather than by the solar wind as at Earth's magnetosphere. Strong currents in the magnetosphere generate permanent aurorae around the planet's poles and intense variable radio emissions, which means that Jupiter can be thought of as a very weak radio pulsar. Jupiter's aurorae have been observed in almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared, visible, ultraviolet and soft X-rays. (Full article...)

Did you know -

Jupiter

• ...that if you ever saw Jupiter's magnetic field from Earth, it would appear five times larger than the full moon?

• ...that the impact of a raindrop would be fatal if not for the property of fluid flow known as terminal velocity?

• ...that transits of Venus occur in a 243-year cycle?

Selected image -

Spectra of the fixed stars and nebulae compared with the sun-spectrum and other spectra

Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the heavenly bodies, rather than their positions or motions in space–what they are, rather than where they are", which is studied in celestial mechanics. (Full article...)

Related portals

Good articles -

These are Good articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.

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  c. 1680 Portrait of a Mathematician by Mary Beale, conjectured to be of Hooke but also conjectured to be of Isaac Barrow

  
  Robert Hooke FRS (/hʊk/; 18 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English polymath who was active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. He is credited as one of the first scientists to investigate living things at microscopic scale in 1665, using a compound microscope that he designed. Hooke was an impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood who went on to become one of the most important scientists of his time. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Hooke (as a surveyor and architect) attained wealth and esteem by performing more than half of the property line surveys and assisting with the city's rapid reconstruction. Often vilified by writers in the centuries after his death, his reputation was restored at the end of the twentieth century and he has been called "England's Leonardo [da Vinci]".
  
  Hooke was a Fellow of the Royal Society and from 1662, he was its first Curator of Experiments. From 1665 to 1703, he was also Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. Hooke began his scientific career as an assistant to the physical scientist Robert Boyle. Hooke built the vacuum pumps that were used in Boyle's experiments on gas law and also conducted experiments. In 1664, Hooke identified the rotations of Mars and Jupiter. Hooke's 1665 book Micrographia, in which he coined the term cell, encouraged microscopic investigations. Investigating optics – specifically light refraction – Hooke inferred a wave theory of light. His is the first-recorded hypothesis of the cause of the expansion of matter by heat, of air's composition by small particles in constant motion that thus generate its pressure, and of heat as energy. (Full article...)
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  Wigner in 1963

  
  Eugene Paul Wigner (Hungarian: Wigner Jenő Pál, pronounced [ˈviɡnɛr ˈjɛnøː ˈpaːl]; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
  
  A graduate of the Technical Hochschule Berlin (now Technische Universität Berlin), Wigner worked as an assistant to Karl Weissenberg and Richard Becker at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen. Wigner and Hermann Weyl were responsible for introducing group theory into physics, particularly the theory of symmetry in physics. Along the way he performed ground-breaking work in pure mathematics, in which he authored a number of mathematical theorems. In particular, Wigner's theorem is a cornerstone in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. He is also known for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus. In 1930, Princeton University recruited Wigner, along with John von Neumann, and he moved to the United States, where he obtained citizenship in 1937. (Full article...)
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  Sir Ernest William Titterton CMG FRS FAA (4 March 1916 – 8 February 1990) was a British nuclear physicist.
  
  A graduate of the University of Birmingham, Titterton worked in a research position under Mark Oliphant, who recruited him to work on radar for the British Admiralty during the first part of the Second World War. In 1943, he joined the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where he helped develop the first atomic bombs. He eventually became one of the laboratory's group leaders. He participated in the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll in 1946, where he performed the countdown for both tests. With the passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, known as the McMahon Act, all British government employees had to leave. He was the last member of the British Mission to do so, in April 1947. (Full article...)
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  Bust of Pythagoras of Samos in the
  Capitoline Museums, Rome

  
  Pythagoras of Samos (Ancient Greek: Πυθαγόρας; c. 570 – c. 495 BC) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher, polymath, and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His political and religious teachings were well known in Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, the West in general. Knowledge of his life is clouded by legend; modern scholars disagree regarding Pythagoras's education and influences, but they do agree that, around 530 BC, he travelled to Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a school in which initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic lifestyle.
  
  In antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with many mathematical and scientific discoveries, including the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the Theory of Proportions, the sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus. It was said that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher ("lover of wisdom") and that he was the first to divide the globe into five climatic zones. Classical historians debate whether Pythagoras made these discoveries, and many of the accomplishments credited to him likely originated earlier or were made by his colleagues or successors. Some accounts mention that the philosophy associated with Pythagoras was related to mathematics and that numbers were important, but it is debated to what extent, if at all, he actually contributed to mathematics or natural philosophy. (Full article...)
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  A waterspout near Florida in 1969. Two flares with smoke trails (near base of photograph) have been discharged to indicate wind direction and general speed.

  
  A waterspout is a rotating column of air that occurs over a body of water, usually appearing as a funnel-shaped cloud in contact with the water and a cumuliform cloud. There are two types of waterspout, each formed by distinct mechanisms. The most common type is a weak vortex known as a "fair weather" or "non-tornadic" waterspout. The other less common type is simply a classic tornado occurring over water rather than land, known as a "tornadic", "supercellular", or "mesocyclonic" waterspout, and accurately a "tornado over water". A fair weather waterspout has a five-part life cycle: formation of a dark spot on the water surface; spiral pattern on the water surface; formation of a spray ring; development of a visible condensation funnel; and ultimately, decay. Most waterspouts do not suck up water.
  
  While waterspouts form mostly in tropical and subtropical areas, they are also reported in Europe, Western Asia (the Middle East), Australia, New Zealand, the Great Lakes, Antarctica, and on rare occasions, the Great Salt Lake. Some are also found on the East Coast of the United States, and the coast of California. Although rare, waterspouts have been observed in connection with lake-effect snow precipitation bands. (Full article...)
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  Decahedral PtFe1.2 nanoparticle.

  
  A fiveling, also known as a decahedral nanoparticle, a multiply-twinned particle (MTP), a pentagonal nanoparticle, a pentatwin, or a five-fold twin is a type of twinned crystal that can exist at sizes ranging from nanometers to millimetres. It contains five different single crystals arranged around a common axis. In most cases each unit has a face centered cubic (fcc) arrangement of the atoms, although they are also known for other types of crystal structure.
  
  They nucleate at quite small sizes in the nanometer range, but can be grown much larger. They have been found in mineral crystals excavated from mines such as pentagonite or native gold from Ukraine, in rods of metals grown via electrochemical processes and in nanoparticles produced by the condensation of metals either onto substrates or in inert gases. They have been investigated for their potential uses in areas such as improving the efficiency of solar cell or heterogeneous catalysis for more efficient production of chemicals. Information about them is distributed across a diverse range of scientific disciplines, mainly chemistry, materials science, mineralogy, nanomaterials and physics. Because many different names have been used, sometimes the information in the different disciplines or within any one discipline is fragmented and overlapping. (Full article...)
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  Charles Allen Thomas (February 15, 1900 – March 29, 1982) was a noted American chemist and businessman, and an important figure in the Manhattan Project. He held over 100 patents.
  
  A graduate of Transylvania College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Thomas worked as a research chemist at General Motors as part of a team researching antiknock agents. This led to the development of tetraethyllead, which was widely used in motor fuels for many decades until its toxicity led to its prohibition. In 1926, he and Carroll A. "Ted" Hochwalt co-founded Thomas & Hochwalt Laboratories in Dayton, Ohio, with Thomas as president of the company. It was acquired by Monsanto in 1936, and Thomas would spend the rest of his career with Monsanto, rising to become its president in 1950, and chairman of the board from 1960 to 1965. He researched the chemistry of hydrocarbons and polymers, and developed the proton theory of aluminium chloride, which helped explain a variety of chemical reactions, publishing a book on the subject in 1941. (Full article...)
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  Boyce McDaniel at Los Alamos

  
  Boyce Dawkins McDaniel (June 11, 1917 – May 8, 2002) was an American nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later directed the Cornell University Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS). McDaniel was skilled in constructing "atom smashing" devices to study the fundamental structure of matter and helped to build the most powerful particle accelerators of his time. Together with his graduate student, he invented the pair spectrometer.
  
  During World War II, McDaniel used his electronics expertise to help develop cyclotrons used to separate Uranium isotopes. McDaniel is also noted as having performed the final check on the first atomic bomb prior to its detonation in the Trinity test, during a lightning storm. (Full article...)
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  Lawrence's 60-inch (152 cm) cyclotron, c. 1939, showing the beam of accelerated ions (likely protons or deuterons) exiting the machine and ionizing the surrounding air causing a blue glow

  
  
  A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. A cyclotron accelerates charged particles outwards from the center of a flat cylindrical vacuum chamber along a spiral path. The particles are held to a spiral trajectory by a static magnetic field and accelerated by a rapidly varying electric field. Lawrence was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for this invention.
  
  The cyclotron was the first "cyclical" accelerator. The primary accelerators before the development of the cyclotron were electrostatic accelerators, such as the Cockcroft–Walton generator and the Van de Graaff generator. In these accelerators, particles would cross an accelerating electric field only once. Thus, the energy gained by the particles was limited by the maximum electrical potential that could be achieved across the accelerating region. This potential was in turn limited by electrostatic breakdown to a few million volts. In a cyclotron, by contrast, the particles encounter the accelerating region many times by following a spiral path, so the output energy can be many times the energy gained in a single accelerating step. (Full article...)
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  Wu and wife Li Minhua, c. 1943

  
  Wu Zhonghua (Chinese: 吴仲华; 27 July 1917 – 19 September 1992), also known as Chung-Hua Wu, was a Chinese physicist. He was a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) researcher, Tsinghua University professor, and Founding Director of the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He pioneered the general theory of three-dimensional flow for turbomachinery, which has been widely used in aircraft engine designs. Wu and his wife Li Minhua were both academicians of the CAS.
  
  Born in Shanghai, Wu's college education at Tsinghua University was interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War. He graduated from the temporary National Southwestern Associated University and was awarded a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. After earning his Ph.D., he joined the NACA, the predecessor of NASA, where he developed the theory of three-dimensional flow. (Full article...)
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  Robert F. Christy c. 1959

  
  Robert Frederick Christy (May 14, 1916 – October 3, 2012) was a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and later astrophysicist who was one of the last surviving people to have worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He briefly served as acting president of California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
  
  A graduate of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the 1930s where he studied physics, he followed George Volkoff, who was a year ahead of him, to the University of California, Berkeley, where he was accepted as a graduate student by Robert Oppenheimer, the leading theoretical physicist in the United States at that time. Christy received his doctorate in 1941 and joined the physics department of Illinois Institute of Technology. (Full article...)
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  Philip Morrison (November 7, 1915 – April 22, 2005) was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics, high energy astrophysics, and SETI.
  
  A graduate of Carnegie Tech, Morrison became interested in physics, which he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He also joined the Communist Party. During World War II he joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Eugene Wigner on the design of nuclear reactors. (Full article...)
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  Quantum Reality is a 1985 popular science book by physicist Nick Herbert, a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group which was formed to explore the philosophical implications of quantum theory. The book attempts to address the ontology of quantum objects, their attributes, and their interactions, without reliance on advanced mathematical concepts. Herbert discusses the most common interpretations of quantum mechanics and their consequences in turn, highlighting the conceptual advantages and drawbacks of each. (Full article...)
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  Peierls in 1966

  
  Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, CBE FRS (/ˈpaɪ.ərlz/; German: [ˈpaɪɐls]; 5 June 1907 – 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".
  
  Peierls studied physics at the University of Berlin, at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld, the University of Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg, and ETH Zurich under Wolfgang Pauli. After receiving his DPhil from Leipzig in 1929, he became an assistant to Pauli in Zurich. In 1932, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, which he used to study in Rome under Enrico Fermi, and then at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge under Ralph H. Fowler. Because of his Jewish background, he elected to not return home after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, but to remain in Britain, where he worked with Hans Bethe at the Victoria University of Manchester, then at the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge. In 1937, Mark Oliphant, the newly appointed Australian professor of physics at the University of Birmingham recruited him for a new chair there in applied mathematics. (Full article...)
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  Foster's reactance theorem is an important theorem in the fields of electrical network analysis and synthesis. The theorem states that the reactance of a passive, lossless two-terminal (one-port) network always strictly monotonically increases with frequency. It is easily seen that the reactances of inductors and capacitors individually increase with frequency and from that basis a proof for passive lossless networks generally can be constructed. The proof of the theorem was presented by Ronald Martin Foster in 1924, although the principle had been published earlier by Foster's colleagues at American Telephone & Telegraph.
  
  The theorem can be extended to admittances and the encompassing concept of immittances. A consequence of Foster's theorem is that zeros and poles of the reactance must alternate with frequency. Foster used this property to develop two canonical forms for realising these networks. Foster's work was an important starting point for the development of network synthesis. (Full article...)

November anniversaries

• 1952 - detonation of the first Hydrogen bomb, code named "Ivy Mike".
• 1947 - invention of the first transistor, between November 17 to December 23. APS.
• 1930 - Patent granted for Einstein-Szilard refrigerator designed by Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd. APS.
• 1919 - Elmer Imes's published work presented the first accurate measurement of the distance between atoms in molecules with high resolution infrared spectroscopy. APS.
• 1915 – Einstein's presentation to the Prussian Academy of Science specifies how the geometry of space and time is influenced by whatever matter is present. (see: General relativity and APS)
• 1895 - Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovers X-rays.
• 1887 - Michelson–Morley experiment provided strong evidence against the luminiferous ether. APS.
• 1872 - death of Mary Somerville who gained an international reputation as a scientist in the intervals of raising a family of six children. APS
• 1783 - John Michell predicted the existence of black holes, and the possibility of a luminous twin to aid in detection. APS
• 1676 – using his first quantitative measurement of the speed of light, Ole Rømer accurately predicts the delay of eclipse of Io

Births

• 1934 – Carl Sagan
• 1932 - Melvin Schwartz
• 1929 - Richard E. Taylor
• 1925 - Simon van der Meer
• 1902 - Eugene Wigner
• 1837 - Johannes Diderik van der Waals
• 1867 - Marie Curie (Nov. 7)
• 1828 - Balfour Stewart
• 1878 - Lise Meitner (Nov. 7)
• 1887 - Henry Moseley
• 1888 - C V Raman (Nov. 7)
• 1892 - Dmitri Skobeltsyn (Nov. 24)

General images

The following are images from various physics-related articles on Wikipedia.

• 
  Christiaan Huygens
  (1629–1695) (from History of physics)
• 
  One possible signature of a Higgs boson from a simulated proton–proton collision. It decays almost immediately into two jets of hadrons and two electrons, visible as lines. (from History of physics)
• 
  Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1040). (from History of physics)
• 
  Classical physics (Rayleigh–Jeans law, black line) failed to explain black-body radiation – the so-called ultraviolet catastrophe. The quantum description (Planck's law, colored lines) is said to be modern physics. (from Modern physics)
• 
  A page from al-Khwārizmī's Algebra. (from History of physics)
• 
  The quantum Hall effect: Components of the Hall resistivity as a function of the external magnetic field (from Condensed matter physics)
• 
  A replica of the first point-contact transistor in Bell labs (from Condensed matter physics)
• 
  Computer simulation of nanogears made of fullerene molecules. It is hoped that advances in nanoscience will lead to machines working on the molecular scale. (from Condensed matter physics)
• 
  Max Planck
  (1858–1947) (from History of physics)
• 
  Chien-Shiung Wu worked on parity violation in 1956 and announced her results in January 1957. (from History of physics)
• 
  Image of X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal (from Condensed matter physics)
• 
  James Clerk Maxwell
  (1831–1879) (from History of physics)
• 
  Alessandro Volta
  (1745–1827) (from History of physics)
• 
  J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) discovered the electron and isotopy and also invented the mass spectrometer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906. (from History of physics)
• 
  A Newton's cradle, named after physicist Isaac Newton (from History of physics)
• 
  Werner Heisenberg
  (1901–1976) (from History of physics)
• 
  The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, developer of ideas regarding fluid mechanics and buoyancy. (from History of physics)
• 
  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes van der Waals with the helium liquefactor at Leiden in 1908 (from Condensed matter physics)
• 
  William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
  (1824–1907) (from History of physics)
• 
  Gottfried Leibniz
  (1646–1716) (from History of physics)
• 
  Einstein proposed that gravitation is a result of masses (or their equivalent energies) curving ("bending") the spacetime in which they exist, altering the paths they follow within it. (from History of physics)
• 
  Michael Faraday
  (1791–1867) (from History of physics)
• 
  The Standard Model (from History of physics)
• 
  Galileo Galilei, early proponent of the modern scientific worldview and method
  (1564–1642) (from History of physics)
• 
  A composite montage comparing Jupiter (lefthand side) and its four Galilean moons (top to bottom: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto) (from History of physics)
• 
  Sir Isaac Newton
  (1642–1727) (from History of physics)
• 
  René Descartes
  (1596–1650) (from History of physics)
• 
  Ludwig Boltzmann
  (1844–1906) (from History of physics)
• 
  Richard Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge (from History of physics)
• 
  The first Bose–Einstein condensate observed in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms. The blue and white areas represent higher density. (from Condensed matter physics)
• 
  A Feynman diagram representing (left to right) the production of a photon (blue sine wave) from the annihilation of an electron and its complementary antiparticle, the positron. The photon becomes a quark–antiquark pair and a gluon (green spiral) is released. (from History of physics)
• 
  The Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The inscriptions on the edicts of Ashoka (3rd century BCE) display this number system being used by the Imperial Mauryas. (from History of physics)
• 
  Star maps by the 11th-century Chinese polymath Su Song are the oldest known woodblock-printed star maps to have survived to the present day. This example, dated 1092, employs the cylindrical equirectangular projection. (from History of physics)
• 
  Classical physics is usually concerned with everyday conditions: speeds are much lower than the speed of light, sizes are much greater than that of atoms, yet very small in astronomical terms. Modern physics, however, is concerned with high velocities, small distances, and very large energies. (from Modern physics)
• 
  Daniel Bernoulli
  (1700–1782) (from History of physics)
• 
  Aristotle
  (384–322 BCE) (from History of physics)
• 
  Marie Skłodowska-Curie
  (1867–1934) She was awarded two Nobel prizes, Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) (from History of physics)
• 
  Albert Einstein (1879–1955), photographed here in around 1905 (from History of physics)
• 
  The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is remembered for his development of a heliocentric model of the Solar System. (from History of physics)
• 
  A magnet levitating above a high-temperature superconductor. Today some physicists are working to understand high-temperature superconductivity using the AdS/CFT correspondence. (from Condensed matter physics)

Categories

Category puzzle

Fundamentals: Concepts in physics | Constants | Physical quantities | Units of measure | Mass | Length | Time | Space | Energy | Matter | Force | Gravity | Electricity | Magnetism | Waves

Basic physics: Mechanics | Electromagnetism | Statistical mechanics | Thermodynamics | Quantum mechanics | Theory of relativity | Optics | Acoustics

Specific fields: Acoustics | Astrophysics | Atomic physics | Molecular physics | Optical physics | Computational physics | Condensed matter physics | Nuclear physics | Particle physics | Plasma physics

Tools: Detectors | Interferometry | Measurement | Radiometry | Spectroscopy | Transducers

Background: Physicists | History of physics | Philosophy of physics | Physics education | Physics journals | Physics organizations

Other: Physics in fiction | Physics lists | Physics software | Physics stubs

Physics topics

Classical physics traditionally includes the fields of mechanics, optics, electricity, magnetism, acoustics and thermodynamics. The term Modern physics is normally used for fields which rely heavily on quantum theory, including quantum mechanics, atomic physics, nuclear physics, particle physics and condensed matter physics. General and special relativity are usually considered to be part of modern physics as well.

Fundamental Concepts	Classical Physics	Modern Physics	Cross Discipline Topics
Continuum	Solid Mechanics	Fluid Mechanics	Geophysics
Motion	Classical Mechanics	Analytical mechanics	Mathematical Physics
Kinetics	Kinematics	Kinematic chain	Robotics
Matter	Classical states	Modern states	Nanotechnology
Energy	Chemical Physics	Plasma Physics	Materials Science
Cold	Cryophysics	Cryogenics	Superconductivity
Heat	Heat transfer	Transport Phenomena	Combustion
Entropy	Thermodynamics	Statistical mechanics	Phase transitions
Particle	Particulates	Particle physics	Particle accelerator
Antiparticle	Antimatter	Annihilation physics	Gamma ray
Waves	Oscillation	Quantum oscillation	Vibration
Gravity	Gravitation	Gravitational wave	Celestial mechanics
Vacuum	Pressure physics	Vacuum state physics	Quantum fluctuation
Random	Statistics	Stochastic process	Brownian motion
Spacetime	Special Relativity	General Relativity	Black holes
Quantum	Quantum mechanics	Quantum field theory	Quantum computing
Radiation	Radioactivity	Radioactive decay	Cosmic ray
Light	Optics	Quantum optics	Photonics
Electrons	Solid State	Condensed Matter	Symmetry breaking
Electricity	Electrical circuit	Electronics	Integrated circuit
Electromagnetism	Electrodynamics	Quantum Electrodynamics	Chemical Bonds
Strong interaction	Nuclear Physics	Quantum Chromodynamics	Quark model
Weak interaction	Atomic Physics	Electroweak theory	Radioactivity
Standard Model	Fundamental interaction	Grand Unified Theory	Higgs boson
Information	Information science	Quantum information	Holographic principle
Life	Biophysics	Quantum Biology	Astrobiology
Conscience	Neurophysics	Quantum mind	Quantum brain dynamics
Cosmos	Astrophysics	Cosmology	Observable universe
Cosmogony	Big Bang	Mathematical universe	Multiverse
Chaos	Chaos theory	Quantum chaos	Perturbation theory
Complexity	Dynamical system	Complex system	Emergence
Quantization	Canonical quantization	Loop quantum gravity	Spin foam
Unification	Quantum gravity	String theory	Theory of Everything

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