Concept

Physicist

Overview

A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate causes of phenomena, and usually frame their understanding in mathematical terms. They work across a wide range of research fields, spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic and particle physics, through biological physics, to cosmological length scales encompassing the universe as a whole. The field generally includes two types of physicists: experimental physicists who specialize in the observation of natural phenomena and the development and analysis of experiments, and theoretical physicists who specialize in mathematical modeling of physical systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena.

Physicists can apply their knowledge towards solving practical problems or to developing new technologies (also known as applied physics or engineering physics).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Physicist is discussed.

I have emphasized this point, which might seem a trifle obvious, because some people imagine that Einstein has made a difference in this respect. In fact he has made none. But if the physicist is justified in this belief that a number of people can observe the “same” physical occurrence, then clearly the physicist must be concerned with those features which the occurrence has in common for all observers, for the…
Bertrand Russell, The A B C of Relativity
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Nor do the physicists wait to study a phenomenon until some urgent need of material life has made it a necessity for them; and they are right. If the scientists of the eighteenth century had neglected electricity as being in their eyes only a curiosity without practical interest, we should have had in the twentieth century neither telegraphy, nor electro-chemistry, nor electro-technics. The physicists, compelled to…
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
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Presumably, when this belief decayed and the disinterested study of astronomy began, many who had found astrology absorbingly interesting decided that astronomy had too little human interest to be worthy of study. Physics, as it appears in Plato's Timæus for example, is full of ethical notions: it is an essential part of its purpose to show that the earth is worthy of admiration. The modern physicist, on the…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
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This hypothesis is theoretically conceivable, as has been demonstrated quite recently; but, according to the calculations of Boltzmann, the mathematical improbability of it passes all imagination and practically amounts to absolute impossibility.[89] In reality, the problem remains insoluble as long as we keep on the ground of physics, for the physicist is obliged to attach energy to extended particles, and, even if…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
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To Kant we owe the completed theory of matter as the unity of repulsion and attraction. The theory is correct, so far as it recognises attraction to be the other of the two elements involved in the notion of Being-for-self: and to be an element no less essential than repulsion to constitute matter. Still this dynamical construction of matter, as it is termed, has the fault of taking for granted, instead of deducing…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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Physicist

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