Method
Physics
Overview
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. It 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 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.
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 Physics is discussed.
By extensions of this line of argument we arrive at the mathematical laws of the physical world. Physics is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest, our knowledge is negative.
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Our object has been to discover as far as possible the nature of the ultimate constituents of the physical world. When I speak of the "physical world," I mean, to begin with, the world dealt with by physics. It is obvious that physics is an empirical science, giving us a certain amount of knowledge and based upon evidence obtained through the senses. But partly through the development of physics itself, partly…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph
The phraseology of physics is derived from the materialistic ideas of the seventeenth century. But we find that, even in its extreme abstraction, what it is really presupposing is the organic theory of aspects as explained above.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
states what it is; names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
That for the past three centuries energy should have gone chiefly into physical inquiry, beginning with the things most remote from man such as heavenly bodies, was to have been expected. The history of the physical sciences reveals a certain order in which they developed. Mathematical tools had to be employed before a new astronomy could be constructed. Physics advanced when ideas worked out in connection with the…
John Dewey, The public and its problems
names the idea
Etiology proper comprehends all those branches of natural science in which the chief concern is the knowledge of cause and effect. The sciences teach how, according to an invariable rule, one condition of matter is necessarily followed by a certain other condition; how one change necessarily conditions and brings about a certain other change; this sort of teaching is called _explanation_. The principal sciences in…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
states what it is; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Physics
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Ludwig Büchner
- Heraclitus
- Carl Gustav Hempel
- Alexander Bain (philosopher)
- Hans Reichenbach
- Alexander of Aphrodisias
- Karl Popper
- Xenocrates
- Heraclides Ponticus
- Herbert Feigl
- Nicolas Malebranche
- Jakob Friedrich Fries
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr
- Thomas Nagel
- Pierre Gassendi
- William Whewell
- Moritz Schlick
- Periodic table
- Frank P. Ramsey
- Johann Georg Hamann
- John Toland
- Robert A. Heinlein
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- Aristotelian physics
- Fundamental interaction
- Force
- Elementary particle
- Avicenna
- Early modern Europe
- Greek language
- Classical Greece
- General relativity
- Greece
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Philosophy of physics
- Philosophical realism
- Homer
- Isaac Newton
- Immanuel Kant
- Industrial Revolution
- Academic discipline
- Classical physics
- Interdisciplinarity
- Johannes Kepler
- Ibn al-Haytham
- Physics (Aristotle)
Place in the tradition
Part of Ancient Greek philosophy.