Concept
Theoretical physics
Overview
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that uses mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to explain and predict natural phenomena. It is, in the broadest sense, the attempt to say why things happen the way they do, not merely to record that they do. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which tests and refines those explanations through direct measurement and observation. In practice, the two feed each other constantly: a theoretical prediction suggests an experiment, and an unexpected experimental result sends theorists back to the drawing board.
The scope of theoretical physics is enormous. It ranges from the behaviour of quarks and elementary particles at scales far smaller than an atom to the large-scale structure of the universe itself. Where direct experimentation is impossible or simply not yet feasible, theoretical physics advances understanding through mathematical reasoning and thought experiments. This is perhaps the thing that surprises people most about the field: some of its most important results have come from pure reasoning, long before any instrument could test them. General relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics each originated primarily as theoretical constructions, only later confirmed by experiment.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In the same way, he would explain the size of a white object in terms of surface, for he would state the area which it covered. Thus the things already mentioned, and these alone, are in their intrinsic nature quantities; nothing else can claim the name in its own right, but, if at all, only in a secondary sense.
Aristotle, The Categories
States what Theoretical physics is; the author is tied to Theoretical physics in the knowledge graph.
So, since the principles are the cause of our knowing and behoving we know and believe them more, because by reason of them we know also the conclusion following. Further: the man who is to have the Knowledge which comes through demonstration must not merely know and believe his principles better than he does his conclusion, but he must believe nothing more firmly than the contradictories of those principles out of…
Aristotle, The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle
The author is tied to Theoretical physics in the knowledge graph.
The theory of atomic structure that has just been outlined, like everything in theoretical physics, is capable of expression in mathematical formulæ; but like many things in theoretical physics, it is also capable of expression in the form of an imaginative picture. But here, as always, it is necessary to distinguish sharply between the mathematical symbols and the pictorial words.
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
Names Theoretical physics twice; opens on Theoretical physics.
Philosophers who discussed Theoretical physics
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Kurt Gödel
- Mario Bunge
- Christopher Hitchens
- Ludwig Boltzmann
- Lawrence Krauss
- Hasok Chang
Related ideas
- Eugene Wigner
- Elementary particle
- General relativity
- Isaac Newton
- Loop quantum gravity
- Johannes Kepler
- Ibn al-Haytham
- Karl Popper
- Dark energy
- Optics
- Physics
- Particle physics
- Quantum mechanics
- Quantum field theory
- Quantum gravity
- Special relativity
- String theory
- Statistical mechanics
- James Clerk Maxwell
- Abstraction
- Topology
- Aristotle
- Universe
- Nicolaus Copernicus
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Confirmation holism.