Physics  

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The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1820s) by Hokusai
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The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1820s) by Hokusai

"Monsieur E. Bréhier (Histoire de la Philosophie, Paris, 1928, vol i, p. 42) says that the question 'What are things made of? ' is not Thales' question but Aristotle's question."--The Idea of Nature (1945) by Robin George Collingwood

Citation: "energy destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion" --The Accursed Share, cited in Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68 by Peter Starr
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Citation: "energy destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion" --The Accursed Share, cited in Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68 by Peter Starr

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Physics (Greek: (phúsis), "nature") is the branch of science concerned with the discovery and characterization of universal laws which govern matter, energy, space, and time. The role of physics, then, is to provide a logically ordered picture of nature in agreement with experience.

History

Natural philosophy has its origins in Greece during the Archaic period, (650 BCE – 480 BCE), when Pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales rejected non-naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena and proclaimed that every event had a natural cause. They proposed ideas verified by reason and observation and many of their hypotheses proved successful in experiment, for example atomism.

Classical physics became a separate science when early modern Europeans used these experimental and quantitative methods to discover what are now considered to be the laws of physics. Kepler, Galileo and more specifically Newton discovered and unified the different laws of motion. During the industrial revolution, as energy needs increased, so did research, which led to the discovery of new laws in thermodynamics, chemistry and electromagnetics.

Modern physics started with the works of Max Planck in quantum theory and Einstein in relativity, and continued in quantum mechanics pioneered by Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Paul Dirac.

See also

General
Related fields
Interdisciplinary fields incorporating physics

See also

quantum mysticism, wave–particle duality, measurement problem, Schrödinger's cat




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Physics" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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