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

Physics is the natural science of matter, involving the 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, with its main goal being to understand how the universe behaves. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.

Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines and, through its inclusion of astronomy, perhaps the oldest. 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 emerged as unique research endeavors in their own right. 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 new products that have dramatically transformed modern-day 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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Image of the Sun, a G-type main-sequence star, the closest to Earth

A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night; their immense distances from Earth make them appear as fixed points of light. The most prominent stars have been categorised into constellations and asterisms, and many of the brightest stars have proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. The observable universe contains an estimated 10²² to 10²⁴ stars. Only about 4,000 of these stars are visible to the naked eye—all within the Milky Way galaxy.

A star's life begins with the gravitational collapse of a gaseous nebula of material largely comprising hydrogen, helium, and trace heavier elements. Its total mass mainly determines its evolution and eventual fate. A star shines for most of its active life due to the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core. This process releases energy that traverses the star's interior and radiates into outer space. At the end of a star's lifetime as a fusor, its core becomes a stellar remnant: a white dwarf, a neutron star, or—if it is sufficiently massive—a black hole. (Full article...)

Did you know -

• ... that nuclear fusion reactions are probably occurring at or above the sun's photosphere; it is a process called solar surface fusion.

• ... that the submarine telescope ANTARES, intended to detect neutrinos, may also be used to observe bioluminescent plankton and fish?

• ... that a touch flash releases about a billion photons a second far less than produced in a particle accelerator?

Selected image -

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, two parts in a million of the whole sky

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  The Hubble Deep Field
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  Details from the Hubble Deep Field illustrate the wide variety of galaxy shapes, sizes and colours found in the distant universe.

Related portals

Good articles -

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

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  Einstein in 1921

  
  Albert Einstein (/ˈaɪnstaɪn/ EYEN-styne; German: [ˈalbɛɐt ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics, and was thus a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc², which arises from relativity theory, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science.
  
  Born in the German Empire, Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship (as a subject of the Kingdom of Württemberg) the following year. In 1897, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zürich, graduating in 1900. In 1901, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for the rest of his life. In 1903, he secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich. In 1914, he moved to Berlin in order to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1917, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics; he also became a German citizen again, this time as a subject of the Kingdom of Prussia. (Full article...)
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  Rainwater in 1975

  
  Leo James Rainwater (December 9, 1917 – May 31, 1986) was an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei.
  
  During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs. In 1949, he began developing his theory that, contrary to what was then believed, not all atomic nuclei are spherical. His ideas were later tested and confirmed by Aage Bohr's and Ben Mottelson's experiments. He also contributed to the scientific understanding of X-rays and participated in the United States Atomic Energy Commission and naval research projects. (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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  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 became 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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  The Type Ib supernova SN 2008D in galaxy NGC 2770, shown in X-ray (left) and visible light (right), at the corresponding positions of the images. (NASA image.)

  
  
  Type Ib and Type Ic supernovae are categories of supernovae that are caused by the stellar core collapse of massive stars. These stars have shed or been stripped of their outer envelope of hydrogen, and, when compared to the spectrum of Type Ia supernovae, they lack the absorption line of silicon. Compared to Type Ib, Type Ic supernovae are hypothesized to have lost more of their initial envelope, including most of their helium. The two types are usually referred to as stripped core-collapse supernovae. (Full article...)
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  Gelders in 1936

  
  Joseph Sidney Gelders (November 20, 1898 – March 1, 1950) was an American physicist who later became an antiracist, civil rights activist, labor organizer, and communist. In the mid-1930s, he served as the secretary and southern-U.S. representative of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. In September 1936, Gelders was kidnapped, beaten, and nearly killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan for his civil rights and labor organizing activities. After his recovery, Gelders continued his activism and cofounded the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. He collaborated closely with other activists including Lucy Randolph Mason and Virginia Foster Durr. Internal injuries sustained during his kidnapping and assault led to Gelders' death on March 1, 1950. (Full article...)
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  The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image shows some of the most remote galaxies visible to present technology (diagonal is ~1/10 apparent Moon diameter)

  
  The universe is all of space and time and their contents. It comprises all of existence, any fundamental interaction, physical process and physical constant, and therefore all forms of energy and matter, and the structures they form, from sub-atomic particles to entire galactic filaments. Space and time, according to the prevailing cosmological theory of the Big Bang, emerged together 13.787±0.020 billion years ago, and the universe has been expanding ever since. Today the universe has expanded into an age and size that is physically only in parts observable as the observable universe, which is approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter at the present day, while the spatial size, if any, of the entire universe is unknown.
  
  Some of the earliest cosmological models of the universe were developed by ancient Greek and Indian philosophers and were geocentric, placing Earth at the center. Over the centuries, more precise astronomical observations led Nicolaus Copernicus to develop the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. In developing the law of universal gravitation, Isaac Newton built upon Copernicus's work as well as Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion and observations by Tycho Brahe. (Full article...)
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  Creutz in later life

  
  Edward Creutz (January 23, 1913 – June 27, 2009) was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war he became a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He was Vice President of Research at General Atomics from 1955 to 1970. He published over 65 papers on botany, physics, mathematics, metallurgy and science policy, and held 18 patents relating to nuclear energy.
  
  A graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Creutz helped Princeton University build its first cyclotron. During World War II he worked on nuclear reactor design under Eugene Wigner at the Metallurgical Laboratory, designing the cooling system for the first water-cooled reactors. He led a group that studied the metallurgy of uranium and other elements used in reactor designs. In October 1944, he moved to the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he became a group leader. (Full article...)
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  Agnew in 1955

  
  Harold Melvin Agnew (March 28, 1921 – September 29, 2013) was an American physicist, best known for having flown as a scientific observer on the Hiroshima bombing mission and, later, as the third director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
  
  Agnew joined the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in 1942, and helped build Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor. In 1943, he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he worked with the Cockcroft–Walton generator. After the war ended, he returned to the University of Chicago, where he completed his graduate work under Enrico Fermi. (Full article...)
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  A simulated particle collision in the LHC.

  
  
  The safety of high energy particle collisions was a topic of widespread discussion and topical interest during the time when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and later the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—currently the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator—were being constructed and commissioned. Concerns arose that such high energy experiments—designed to produce novel particles and forms of matter—had the potential to create harmful states of matter or even doomsday scenarios. Claims escalated as commissioning of the LHC drew closer, around 2008–2010. The claimed dangers included the production of stable micro black holes and the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets, and these questions were explored in the media, on the Internet and at times through the courts.
  
  To address these concerns in the context of the LHC, CERN mandated a group of independent scientists to review these scenarios. In a report issued in 2003, they concluded that, like current particle experiments such as the RHIC, the LHC particle collisions pose no conceivable threat. A second review of the evidence commissioned by CERN was released in 2008. The report, prepared by a group of physicists affiliated to CERN but not involved in the LHC experiments, reaffirmed the safety of the LHC collisions in light of further research conducted since the 2003 assessment. It was reviewed and endorsed by a CERN committee of 20 external scientists and by the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles & Fields of the American Physical Society, and was later published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics G by the UK Institute of Physics, which also endorsed its conclusions. (Full article...)
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  Bruno Benedetto Rossi (/ˈrɒsi/; Italian: [ˈrossi]; 13 April 1905 – 21 November 1993) was an Italian experimental physicist. He made major contributions to particle physics and the study of cosmic rays. A 1927 graduate of the University of Bologna, he became interested in cosmic rays. To study them, he invented an improved electronic coincidence circuit, and travelled to Eritrea to conduct experiments that showed that cosmic ray intensity from the West was significantly larger than that from the East.
  
  Forced to emigrate in October 1938 due to the Italian racial laws, Rossi moved to Denmark, where he worked with Niels Bohr. He then moved to Britain, where he worked with Patrick Blackett at the University of Manchester. Finally he went to the United States, where he worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, and later at Cornell University. Rossi stayed in the United States, and became an American Citizen. (Full article...)
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  The S-1 Executive Committee at the Bohemian Grove on September 13, 1942. From left to right: Harold C. Urey, Ernest O. Lawrence, James B. Conant, Lyman J. Briggs, E. V. Murphree and Arthur Compton

  
  The S-1 Executive Committee laid the groundwork for the Manhattan Project by initiating and coordinating the early research efforts in the United States, and liaising with the Tube Alloys Project in Britain.
  
  In the wake of the discovery of nuclear fission in December 1938, the possibility that Nazi Germany might develop nuclear weapons prompted Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner to draft the Einstein–Szilárd letter to the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in August 1939. In response, the Advisory Committee on Uranium was created at the National Bureau of Standards under the chairmanship of Lyman J. Briggs to determine the feasibility of nuclear weapons. In June 1940, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) was created to coordinate defense-related research, and the Advisory Committee on Uranium became the Uranium Committee of the NDRC. In June 1941, Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development under the leadership of Vannevar Bush (OSRD), at it incorporated the NDRC, now under James B. Conant. The Uranium Committee became the Uranium Section of the OSRD, which was soon renamed the S-1 Section for security reasons. By May 1942, it was felt that the S-1 Section had become too unwieldy, and in June 1942, was replaced by the smaller S-1 Executive Committee. (Full article...)
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  von Neumann in the 1940s

  
  John von Neumann (/vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/ von NOY-mən; Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos [ˈnɒjmɒn ˈjaːnoʃ ˈlɒjoʃ]; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, integrating pure and applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. He was a pioneer in building the mathematical framework of quantum physics, in the development of functional analysis, and in game theory, introducing or codifying concepts including cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA.
  
  During World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project. He developed the mathematical models behind the explosive lenses used in the implosion-type nuclear weapon. Before and after the war, he consulted for many organizations including the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At the peak of his influence in the 1950s, he chaired a number of Defense Department committees including the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee and the ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee. He was also a member of the influential Atomic Energy Commission in charge of all atomic energy development in the country. He played a key role alongside Bernard Schriever and Trevor Gardner in the design and development of the United States' first ICBM programs. At that time he was considered the nation's foremost expert on nuclear weaponry and the leading defense scientist at the U.S. Department of Defense. (Full article...)
• 
  Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein is a biography of Albert Einstein written by Abraham Pais. First published in 1982 by Oxford University Press, the book is one of the most acclaimed biographies of the scientist. This was not the first popular biography of Einstein, but it was the first to focus on his scientific research as opposed to his life as a popular figure. Pais, renowned for his work in theoretical particle physics, was a friend of Einstein's at the Institute for Advanced Study in his early career. Originally published in English in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book has translations in over a dozen languages. Pais later released a sequel to the book in 1994 titled Einstein Lived Here and, after his death in 2000, the University Press released a posthumous reprint of the biography in 2005, with a new foreword by Roger Penrose. Considered very popular for a science book, the biography sold tens of thousands of copies of both paperback and hardcover versions in its first year. The book has received many reviews and, the year after its initial publication, it won both the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction, in Science (Hardcover), and the 1983 Science Writing Award. (Full article...)
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  Facsimile of the Einstein–Szilard letter

  
  
  The Einstein–Szilard letter was a letter written by Leo Szilard and signed by Albert Einstein on August 2, 1939, that was sent to President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt. Written by Szilard in consultation with fellow Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, the letter warned that Germany might develop atomic bombs and suggested that the United States should start its own nuclear program. It prompted action by Roosevelt, which eventually resulted in the Manhattan Project, the development of the first atomic bombs, and the use of these bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Full article...)

June anniversaries

First American spacewalker. During the 1965 Gemini IV mission, Ed White became the first American astronaut to perform a spacewalk.

• 1 June 1831 – James Clark Ross discovers the North Magnetic Pole.
• 1 June 1869 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric voting machine.
• 1 June 1910 – Robert Falcon Scott expedition leaves England for South Pole.
• 1 June 1978 – First Patent Cooperation Treaty international filings.
• 1 June 1980 – Cable News Network (CNN) begins broadcasting.
• 1 June 1990 – Bush and Gorbachev sign chemical weapons ban.
• 1 June 2000 – Patent Law Treaty is signed.
• 2 June 1966 – Surveyor 1 lands on the Moon.
• 2 June 2003 - ESA launches Mars Express probe to Mars.
• 3 June 1965 - First American spacewalk, mission Gemini IV
• 3 June 1973 – A Soviet supersonic Tupolev Tu-144 crashes.
• 4 June 781 BC – First historic solar eclipse is recorded in China.
• 4 June 1973 – A patent for the ATM is granted.
• 4 June 1996 - First flight. Ariane 5 rocket explodes after roughly 20 seconds.
• 5 June 1977 – Apple II, personal computer goes on sale.

Birthdays

• 1 June 1633 – Geminiano Montanari, Italian astronomer (d. 1687)
• 1 June 1796 – Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, French physicist (d. 1832)
• 1 June 1899 – Edward Charles Titchmarsh, English mathematician (d. 1963)
• 1 June 1907 – Frank Whittle, invented jet engine. (d. 1996)
• 1 June 1917 – William S. Knowles Nobel Prize laureate
• 1 June 1940 – Kip Thorne, American physicist
• 2 June 1930 – Pete Conrad, American astronaut (d. 1999)
• 2 June 1949 – Heather Couper, British astronomer
• 3 June 1659 – David Gregory, Scottish astronomer (d. 1708)
• 3 June 1923 – Igor Shafarevich, Russian mathematician
• 4 June 1704 – Benjamin Huntsman, English inventor and manufacturer (d. 1776)
• 4 June 1877 – Heinrich Wieland, German biochemist & Nobel laureate (d. 1957)
• 4 June 1916 – Robert F. Furchgott, American chemist & Nobel laureate (d. 2009)
• 4 June 1967 – Robert Shane Kimbrough, American astronaut
• 5 June 1760 – Johan Gadolin, Finnish scientist (d. 1852)
• 5 June 1819 – John Couch Adams, English astronomer (d. 1892)
• 5 June 1862 – Allvar Gullstrand, Swedish ophthalmologist Nobel laureate (d. 1930)
• 5 June 1900 – Dennis Gabor, Hungarian physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1979)
• 5 June 1965 – Michael E. Brown, American astronomer
• 13 June 1831 - James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist (d. 1879)

General images

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

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  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)
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  Aristotle
  (384–322 BCE) (from History of physics)
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  A page from al-Khwārizmī's Algebra. (from History of physics)
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  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)
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  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)
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  Gottfried Leibniz
  (1646–1716) (from History of physics)
• 
  Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1040). (from History of physics)
• 
  Galileo Galilei, early proponent of the modern scientific worldview and method
  (1564–1642) (from History of physics)
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  The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is remembered for his development of a heliocentric model of the Solar System. (from History of physics)
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  A Newton's cradle, named after physicist Isaac Newton (from History of physics)
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  The quantum Hall effect: Components of the Hall resistivity as a function of the external magnetic field (from Condensed matter physics)
• 
  Max Planck
  (1858–1947) (from History of physics)
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  William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
  (1824–1907) (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)
• 
  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)
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  Werner Heisenberg
  (1901–1976) (from History of physics)
• 
  Alessandro Volta
  (1745–1827) (from History of physics)
• 
  Richard Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge (from History of physics)
• 
  Marie Skłodowska-Curie
  (1867–1934) She was awarded two Nobel prizes, Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) (from History of physics)
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  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes van der Waals with the helium liquefactor at Leiden in 1908 (from Condensed matter physics)
• 
  Sir Isaac Newton
  (1642–1727) (from History of physics)
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  The Standard Model. (from History of physics)
• 
  René Descartes
  (1596–1650) (from History of physics)
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  Michael Faraday
  (1791–1867) (from History of physics)
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  Image of X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal (from Condensed matter physics)
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  Albert Einstein (1879–1955), photographed here in around 1905 (from History of physics)
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  Chien-Shiung Wu worked on parity violation in 1956 and announced her results in January 1957. (from History of physics)
• 
  Christiaan Huygens
  (1629–1695) (from History of physics)
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  The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, developer of ideas regarding fluid mechanics and buoyancy. (from History of physics)
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  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)
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  A composite montage comparing Jupiter (lefthand side) and its four Galilean moons (top to bottom: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto). (from History of physics)
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  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)
• 
  Ludwig Boltzmann
  (1844-1906) (from History of physics)
• 
  James Clerk Maxwell
  (1831–1879) (from History of physics)
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  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)
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  A replica of the first point-contact transistor in Bell labs (from Condensed matter physics)
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  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)
• 
  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)
• 
  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)
• 
  Daniel Bernoulli
  (1700–1782) (from History of 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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