Portal:Physics
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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...)
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The Montreal Laboratory was a program established by the National Research Council of Canada during World War II to undertake nuclear research in collaboration with the United Kingdom, and to absorb some of the scientists and work of the Tube Alloys nuclear project in Britain. It became part of the Manhattan Project, and designed and built some of the world's first nuclear reactors.
After the Fall of France, some French scientists escaped to Britain with their stock of heavy water. They were temporarily installed in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where they worked on reactor design. The MAUD Committee was uncertain whether this was relevant to the main task of Tube Alloys, that of building an atomic bomb, although there remained a possibility that a reactor could be used to breed plutonium, which might be used in one. It therefore recommended that they be relocated to the United States, and co-located with the Manhattan Project's reactor effort. Due to American concerns about security (many of the scientists were foreign nationals) and patent claims by the French scientists and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), it was decided to relocate them to Canada instead. (Full article...)Did you know -
- ...that Isaac Newton originally defined force as the rate of change of momentum with respect to time?
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For simplicity, Mars' period of revolution is depicted as 2 years instead of 1.88, and orbits are depicted as perfectly circular or epitrochoid.
The Copernican Revolution was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. This revolution consisted of two phases; the first being extremely mathematical in nature and the second phase starting in 1610 with the publication of a pamphlet by Galileo. Beginning with the 1543 publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, contributions to the “revolution” continued until finally ending with Isaac Newton’s work over a century later. (Full article...)
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Augustin-Jean Fresnel (10 May 1788 – 14 July 1827) was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric (reflective/refractive) Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving countless lives at sea. The simpler dioptric (purely refractive) stepped lens, first proposed by Count Buffon and independently reinvented by Fresnel, is used in screen magnifiers and in condenser lenses for overhead projectors.
By expressing Huygens's principle of secondary waves and Young's principle of interference in quantitative terms, and supposing that simple colors consist of sinusoidal waves, Fresnel gave the first satisfactory explanation of diffraction by straight edges, including the first satisfactory wave-based explanation of rectilinear propagation. Part of his argument was a proof that the addition of sinusoidal functions of the same frequency but different phases is analogous to the addition of forces with different directions. By further supposing that light waves are purely transverse, Fresnel explained the nature of polarization, the mechanism of chromatic polarization, and the transmission and reflection coefficients at the interface between two transparent isotropic media. Then, by generalizing the direction-speed-polarization relation for calcite, he accounted for the directions and polarizations of the refracted rays in doubly-refractive crystals of the biaxial class (those for which Huygens's secondary wavefronts are not axisymmetric). The period between the first publication of his pure-transverse-wave hypothesis, and the submission of his first correct solution to the biaxial problem, was less than a year. (Full article...) -
Nikola Tesla (/ˈtɛslə/; Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла, [nǐkola têsla]; 10 July [O.S. 28 June] 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist. He is known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla first studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without receiving a degree. He then gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884 he immigrated to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His AC induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company eventually marketed. (Full article...) -
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...) -
The Leibstadt Nuclear Power Plant in Switzerland
Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators in some space probes such as Voyager 2. Generating electricity from fusion power remains the focus of international research.
Most nuclear power plants use thermal reactors with enriched uranium in a once-through fuel cycle. Fuel is removed when the percentage of neutron absorbing atoms becomes so large that a chain reaction can no longer be sustained, typically three years. It is then cooled for several years in on-site spent fuel pools before being transferred to long-term storage. The spent fuel, though low in volume, is high-level radioactive waste. While its radioactivity decreases exponentially it must be isolated from the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, though newer technologies (like fast reactors) have the potential to reduce this significantly. Because the spent fuel is still mostly fissionable material, some countries (e.g. France and Russia) reprocess their spent fuel by extracting fissile and fertile elements for fabrication in new fuel, although this process is more expensive than producing new fuel from mined uranium. All reactors breed some plutonium-239, which is found in the spent fuel, and because Pu-239 is the preferred material for nuclear weapons, reprocessing is seen as a weapon proliferation risk. (Full article...) -
Computer simulation of Earth's field in a period of normal polarity between reversals. The lines represent magnetic field lines, blue when the field points towards the center and yellow when away. The rotation axis of Earth is centered and vertical. The dense clusters of lines are within Earth's core.
Earth's magnetic field, also known as the geomagnetic field, is the magnetic field that extends from Earth's interior out into space, where it interacts with the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. The magnetic field is generated by electric currents due to the motion of convection currents of a mixture of molten iron and nickel in Earth's outer core: these convection currents are caused by heat escaping from the core, a natural process called a geodynamo.
The magnitude of Earth's magnetic field at its surface ranges from 25 to 65 μT (0.25 to 0.65 G). As an approximation, it is represented by a field of a magnetic dipole currently tilted at an angle of about 11° with respect to Earth's rotational axis, as if there were an enormous bar magnet placed at that angle through the center of Earth. The North geomagnetic pole actually represents the South pole of Earth's magnetic field, and conversely the South geomagnetic pole corresponds to the north pole of Earth's magnetic field (because opposite magnetic poles attract and the north end of a magnet, like a compass needle, points toward Earth's South magnetic field, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada). (Full article...) -
Henri Coutard (27 August 1876 – 16 March 1950) was a French radiation therapist. He is known for his studies of radiation therapy for the treatment of laryngeal cancer and the development of the "protracted-fractional method" of radiation dosing.
Born in Marolles-les-Braults in the French department of Sarthe, Coutard attended medical school at University of Paris and graduated in 1902. He served in the French Army and lived for several years in the Jura Mountains before returning to Paris to study the medical applications of radium. During World War I, he worked in one of the radiological ambulance units overseen by the Polish-French physicist and chemist Marie Curie. He became the chief of the X-ray department at the Radium Institute of the University of Paris in 1919, working closely with Claudius Regaud and other scientists. Coutard's early work demonstrating the efficacy of radiating patients with laryngeal cancer led to the adoption of radiation therapy as a primary course of cancer treatment. The protracted-fractional method consisted of long durations of radiation applied over several weeks. (Full article...) -
George Thomas Reynolds (May 27, 1917 – April 19, 2005) was an American physicist best known for his accomplishments in particle physics, biophysics and environmental science.
Reynolds received his PhD in physics from Princeton in 1943, writing a thesis of the propagation of shock waves. During World War II, he joined the United States Navy, and served with the Manhattan Project. He worked with George Kistiakowsky on the design of the explosive lenses required by the implosion-type nuclear weapon. He was involved in the investigation of the Port Chicago disaster, served with Project Alberta on Tinian, and was part of the Manhattan Project team sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to inspect the bomb damage. (Full article...) -
Walter Henry Zinn (December 10, 1906 – February 14, 2000) was a Canadian-born American nuclear physicist who was the first director of the Argonne National Laboratory from 1946 to 1956. He worked at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory during World War II, and supervised the construction of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor, which went critical on December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago. At Argonne he designed and built several new reactors, including Experimental Breeder Reactor I, the first nuclear reactor to produce electric power, which went live on December 20, 1951. (Full article...) -
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, CBE FRS (/ˈpaɪ.ərlz/; German: [ˈpaɪɐls]; 5 June 1907 – 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".
Peierls studied physics at the University of Berlin, at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld, the University of Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg, and ETH Zurich under Wolfgang Pauli. After receiving his DPhil from Leipzig in 1929, he became an assistant to Pauli in Zurich. In 1932, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, which he used to study in Rome under Enrico Fermi, and then at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge under Ralph H. Fowler. Because of his Jewish background, he elected to not return home after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, but to remain in Britain, where he worked with Hans Bethe at the Victoria University of Manchester, then at the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge. In 1937, Mark Oliphant, the newly appointed Australian professor of physics at the University of Birmingham recruited him for a new chair there in applied mathematics. (Full article...) -
The SI system after the 2019 definition: Base units as defined in terms of physical constants and other base units. Here, means is used in the definition of .
In 2019, four of the seven SI base units specified in the International System of Quantities were redefined in terms of natural physical constants, rather than human artifacts such as the standard kilogram. Effective 20 May 2019, the 144th anniversary of the Metre Convention, the kilogram, ampere, kelvin, and mole are now defined by setting exact numerical values, when expressed in SI units, for the Planck constant (h), the elementary electric charge (e), the Boltzmann constant (kB), and the Avogadro constant (NA), respectively. The second, metre, and candela had previously been redefined using physical constants. The four new definitions aimed to improve the SI without changing the value of any units, ensuring continuity with existing measurements. In November 2018, the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) unanimously approved these changes, which the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) had proposed earlier that year after determining that previously agreed conditions for the change had been met. These conditions were satisfied by a series of experiments that measured the constants to high accuracy relative to the old SI definitions, and were the culmination of decades of research.
The previous major change of the metric system occurred in 1960 when the International System of Units (SI) was formally published. At this time the metre was redefined: the definition was changed from the prototype of the metre to a certain number of wavelengths of a spectral line of a krypton-86 radiation, making it derivable from universal natural phenomena. The kilogram remained defined by a physical prototype, leaving it the only artifact upon which the SI unit definitions depend. At this time the SI, as a coherent system, was constructed around seven base units, powers of which were used to construct all other units. With the 2019 redefinition, the SI is constructed around seven defining constants, allowing all units to be constructed directly from these constants. The designation of base units is retained but is no longer essential to define the SI units. (Full article...) -
Lightning (pictured) and urban lighting are some of the most dramatic effects of electricity
Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter possessing an electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwell's equations. Common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others.
The presence of either a positive or negative electric charge produces an electric field. The motion of electric charges is an electric current and produces a magnetic field. In most applications, Coulomb's law determines the force acting on an electric charge. Electric potential is the work done to move an electric charge from one point to another within an electric field, typically measured in volts. (Full article...) -
Alvin Martin Weinberg (/ˈwaɪnbɜːrɡ/; April 20, 1915 – October 18, 2006) was an American nuclear physicist who was the administrator of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) during and after the Manhattan Project. He came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1945 and remained there until his death in 2006. He was the first to use the term "Faustian bargain" to describe nuclear energy.
A graduate of the University of Chicago, which awarded him his doctorate in mathematical biophysics in 1939, Weinberg joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in September 1941. The following year he became part of Eugene Wigner's Theoretical Group, whose task was to design the nuclear reactors that would convert uranium into plutonium. (Full article...) -
The missing aircraft (9M-MRO) seen in 2011.
The analysis of communications between Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and Inmarsat's satellite telecommunication network provide the primary source of information about Flight 370's location and possible in-flight events after it disappeared from military radar coverage at 02:22 Malaysia Standard Time (MYT) on 8 March 2014 (17:22 UTC, 7 March), one hour after communication with air traffic control ended and the aircraft departed from its planned flight path while over the South China Sea.
Flight 370 was a scheduled commercial flight with 227 passengers and 12 crew which departed Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at 0:41 and was scheduled to land in Beijing, China at 6:30 China Standard Time (6:30 MYT; 22:30 UTC, 7 March). Malaysia has worked in conjunction with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau to co-ordinate the analysis, which has also involved the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch, Inmarsat, and US National Transportation Safety Board. Other groups have also made efforts to analyse the satellite communications, albeit challenged by a lack of publicly available information for several months after the disappearance. On 29 July 2015, debris was discovered on Réunion Island which was later confirmed to have come from Flight 370; it is the first physical evidence that Flight 370 ended in the Indian Ocean. (Full article...) -
Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, FRS (/ˈhaɪɡənz/ HY-gənz, US: /ˈhɔɪɡənz/ HOY-gənz, Dutch: [ˈkrɪstijaːn ˈɦœyɣə(n)s] ⓘ; also spelled Huyghens; Latin: Hugenius; 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor who is regarded as a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. In physics, Huygens made seminal contributions to optics and mechanics, while as an astronomer he studied the rings of Saturn and discovered its largest moon, Titan. As an engineer and inventor, he improved the design of telescopes and invented the pendulum clock, the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. A talented mathematician and physicist, his works contain the first idealization of a physical problem by a set of mathematical parameters, and the first mathematical and mechanistic explanation of an unobservable physical phenomenon.
Huygens first identified the correct laws of elastic collision in his work De Motu Corporum ex Percussione, completed in 1656 but published posthumously in 1703. In 1659, Huygens derived geometrically the formula in classical mechanics for the centrifugal force in his work De vi Centrifuga, a decade before Newton. In optics, he is best known for his wave theory of light, which he described in his Traité de la Lumière (1690). His theory of light was initially rejected in favour of Newton's corpuscular theory of light, until Augustin-Jean Fresnel adapted Huygens's principle to give a complete explanation of the rectilinear propagation and diffraction effects of light in 1821. Today this principle is known as the Huygens–Fresnel principle. (Full article...) -
James Clerk Maxwell FRSE FRS (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish physicist with broad interests who was responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics" where the first one had been realised by Isaac Newton.
With the publication of "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" in 1865, Maxwell demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves moving at the speed of light. He proposed that light is an undulation in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. The unification of light and electrical phenomena led to his prediction of the existence of radio waves. Maxwell is also regarded as a founder of the modern field of electrical engineering. (Full article...)
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May anniversaries
- May 1, 1960 - U-2 spy plane shot down
- May 6, 1937 - Hindenburg fire
- May 9, 1012 BC – Solar Eclipse seen at Ugarit, 6:09–6:39 PM.
- May 9, 1904 – City of Truro, a steam locomotive exceeds 100 mph (160 km/h).
- May 10, 1946 – V-2 rocket's first successful launch at White Sands Proving Ground
- May 10, 1960 – The nuclear submarine USS Triton completes Operation Sandblast, the first underwater circumnavigation of the earth.
- May 11, 1862 – American Civil War: The ironclad CSS Virginia is scuttled in Virginia.
- May 11, 1995 – In New York City, over 170 countries extend Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty indefinitely, without conditions.
- May 11, 1998 – India conducts three underground nuclear tests, including a thermonuclear device.
- May 14, 2018 - Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan died.
- May 16, 1960 - Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
- May 16, 1969 – Venera 5, a Soviet spaceprobe, lands on Venus.
- May 17, 1865 – The International Telegraph Union is established.
- May 18, 1974 - India conducts underground nuclear tests, named Smiling Buddha.
- May 18, 1998 - Microsoft sued by US Government
- May 19, 1943 - RAF uses bouncing bombs in combat
- May 20, 1932 - Amelia Earhart crosses Atlantic Ocean
- May 26, 1972 - President Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev sign nuclear weapon non-proliferation pact.
- May 24, 1844 - First official telegraph message is sent by Samuel Morse.
- May 27, 1937 - Grand opening, Golden Gate Bridge
- May 28, 1998 – Pakistan conducts five underground nuclear tests, named Chagai-I.
Births
- May 6, 1872 - Willem de Sitter, physicist, mathematician, and astronomer
- May 9, 1931 – Vance Brand, astronaut
- May 10, 1746 – Gaspard Monge, mathematician
- May 10, 1788 – Augustin-Jean Fresnel physicist
- May 10, 1963 – Lisa Nowak, astronaut
- May 11, 1918 – Richard Feynman, physicist
- May 14, 1686 - Gabriel Fahrenheit, physicist and engineer
- May 21, 1921 - Andrei Sakharov, nuclear physicist
- May 7,1861 - Rabindranath Tagore, poet, patriotist, and philosopher
Deaths
- May 10, 1482 – Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, mathematician and astronomer
- May 16, 1830 – Joseph Fourier, French scientist
- May 17, 1916 – Boris Borisovich Galitzine, Russian physicist
General images
The following are images from various physics-related articles on Wikipedia.
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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) -
Christiaan Huygens
(1629–1695) (from History of physics) -
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
(1824–1907) (from History of 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) -
The Standard Model. (from History of physics) -
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Galileo Galilei, early proponent of the modern scientific worldview and method
(1564–1642) (from History of physics) -
The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, famous for his ideas regarding fluid mechanics and buoyancy. (from History of physics) -
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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 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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Chien-Shiung Wu worked on parity violation in 1956 and announced her results in January 1957. (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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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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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) -
The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is remembered for his development of a heliocentric model of the Solar System. (from History of physics) -
Sir Isaac Newton
(1642–1727) (from History of 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) -
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) -
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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) -
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
(1867–1934) She was awarded two Nobel prizes, Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) (from History of physics) -
Richard Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge (from History of physics) -
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) -
Image of X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal. (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) -
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Albert Einstein (1879–1955), photographed here in around 1905 (from History of physics) -
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes van der Waals with the helium liquefactor at Leiden in 1908 (from Condensed matter physics) -
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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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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.
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