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The Physics Portal

Various examples of physical phenomena

Physics (from Ancient Greek: φυσική (ἐπιστήμη), romanized: physikḗ (epistḗmē), lit. 'knowledge of nature', from φύσις phýsis 'nature') is the natural science that studies matter, 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, and its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves.

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 academic disciplines such as mathematics and philosophy.

Advances in physics often enable advances in 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.

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The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an online database of over eight million astronomy and physics papers from both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources. Abstracts are available free online for almost all articles, and full scanned articles are available in Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and Portable Document Format (PDF) for older articles. It was developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and is managed by the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

ADS is a powerful research tool and has had a significant impact on the efficiency of astronomical research since it was launched in 1992. Literature searches that previously would have taken days or weeks can now be carried out in seconds via the ADS search engine, which is custom-built for astronomical needs. Studies have found that the benefit to astronomy of the ADS is equivalent to several hundred million US dollars annually, and the system is estimated to have tripled the readership of astronomical journals. Read more...

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... 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?

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790106-0203 Voyager 58M to 31M reduced.gif

Jupiter as seen by Voyager 1 probe with a blue filter

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Stanisław Marcin Ulam ([sta'ɲiswaf 'mart͡ɕin 'ulam]; 3 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish-American scientist in the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved some theorems and proposed several conjectures.

Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family, Ulam studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute, where he earned his PhD in 1933 under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski. In 1935, John von Neumann, whom Ulam had met in Warsaw, invited him to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for a few months. From 1936 to 1939, he spent summers in Poland and academic years at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked to establish important results regarding ergodic theory. On 20 August 1939, he sailed for the United States for the last time with his 17-year-old brother Adam Ulam. He became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1940, and a United States citizen in 1941. Read more...

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September anniversaries

6 September 1809 - Sir George Cayley identifies the four aerodynamic forces
3 September 1821 - Faraday discovers electromagnetic rotation (the principle behind the electric motor).
- September 1911 - The Sackur-Tetrode Equation is published in Annalen der Physik.
29 September 1904 - Nature publishes Wood's letter discrediting N-rays.
27 September 1905 - E=mc² --- Annalen der Physik publishes the Mass–Energy equivalence
9 September 1934: The American Rocket Society (ARS) launched Rocket No. 4 to 400 feet.
17 September 1959 - The first powered X-15 flight.
9 September 1959 - The Atlas 10-D rocket is launched.
1 September 1974 - Pioneer 11 sends polar images of Jupiter.
20 September 1979 - The High Energy Astronomical Observatory (HEAO) 3 is launched.
- September 1981 - Invention of the scanning tunneling microscope.

Births

22 September 1791 Michael Faraday (d.1867)
29 September 1901 Enrico Fermi

Deaths

5 September 1906 - Ludwig Boltzmann
7 September 1783 - Leonhard Euler
9 September 2003 - Edward Teller

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General images

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

Werner Heisenberg
(1901–1976)
Richard Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge
Gottfried Leibniz
(1646–1716)
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.
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.
Daniel Bernoulli
(1700–1782)
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.
A magnet levitating above a high-temperature superconductor. Today some physicists are working to understand high-temperature superconductivity using the AdS/CFT correspondence.
The quantum Hall effect: Components of the Hall resistivity as a function of the external magnetic field
A Newton's cradle, named for physicist Isaac Newton
The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, famous for his ideas regarding fluid mechanics and buoyancy.
A replica of the first point-contact transistor in Bell labs
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
(1824–1907)
A composite montage comparing Jupiter (lefthand side) and its four Galilean moons (top to bottom: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto).
Michael Faraday
(1791–1867)
Galileo Galilei, early proponent of the modern scientific worldview and method
(1564–1642)
Sir Isaac Newton
(1642–1727)
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.
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.
Max Planck
(1858–1947)
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 cylindrical projection.
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.
Computer simulation of nanogears made of fullerene molecules. It is hoped that advances in nanoscience will lead to machines working on the molecular scale.
The Standard Model.
James Clerk Maxwell
(1831–1879)
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), photographed here in around 1905
The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is remembered for his development of a heliocentric model of the Solar system.
A page from al-Khwārizmī's Algebra.
Aristotle
(384–322 BCE)
Alessandro Volta
(1745–1827)
Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1040).
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.
Image of X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal.
The first Bose–Einstein condensate observed in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms. The blue and white areas represent higher density.
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes van der Waals with the helium liquefactor at Leiden in 1908
René Descartes
(1596–1650)
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
(1867–1934)
Ludwig Boltzmann
(1844-1906)

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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.

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
Quanta	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