Portal:Physics
Physics Portal Main Page | Physics Textbook | Wikiprojects and things to do |
The Physics Portal
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...)
Following the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, there was considerable speculation that another planet might exist beyond its orbit. The search began in the mid-19th century and continued at the start of the 20th with Percival Lowell's quest for Planet X. Lowell proposed the Planet X hypothesis to explain apparent discrepancies in the orbits of the giant planets, particularly Uranus and Neptune, speculating that the gravity of a large unseen ninth planet could have perturbed Uranus enough to account for the irregularities.
Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto in 1930 appeared to validate Lowell's hypothesis, and Pluto was officially named the ninth planet. In 1978, Pluto was conclusively determined to be too small for its gravity to affect the giant planets, resulting in a brief search for a tenth planet. The search was largely abandoned in the early 1990s, when a study of measurements made by the Voyager 2 spacecraft found that the irregularities observed in Uranus's orbit were due to a slight overestimation of Neptune's mass. After 1992, the discovery of numerous small icy objects with similar or even wider orbits than Pluto led to a debate over whether Pluto should remain a planet, or whether it and its neighbours should, like the asteroids, be given their own separate classification. Although a number of the larger members of this group were initially described as planets, in 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) reclassified Pluto and its largest neighbours as dwarf planets, leaving Neptune the farthest known planet in the Solar System. (Full article...)Did you know -
- ... that lasers can be used to separate two isotopes very efficiently?
- ... that your feet are slightly younger than your head, because time runs slow at a lower Gravitational Potential. This is a consequence of Gravitational Time Dilation
- ...that Max Planck created a system of measurement based solely on natural units?
Selected image -
The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a 1964 physics textbook by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, based upon the lectures given by Feynman to undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1961–63.
It includes lectures on mathematics, electromagnetism, Newtonian physics, quantum physics, and the relation of physics to other sciences. Six readily accessible chapters were later compiled into a book entitled Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher, and six more in Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time.
Related portals
June anniversaries
- 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
Categories
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.
More recognized content
Associated Wikimedia
The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:
- Commons
Free media repository - Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals - Wikidata
Free knowledge base - Wikinews
Free-content news - Wikiquote
Collection of quotations - Wikisource
Free-content library - Wikiversity
Free learning tools - Wikivoyage
Free travel guide - Wiktionary
Dictionary and thesaurus