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Modern physics is a branch of physics that developed in the early 20th century and onward or branches greatly influenced by early 20th century physics. Notable branches of modern physics include quantum mechanics , special relativity and general relativity .
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to 224 individuals as of 2023. [5] The first prize in physics was awarded in 1901 to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, of Germany, who received 150,782 SEK. John Bardeen is the only laureate to win the prize twice—in 1956 and 1972. William Lawrence Bragg was the youngest Nobel laureate in physics; he won the ...
- Ancient History
- Scientific Revolution
- 18Th-Century Developments
- 19th Century
- 20th Century: Birth of Modern Physics
- Contemporary Physics
- Articles on The History of Physics
- Further Reading
Elements of what became physics were drawn primarily from the fields of astronomy, optics, and mechanics, which were methodologically united through the study of geometry. These mathematical disciplines began in antiquity with the Babylonians and with Hellenistic writers such as Archimedes and Ptolemy. Ancient philosophy, meanwhile, included what w...
During the 16th and 17th centuries, a large advancement of scientific progress known as the Scientific Revolution took place in Europe. Dissatisfaction with older philosophical approaches had begun earlier and had produced other changes in society, such as the Protestant Reformation, but the revolution in science began when natural philosophers beg...
During the 18th century, the mechanics founded by Newton was developed by several scientists as more mathematicians learned calculus and elaborated upon its initial formulation. The application of mathematical analysis to problems of motion was known as rational mechanics, or mixed mathematics (and was later termed classical mechanics).
Mechanics
In 1821, William Hamilton began his analysis of Hamilton's characteristic function. In 1835, he stated Hamilton's canonical equations of motion. In 1813, Peter Ewart supported the idea of the conservation of energy in his paper On the measure of moving force. In 1829, Gaspard Coriolis introduced the terms of work (force times distance) and kinetic energy with the meanings they have today. In 1841, Julius Robert von Mayer, an amateur scientist, wrote a paper on the conservation of energy, alth...
Electromagnetism
In 1800, Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery (known as the voltaic pile) and thus improved the way electric currents could also be studied. A year later, Thomas Young demonstrated the wave nature of light—which received strong experimental support from the work of Augustin-Jean Fresnel—and the principle of interference. In 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted found that a current-carrying conductor gives rise to a magnetic force surrounding it, and within a week after Ørsted's discovery rea...
Laws of thermodynamics
In the 19th century, the connection between heat and mechanical energy was established quantitatively by Julius Robert von Mayer and James Prescott Joule, who measured the mechanical equivalent of heat in the 1840s. In 1849, Joule published results from his series of experiments (including the paddlewheel experiment) which show that heat is a form of energy, a fact that was accepted in the 1850s. The relation between heat and energy was important for the development of steam engines, and in 1...
At the end of the 19th century, physics had evolved to the point at which classical mechanicscould cope with highly complex problems involving macroscopic situations; thermodynamics and kinetic theory were well established; geometrical and physical optics could be understood in terms of electromagnetic waves; and the conservation laws for energy an...
Quantum field theory
As the philosophically inclined continued to debate the fundamental nature of the universe, quantum theories continued to be produced, beginning with Paul Dirac's formulation of a relativistic quantum theory in 1928. However, attempts to quantize electromagnetic theory entirely were stymied throughout the 1930s by theoretical formulations yielding infinite energies. This situation was not considered adequately resolved until after World War II ended, when Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman and...
Unified field theories
Einstein deemed that all fundamental interactions in nature can be explained in a single theory. Unified field theories were numerous attempts to "merge" several interactions. One of many formulations of such theories (as well as field theories in general) is a gauge theory, a generalization of the idea of symmetry. Eventually the Standard Model (see below) succeeded in unification of strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions. All attempts to unify gravitationwith something else failed.
Particle physics and the Standard Model
When parity was broken in weak interactions by Chien-Shiung Wu in her experiment, a series of discoveries were created thereafter. The interaction of these particles by scattering and decay provided a key to new fundamental quantum theories. Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman brought some order to these new particles by classifying them according to certain qualities, beginning with what Gell-Mann referred to as the "Eightfold Way". While its further development, the quark model, at first see...
On branches of physics
1. Astronomy (timeline) 2. History of condensed matter (timeline) 2.1. History of aerodynamics 2.2. Material science (timeline) 2.3. History of fluid mechanics (timeline) 2.4. History of metamaterials 2.5. History of nanotechnology 2.6. History of superconductivity 3. History of computational physics (timeline) 4. History of electromagnetic theory (timeline) 4.1. History of electrical engineering 4.2. History of the philosophy of field theory 4.3. History of Maxwell's equations 4.4. History o...
On specific discoveries
1. Discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation 2. History of graphene 3. First observation of gravitational waves 4. Subatomic particles (timeline) 4.1. Search for the Higgs boson 4.2. Discovery of the neutron
Historical periods
1. Classical physics 2. Copernican Revolution 3. Golden age of physics 4. Golden age of cosmology 5. Modern physics 6. Physics in the medieval Islamic world 6.1. Astronomy in the medieval Islamic world 7. Noisy intermediate-scale quantum era
Buchwald, Jed Z. and Robert Fox, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics (2014) 976pp; excerptByers, Nina; Williams, Gary (2006). Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82197-5.Cropper, William H. (2004). Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517324-4.Dear, Peter (2001). Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08859-4. OCLC 46622656..The annus mirabilis papers (from Latin annus mīrābilis, "miracle year") are the four [a] papers that Albert Einstein published in Annalen der Physik ( Annals of Physics ), a scientific journal, in 1905. These four papers were major contributions to the foundation of modern physics.
Jul 30, 2020 · Modern physics is a branch of physics that includes the post-Newtonian concepts in the world of physics. It is based on the two major breakthroughs of the twentieth century: relativity and quantum theory. The term modern physics means up-to-date physics.
Sep 6, 2023 · This book is part of a series on Modern Physics: Waves General Mechanics Special Relativity ... (2017). The Feynman Lectures on Physics: New Millenium Edition.
Physics Behind Music. An Introduction. Textbook. A Student's Guide to the Schrödinger Equation. Discover Modern Physics, 1st Edition, Gary N. Felder, HB ISBN: 9781108842891 on Higher Education from Cambridge.
