Portal:Physics

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

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. (Full article...)

Featured article - show another

This is a Featured article, which represents some of the best content on English Wikipedia.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, c. 1944

J. Robert Oppenheimer (/ˈɒpənˌhaɪmər/; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico. Oppenheimer later remarked that it brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." In August 1945, the weapons were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war ended, Oppenheimer became chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission. He used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb during a 1949–50 governmental debate on the question and subsequently took stances on defense-related issues that provoked the ire of some factions in the U.S. government and military. During the Second Red Scare, those stances, together with past associations Oppenheimer had with people and organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, led to him suffering the revocation of his security clearance in a much-written-about hearing in 1954. Effectively stripped of his direct political influence, he continued to lecture, write and work in physics. Nine years later, President John F. Kennedy awarded (and Lyndon B. Johnson presented) him with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation. (Full article...)

List of Featured articles

edit

Did you know - show different entries

... that if the Andromeda galaxy were bright enough to be fully visible to the naked eye it would appear six times as wide as our moon?

... that every year, the Moon moves 3.82 cm away from Earth?

... that Femto satellites are the smallest types of satellites, and the Kalam SAT is one of the smallest Femto satellite ever made?

More did you know facts

edit

Selected image - show another

The heliospheric current sheet extends to the outer reaches of the Solar System, and results from the influence of the Sun's rotating magnetic field on the plasma in the interplanetary medium.

More selected images...

edit

Related portals

Good article - show another

This is a Good article, an article that meets a core set of high editorial standards.

Leona Woods Marshall at the University of Chicago in 1946

Leona Harriet Woods (August 9, 1919 – November 10, 1986), later known as Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb.

At age 23, she was the youngest and only female member of the team which built and experimented with the world's first nuclear reactor (then called a pile), Chicago Pile-1, in a project led by her mentor Enrico Fermi. In particular, Woods was instrumental in the construction and then utilization of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation. She was the only woman present when the reactor went critical. She worked with Fermi on the Manhattan Project, and, together with her first husband John Marshall, she subsequently helped solve the problem of xenon poisoning at the Hanford plutonium production site, and supervised the construction and operation of Hanford's plutonium production reactors. (Full article...)

List of Good articles

edit

March anniversaries

1 March 1966 – first spacecraft crash-lands on Venus
14 March 1879 – Albert Einstein's birthday
14 March 2018 – Stephen Hawking died
20 March 1942 - Gabriele Veneziano's Birthday
24 March 1993 – Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 discovered

More anniversaries

edit

General images

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

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

edit

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