Scope and aims
Scope and aims
This parabola-shaped lava flowillustrates Galileo's law of falling bodies as well as blackbody radiation – the temperature is discernible from the color of the blackbody.
Physics covers a wide range of phenomena, from the smallest sub-atomic particles (such as quarks, neutrinos and electrons), to the largest galaxies. Included in these phenomena are the most basic objects from which all other things are composed, and therefore physics is sometimes called the "fundamental science".
Physics aims to describe the various phenomena that occur in nature in terms of simpler phenomena. Thus, physics aims to both connect the things observable to humans to root causes, and then to try to connect these causes together in the hope of finding an ultimate reason for why nature is as it is. For example, the ancient Chinese observed that certain rocks (lodestone) were attracted to one another by some invisible force. This effect was later called magnetism, and was first rigorously studied in the 17th century.
A little earlier than the Chinese, the ancient Greeks knew of other objects such as amber, that when rubbed with fur would cause a similar invisible attraction between the two. This was also first studied rigorously in the 17th century, and came to be called electricity. Thus, physics had come to understand two observations of nature in terms of some root cause (electricity and magnetism). However, further work in the 19th century revealed that these two forces were just two different aspects of one force – electromagnetism. This process of "unifying" forces continues today(see section Current research for more information).
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