Portal:Physics

The Physics Portal

Physics is the scientific study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. It is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.

Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines. 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 branched into separate research endeavors. 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 technologies that have transformed modern 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...)

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An illustration of the helium atom, depicting the nucleus (pink) and the electron cloud distribution (black). The nucleus (upper right) in helium-4 is in reality spherically symmetric and closely resembles the electron cloud, although for more complicated nuclei this is not always the case. The black bar is one angstrom (10⁻¹⁰ m or 100 pm).

Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished from each other by the number of protons that are in their atoms. For example, any atom that contains 11 protons is sodium, and any atom that contains 29 protons is copper. Atoms with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons are called isotopes of the same element.

Atoms are extremely small, typically around 100 picometers across. A human hair is about a million carbon atoms wide. Atoms are smaller than the shortest wavelength of visible light, which means humans cannot see atoms with conventional microscopes. They are so small that accurately predicting their behavior using classical physics is not possible due to quantum effects. (Full article...)

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... 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?

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Magnetosphere of Jupiter

The Io plasma torus is in yellow. Jupiter's volcanically active moon Io is a strong source of plasma in its own right, and loads Jupiter's magnetosphere with as much as 1,000 kg of new material every second. Strong volcanic eruptions on Io emit huge amounts of sulfur dioxide, a major part of which is dissociated into atoms and ionized by the solar ultraviolet radiation, producing ions of sulfur and oxygen: S⁺, O⁺, S²⁺ and O²⁺. These ions escape from the satellite's atmosphere and form the *Io plasma torus*Io's interaction with Jupiter's magnetosphere. As a result of several processes, the plasma slowly leaks away from Jupiter

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Image 1

Rainwater in 1975

Leo James Rainwater (December 9, 1917 – May 31, 1986) was an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei.

During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs. In 1949, he began developing his theory that, contrary to what was then believed, not all atomic nuclei are spherical. His ideas were later tested and confirmed by Aage Bohr's and Ben Mottelson's experiments. He also contributed to the scientific understanding of X-rays and participated in the United States Atomic Energy Commission and naval research projects. (Full article...)
Image 2

William George Penney, Baron Penney, (24 June 1909 – 3 March 1991) was an English mathematician and professor of mathematical physics at the Imperial College London and later the rector of Imperial College London. He had a leading role in the development of High Explosive Research, Britain's clandestine nuclear programme that started in 1942 during the Second World War which produced the first British atomic bomb in 1952.

As the head of the British delegation working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory, Penney initially carried out calculations to predict the damage effects generated by the blast wave of an atomic bomb. Upon returning home, Penney directed the British nuclear weapons directorate, codenamed Tube Alloys and directed scientific research at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment which resulted in the first detonation of a British nuclear bomb in Operation Hurricane in 1952. After the test, Penney became chief advisor to the new United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). He was later chairman of the authority, which he used in international negotiations to control nuclear testing with the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. (Full article...)
Image 3

Adriana C. Ocampo Uria (born January 5, 1955) is a Colombian planetary geologist and a Science Program Manager at NASA Headquarters. In 1970, Ocampo emigrated to California and completed her Master in Sciences at California State University, Northridge and finished her PhD at the Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands. During high school and graduate studies she worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she served as the science coordinator for many planetary missions (Viking, Mars Observer, Voyager, Galileo Galileo Mission, etc.).

She was the first to recognize, using satellite images, that a ring of cenotes or sinkholes, is the only surface impression of the buried Chicxulub crater. This research contributed significantly to the understanding of this impact crater. Ocampo has subsequently led at least seven research expeditions to the Chicxulub site. and to Belize K/Pg ejecta sites, which she discovered and are the subject of her MSc and PhD. She continues to search for new impact craters, and with her team, in 2017, reported on a possible crater near Cali, Colombia. (Full article...)
Image 4
True-color image of Uranus by Voyager 2

The atmosphere of Uranus is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. At depth, it is significantly enriched in volatiles (dubbed "ices") such as water, ammonia, and methane. The opposite is true for the upper atmosphere, which contains very few gases heavier than hydrogen and helium due to its low temperature. Uranus's atmosphere is the coldest of all the planets, with its temperature reaching as low as 49 K.

The Uranian atmosphere can be divided into three main layers: the troposphere, between altitudes of −300 and 50 km and pressures from 100 to 0.1 bar; the stratosphere, spanning altitudes between 50 and 4000 km and pressures of between 0.1 and 10⁻¹⁰ bar; and the hot thermosphere (and exosphere) extending from an altitude of 4,000 km to several Uranian radii from the nominal surface at 1 bar pressure. Unlike Earth's, Uranus's atmosphere has no mesosphere. (Full article...)
Image 5

A series of 5, 2, 1, 0.5 and 0.2 kilogram weights, made of cast iron

The kilogram (also spelled kilogramme) is the base unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI), having the unit symbol kg. The word "kilogram" is formed from the combination of the metric prefix kilo- (meaning one thousand) and gram; it is colloquially shortened to "kilo" (plural "kilos").

The kilogram is an SI base unit, defined ultimately in terms of three defining constants of the SI, namely a specific transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom, the speed of light, and the Planck constant. A properly equipped metrology laboratory can calibrate a mass measurement instrument such as a Kibble balance as a primary standard for the kilogram mass. (Full article...)
Image 6

Woods 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 she subsequently helped evaluate the cross section of xenon, which had poisoned the first Hanford production reactor when it began operation. (Full article...)
Image 7

c. 1680 Portrait of a Mathematician by Mary Beale, of an unknown subject, conjectured to be Hooke but also conjectured to be Isaac Barrow

Robert Hooke (/hʊk/; 18 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English polymath who was active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. He is credited as one of the first scientists to investigate living things at microscopic scale in 1665, using a compound microscope that he designed. Hooke was an impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood who went on to become one of the most important scientists of his time. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Hooke (as a surveyor and architect) attained wealth and esteem by performing more than half of the property line surveys and assisting with the city's rapid reconstruction. Often vilified by writers in the centuries after his death, his reputation was restored at the end of the twentieth century and he has been called "England's Leonardo [da Vinci]".

Hooke was a Fellow of the Royal Society and from 1662, he was its first Curator of Experiments. From 1665 to 1703, he was also Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. Hooke began his scientific career as an assistant to the physical scientist Robert Boyle. Hooke built the vacuum pumps that were used in Boyle's experiments on gas law and also conducted experiments. In 1664, Hooke identified the rotations of Mars and Jupiter. Hooke's 1665 book Micrographia, in which he coined the term cell, encouraged microscopic investigations. Investigating optics – specifically light refraction – Hooke inferred a wave theory of light. His is the first-recorded hypothesis of the cause of the expansion of matter by heat, of air's composition by small particles in constant motion that thus generate its pressure, and of heat as energy. (Full article...)
Image 8
The mobility analogy, also called admittance analogy or Firestone analogy, is a method of representing a mechanical system by an analogous electrical system. The advantage of doing this is that there is a large body of theory and analysis techniques concerning complex electrical systems, especially in the field of filters. By converting to an electrical representation, these tools in the electrical domain can be directly applied to a mechanical system without modification. A further advantage occurs in electromechanical systems: Converting the mechanical part of such a system into the electrical domain allows the entire system to be analysed as a unified whole.

The mathematical behaviour of the simulated electrical system is identical to the mathematical behaviour of the represented mechanical system. Each element in the electrical domain has a corresponding element in the mechanical domain with an analogous constitutive equation. All laws of circuit analysis, such as Kirchhoff's laws, that apply in the electrical domain also apply to the mechanical mobility analogy. (Full article...)
Image 9

An ice block

Ice is water that is frozen into a solid state, typically forming at or below temperatures of 0 °C, 32 °F, or 273.15 K. It occurs naturally on Earth, on other planets, in Oort cloud objects, and as interstellar ice. As a naturally occurring crystalline inorganic solid with an ordered structure, ice is considered to be a mineral. Depending on the presence of impurities such as particles of soil or bubbles of air, it can appear transparent or a more or less opaque bluish-white color.

Virtually all of the ice on Earth is of a hexagonal crystalline structure denoted as ice I_h (spoken as "ice one h"). Depending on temperature and pressure, at least nineteen phases (packing geometries) can exist. The most common phase transition to ice I_h occurs when liquid water is cooled below 0 °C (273.15 K, 32 °F) at standard atmospheric pressure. When water is cooled rapidly (quenching), up to three types of amorphous ice can form. Interstellar ice is overwhelmingly low-density amorphous ice (LDA), which likely makes LDA ice the most abundant type in the universe. When cooled slowly, correlated proton tunneling occurs below −253.15 °C (20 K, −423.67 °F) giving rise to macroscopic quantum phenomena. (Full article...)
Image 10
A kilogram mass and three metric measuring devices: a tape measure in centimetres, a thermometer in degrees Celsius, and a multimeter that measures potential in volts, current in amperes and resistance in ohms.

The metric system is a system of measurement that standardizes a set of base units and a nomenclature for describing relatively large and small quantities via decimal-based multiplicative unit prefixes. Though the rules governing the metric system have changed over time, the modern definition, the International System of Units (SI), defines the metric prefixes and seven base units: metre (m), kilogram (kg), second (s), ampere (A), kelvin (K), mole (mol), and candela (cd).

An SI derived unit is a named combination of base units such as hertz (cycles per second), newton (kg⋅m/s²), and tesla (1 kg⋅s⁻²⋅A⁻¹) and in the case of Celsius a shifted scale from Kelvin. Certain units have been officially accepted for use with the SI. Some of these are decimalised, like the litre and electronvolt, and are considered "metric". Others, like the astronomical unit are not. Ancient non-metric but SI-accepted multiples of time, minute and hour, are base 60 (sexagesimal). Similarly, the angular measure degree and submultiples,
arcminute, and arcsecond, are also sexagesimal and SI-accepted. (Full article...)
Image 11
Ronald Paul "Ron" Fedkiw (born February 27, 1968) is a full professor in the Stanford University department of computer science and a leading researcher in the field of computer graphics, focusing on topics relating to physically based simulation of natural phenomena and machine learning. His techniques have been employed in many motion pictures. He has earned recognition at the 80th Academy Awards and the 87th Academy Awards as well as from the National Academy of Sciences.

His first Academy Award was awarded for developing techniques that enabled many technically sophisticated adaptations including the visual effects in 21st century movies in the Star Wars, Harry Potter, Terminator, and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises. Fedkiw has designed a platform that has been used to create many of the movie world's most advanced special effects since it was first used on the T-X character in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. His second Academy Award was awarded for computer graphics techniques for special effects for large scale destruction. Although he has won an Oscar for his work, he does not design the visual effects that use his technique. Instead, he has developed a system that other award-winning technicians and engineers have used to create visual effects for some of the world's most expensive and highest-grossing movies. (Full article...)
Image 12
Styrofoam peanuts clinging to a cat's fur due to static electricity.

The triboelectric effect (also known as triboelectricity, triboelectric charging, triboelectrification, or tribocharging) describes electric charge transfer between two objects when they contact or slide against each other. It can occur with different materials, such as the sole of a shoe on a carpet, or between two pieces of the same material. It is ubiquitous, and occurs with differing amounts of charge transfer (tribocharge) for all solid materials. There is evidence that tribocharging can occur between combinations of solids, liquids and gases, for instance liquid flowing in a solid tube or an aircraft flying through air.

Often static electricity is a consequence of the triboelectric effect when the charge stays on one or both of the objects and is not conducted away. The term triboelectricity has been used to refer to the field of study or the general phenomenon of the triboelectric effect, or to the static electricity that results from it. When there is no sliding, tribocharging is sometimes called contact electrification, and any static electricity generated is sometimes called contact electricity. The terms are often used interchangeably, and may be confused. (Full article...)
Image 13
Electrical elastance is the reciprocal of capacitance. The SI unit of elastance is the inverse farad (F⁻¹). The concept is not widely used by electrical and electronic engineers, as the value of capacitors is typically specified in units of capacitance rather than inverse capacitance. However, elastance is used in theoretical work in network analysis and has some niche applications, particularly at microwave frequencies.

The term elastance was coined by Oliver Heaviside through the analogy of a capacitor to a spring. The term is also used for analogous quantities in other energy domains. In the mechanical domain, it corresponds to stiffness, and it is the inverse of compliance in the fluid flow domain, especially in physiology. It is also the name of the generalized quantity in bond-graph analysis and other schemes that analyze systems across multiple domains. (Full article...)
Image 14

Philip Morrison (November 7, 1915 – April 22, 2005) was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics, high energy astrophysics, and SETI.

A graduate of Carnegie Tech, Morrison became interested in physics, which he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He also joined the Communist Party. During World War II he joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Eugene Wigner on the design of nuclear reactors. (Full article...)
Image 15

Composite image of the core region of Messier 87 taken at radio wavelengths showing glowing gas surrounding a supermassive black hole.

A black hole is a massive, compact astronomical object so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping, even light. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. A black hole has a great effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, but has no locally detectable features according to general relativity. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly.

Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found the first modern solution of general relativity that would characterise a black hole. Due to his influential research, the Schwarzschild metric is named after him. David Finkelstein, in 1958, first published the interpretation of "black hole" as a region of space from which nothing can escape. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was not until the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality. The first black hole known was Cygnus X-1, identified by several researchers independently in 1971. (Full article...)

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May anniversaries

May 1, 1960 - U-2 spy plane shot down
May 6, 1937 - Hindenburg fire
May 9, 1012 BC – Solar Eclipse seen at Ugarit, 6:09–6:39 PM.
May 9, 1904 – City of Truro, a steam locomotive exceeds 100 mph (160 km/h).
May 10, 1946 – V-2 rocket's first successful launch at White Sands Proving Ground
May 10, 1960 – The nuclear submarine USS Triton completes Operation Sandblast, the first underwater circumnavigation of the earth.
May 11, 1862 – American Civil War: The ironclad CSS Virginia is scuttled in Virginia.
May 11, 1995 – In New York City, over 170 countries extend Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty indefinitely, without conditions.
May 11, 1998 – India conducts three underground nuclear tests, including a thermonuclear device.
May 14, 2018 - Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan died.
May 16, 1960 - Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
May 16, 1969 – Venera 5, a Soviet spaceprobe, lands on Venus.
May 17, 1865 – The International Telegraph Union is established.
May 18, 1974 - India conducts underground nuclear tests, named Smiling Buddha.
May 18, 1998 - Microsoft sued by US Government
May 19, 1943 - RAF uses bouncing bombs in combat
May 20, 1932 - Amelia Earhart crosses Atlantic Ocean
May 26, 1972 - President Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev sign nuclear weapon non-proliferation pact.
May 24, 1844 - First official telegraph message is sent by Samuel Morse.
May 27, 1937 - Grand opening, Golden Gate Bridge
May 28, 1998 – Pakistan conducts five underground nuclear tests, named Chagai-I.

Births

May 6, 1872 - Willem de Sitter, physicist, mathematician, and astronomer
May 9, 1931 – Vance Brand, astronaut
May 10, 1746 – Gaspard Monge, mathematician
May 10, 1788 – Augustin-Jean Fresnel physicist
May 10, 1963 – Lisa Nowak, astronaut
May 11, 1918 – Richard Feynman, physicist
May 14, 1686 - Gabriel Fahrenheit, physicist and engineer
May 21, 1921 - Andrei Sakharov, nuclear physicist

Deaths

May 10, 1482 – Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, mathematician and astronomer
May 16, 1830 – Joseph Fourier, French scientist
May 17, 1916 – Boris Borisovich Galitzine, Russian physicist

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General images

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

Image 1Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) (from History of physics)
Image 2The Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The inscriptions on the edicts of Ashoka (3rd century BCE) display this number system being used by the Imperial Mauryas. (from History of physics)
Image 3Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1040). (from History of physics)
Image 4Artist's rendition of Kepler-62f, a potentially habitable exoplanet discovered using data transmitted by Kepler space telescope, named for Kepler (from History of physics)
Image 5The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, developer of ideas regarding fluid mechanics and buoyancy. (from History of physics)
$Image 6Image of X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal (from Condensed matter physics)$

Image 6Image of X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal (from Condensed matter physics)
Image 7Classical 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. (from Modern physics)
Image 8Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) (from History of physics)
Image 9Computer simulation of nanogears made of fullerene molecules. It is hoped that advances in nanoscience will lead to machines working on the molecular scale. (from Condensed matter physics)
Image 10Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) (from History of physics)
Image 11Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) (from History of physics)
Image 12Classical 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. (from Modern physics)
Image 13A replica of the first point-contact transistor in Bell labs (from Condensed matter physics)
Image 14Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), early proponent of the modern scientific worldview and method (from History of physics)
Image 15Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782) (from History of physics)
Image 16Albert Einstein (1879–1955), ca. 1905 (from History of physics)
Image 171927 Solvay Conference included prominent physicists Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Hendrik Lorentz, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac (from History of physics)
Image 18Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) developed a heliocentric model of the Solar System. (from History of physics)
Image 19One 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. (from History of physics)
Image 20Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) (from History of physics)
Image 21The Standard Model (from History of physics)
Image 22A Newton's cradle, named after physicist Isaac Newton (from History of physics)
Image 23J.J. Thomson (1856–1940), discoverer of electron and isotopy, and inventor of mass spectrometer, received 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics. (from History of physics)
Image 24Chien-Shiung Wu worked on parity violation in 1956 and announced her results in January 1957. (from History of physics)
Image 25The first Bose–Einstein condensate observed in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms. The blue and white areas represent higher density. (from Condensed matter physics)
Image 26Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (from History of physics)
Image 27Michael Faraday (1791–1867) (from History of physics)
Image 28Einstein proposed that gravitation results from masses (or their equivalent energies) curving ("bending") the spacetime in which they exist, altering the paths they follow within it. (from History of physics)
Image 29Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes van der Waals with the helium liquefactor at Leiden in 1908 (from Condensed matter physics)
Image 30A magnet levitating above a high-temperature superconductor. Today some physicists are working to understand high-temperature superconductivity using the AdS/CFT correspondence. (from Condensed matter physics)
Image 31René Descartes (1596–1650) (from History of physics)
Image 32Star 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 the cylindricalequirectangular projection. (from History of physics)
Image 33Max Planck (1858–1947) (from History of physics)
Image 34Richard Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge (from History of physics)
Image 35Marie Skłodowska-Curie
(1867–1934) received Nobel prizes in physics (1903) and chemistry (1911). (from History of physics)
Image 36Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) (from History of physics)
Image 37The quantum Hall effect: Components of the Hall resistivity as a function of the external magnetic field (from Condensed matter physics)
Image 38Composite montage comparing Jupiter (left) and its four Galilean moons (from top: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto) (from History of physics)
Image 39Aristotle (384–322 BCE) (from History of physics)
Image 40A 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. (from History of physics)
Image 41A page from al-Khwārizmī's Algebra. (from History of physics)
Image 42Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) (from History of physics)
Image 43James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) (from History of physics)
Image 44William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
(1824–1907) (from History of physics)

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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
Quantum	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