Physics (Greek: physis - φύσις), in everyday terms, is the science of matter and its motion. It is the science that seeks to understand very basic concepts such as force, energy, mass, and charge. More completely, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the world around us behaves.

In one form or another, physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy. Over the last two millennia, physics has sometimes been synonymous with philosophy, chemistry and certain branches of mathematics and biology but it emerged as a modern science in the 16th century. Physics is now generally distinct from these other disciplines, even though its boundaries remain difficult to define rigorously.

Physics is significant and influential, in part because advances in its understanding have often translated into new technologies, but also because new ideas in physics often resonate with the other sciences, mathematics and philosophy. For example, advances in the understanding of electromagnetism led directly to the development of new products that have transformed society (including television, computers and domestic appliances); advances in thermodynamics led to the development of motorized transport; and advances in mechanics inspired the development of the calculus, quantum chemistry, and the use of instruments like the electron microscope in microbiology.

Today, physics is both a broad and deep subject that, in practical terms, can be split into several subfields. It can also be divided into two conceptually different branches: theoretical and experimental physics; the former dealing with the development of new theories, whilst the latter deals with the experimental testing of these new, or existing, theories. Despite many important discoveries during the last four centuries, many significant questions about nature still remain unanswered, and many areas of the subject are still highly active.

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Introduction

There is also a list of basic physics topics and a list of basic science topics.

Scope and goals

Physics is the discipline devoted to understanding nature in a very general sense: the fundamental characteristic of physics is that it aims to gain knowledge, and hopefully understanding, of the general properties of the world around us. As an example, we can consider asking the following question on the nature of the Universe itself: how many dimensions do we need? Given that we know the Universe to consist of four dimensions (three space dimensions, and one time dimension), we can also ask why the universe picked those particular numbers: why not have four space dimensions? The fact that a choice was made out of a possibility of many means that questions like these fall under the scope of physics. Other general properties of nature include the existence of mass (as in Newton's laws of motion), charge (as in Maxwell's equations), and spin (in Quantum mechanics), amongst others.