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. Physics 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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Herbig–Haro (HH) objects are bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars. They are formed when narrow jets of partially ionised gas ejected by stars collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust at several hundred kilometers per second. Herbig–Haro objects are commonly found in star-forming regions, and several are often seen around a single star, aligned with its rotational axis. Most of them lie within about one parsec (3.26 light-years) of the source, although some have been observed several parsecs away. HH objects are transient phenomena that last around a few tens of thousands of years. They can change visibly over timescales of a few years as they move rapidly away from their parent star into the gas clouds of interstellar space (the interstellar medium or ISM). Hubble Space Telescope observations have revealed the complex evolution of HH objects over the period of a few years, as parts of the nebula fade while others brighten as they collide with the clumpy material of the interstellar medium.
First observed in the late 19th century by Sherburne Wesley Burnham, Herbig–Haro objects were recognised as a distinct type of emission nebula in the 1940s. The first astronomers to study them in detail were George Herbig and Guillermo Haro, after whom they have been named. Herbig and Haro were working independently on studies of star formation when they first analysed the objects, and recognised that they were a by-product of the star formation process. Although HH objects are visible-wavelength phenomena, many remain invisible at these wavelengths due to dust and gas, and can only be detected at infrared wavelengths. Such objects, when observed in near-infrared, are called molecular hydrogen emission-line objects (MHOs). (Full article...)
Did you know -
- ...that on November 2009, CERN's Large Hadron Collider became the world's highest energy particle accelerator?
- ...that 2005 was endorsed by the United Nations as the World Year of Physics?
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Newton's cradle, named after Sir Isaac Newton, is a device that demonstrates conservation of momentum and energy via a series of swinging spheres. When one on the end is lifted and released, the resulting force travels through the line and pushes the last one upward.
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In particle physics, quantum electrodynamics (QED) is the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics. In essence, it describes how light and matter interact and is the first theory where full agreement between quantum mechanics and special relativity is achieved. QED mathematically describes all phenomena involving electrically charged particles interacting by means of exchange of photons and represents the quantum counterpart of classical electromagnetism giving a complete account of matter and light interaction.
In technical terms, QED can be described as a very accurate way to calculate the probability of the position and movement of particles, even those massless such as photons, and the quantity depending on position (field) of those particles, and described light and matter beyond the wave-particle duality proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905. Richard Feynman called it "the jewel of physics" for its extremely accurate predictions of quantities like the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron and the Lamb shift of the energy levels of hydrogen. It is the most precise and stringently tested theory in physics. (Full article...) -
Val Logsdon Fitch (March 10, 1923 – February 5, 2015) was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered. This demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry.
Born on a cattle ranch near Merriman, Nebraska, Fitch was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II, and worked on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. He later graduated from McGill University, and completed his PhD in physics in 1954 at Columbia University. He was a member of the faculty at Princeton University from 1954 until his retirement in 2005. (Full article...) -
Incoming wave (red) reflected at the wall produces the outgoing wave (blue), both being overlaid resulting in the clapotis (black).
In hydrodynamics, a clapotis (from French for "lapping of water") is a non-breaking standing wave pattern, caused for example, by the reflection of a traveling surface wave train from a near vertical shoreline like a breakwater, seawall or steep cliff.
The resulting clapotic wave does not travel horizontally, but has a fixed pattern of nodes and antinodes.
These waves promote erosion at the toe of the wall, and can cause severe damage to shore structures. The term was coined in 1877 by French mathematician and physicist Joseph Valentin Boussinesq who called these waves 'le clapotis' meaning "the lapping".
In the idealized case of "full clapotis" where a purely monotonic incoming wave is completely reflected normal to a solid vertical wall,
the standing wave height is twice the height of the incoming waves at a distance of one half wavelength from the wall.
In this case, the circular orbits of the water particles in the deep-water wave are converted to purely linear motion, with vertical velocities at the antinodes, and horizontal velocities at the nodes. (Full article...) -
A simulated particle collision in the LHC.
The safety of high energy particle collisions was a topic of widespread discussion and topical interest during the time when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and later the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—currently the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator—were being constructed and commissioned. Concerns arose that such high energy experiments—designed to produce novel particles and forms of matter—had the potential to create harmful states of matter or even doomsday scenarios. Claims escalated as commissioning of the LHC drew closer, around 2008–2010. The claimed dangers included the production of stable micro black holes and the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets, and these questions were explored in the media, on the Internet and at times through the courts.
To address these concerns in the context of the LHC, CERN mandated a group of independent scientists to review these scenarios. In a report issued in 2003, they concluded that, like current particle experiments such as the RHIC, the LHC particle collisions pose no conceivable threat. A second review of the evidence commissioned by CERN was released in 2008. The report, prepared by a group of physicists affiliated to CERN but not involved in the LHC experiments, reaffirmed the safety of the LHC collisions in light of further research conducted since the 2003 assessment. It was reviewed and endorsed by a CERN committee of 20 external scientists and by the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles & Fields of the American Physical Society, and was later published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics G by the UK Institute of Physics, which also endorsed its conclusions. (Full article...) -
Figure 1. The light path through a Michelson interferometer. The two light rays with a common source combine at the half-silvered mirror to reach the detector. They may either interfere constructively (strengthening in intensity) if their light waves arrive in phase, or interfere destructively (weakening in intensity) if they arrive out of phase, depending on the exact distances between the three mirrors.
Interferometry is a technique which uses the interference of superimposed waves to extract information. Interferometry typically uses electromagnetic waves and is an important investigative technique in the fields of astronomy, fiber optics, engineering metrology, optical metrology, oceanography, seismology, spectroscopy (and its applications to chemistry), quantum mechanics, nuclear and particle physics, plasma physics, biomolecular interactions, surface profiling, microfluidics, mechanical stress/strain measurement, velocimetry, optometry, and making holograms.
Interferometers are devices that extract information from interference. They are widely used in science and industry for the measurement of microscopic displacements, refractive index changes and surface irregularities. In the case with most interferometers, light from a single source is split into two beams that travel in different optical paths, which are then combined again to produce interference; two incoherent sources can also be made to interfere under some circumstances. The resulting interference fringes give information about the difference in optical path lengths. In analytical science, interferometers are used to measure lengths and the shape of optical components with nanometer precision; they are the highest-precision length measuring instruments in existence. In Fourier transform spectroscopy they are used to analyze light containing features of absorption or emission associated with a substance or mixture. An astronomical interferometer consists of two or more separate telescopes that combine their signals, offering a resolution equivalent to that of a telescope of diameter equal to the largest separation between its individual elements. (Full article...) -
Nikola Tesla (/ˈnɪkələ ˈtɛslə/; Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла, [nǐkola têsla]; 10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American engineer, futurist, and inventor. He is known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla first studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without receiving a degree. He then gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884 he immigrated to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His AC induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company eventually marketed. (Full article...) -
Beryl May Dent MIEE (10 May 1900 – 9 August 1977) was an English mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analogue and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. She was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of schoolteachers. The family left Chippenham in 1901, after her father became head teacher of the then recently established Warminster County School. In 1923, she graduated from the University of Bristol with First Class Honours in applied mathematics. She was awarded the Ashworth Hallett scholarship by the university and was accepted as a postgraduate student at Newnham College, Cambridge.
She returned to Bristol in 1925, after being appointed a researcher in the Physics Department at the University of Bristol, with her salary being paid by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. In 1927, John Lennard-Jones was appointed Professor of Theoretical physics, a chair being created for him, with Dent becoming his research assistant in theoretical physics. Lennard‑Jones pioneered the theory of interatomic and intermolecular forces at Bristol and she became one of his first collaborators. They published six papers together from 1926 to 1928, dealing with the forces between atoms and ions, that were to become the foundation of her master's thesis. Later work has shown that the results they obtained had direct application to atomic force microscopy by predicting that non-contact imaging is possible only at small tip-sample separations. (Full article...) -
A bouncing ball. The motion is not quite parabolic due to air resistance.
The physics of a bouncing ball concerns the physical behaviour of bouncing balls, particularly its motion before, during, and after impact against the surface of another body. Several aspects of a bouncing ball's behaviour serve as an introduction to mechanics in high school or undergraduate level physics courses. However, the exact modelling of the behaviour is complex and of interest in sports engineering.
The motion of a ball is generally described by projectile motion (which can be affected by gravity, drag, the Magnus effect, and buoyancy), while its impact is usually characterized through the coefficient of restitution (which can be affected by the nature of the ball, the nature of the impacting surface, the impact velocity, rotation, and local conditions such as temperature and pressure). To ensure fair play, many sports governing bodies set limits on the bounciness of their ball and forbid tampering with the ball's aerodynamic properties. The bounciness of balls has been a feature of sports as ancient as the Mesoamerican ballgame. (Full article...) -
An electron backscatter diffraction pattern of monocrystalline silicon, taken at 20 kV with a field-emission electron source
Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) technique used to study the crystallographic structure of materials. EBSD is carried out in a scanning electron microscope equipped with an EBSD detector comprising at least a phosphorescent screen, a compact lens and a low-light camera. In the microscope an incident beam of electrons hits a tilted sample. As backscattered electrons leave the sample, they interact with the atoms and are both elastically diffracted and lose energy, leaving the sample at various scattering angles before reaching the phosphor screen forming Kikuchi patterns (EBSPs). The EBSD spatial resolution depends on many factors, including the nature of the material under study and the sample preparation. They can be indexed to provide information about the material's grain structure, grain orientation, and phase at the micro-scale. EBSD is used for impurities and defect studies, plastic deformation, and statistical analysis for average misorientation, grain size, and crystallographic texture. EBSD can also be combined with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), cathodoluminescence (CL), and wavelength-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (WDS) for advanced phase identification and materials discovery.
The change and sharpness of the electron backscatter patterns (EBSPs) provide information about lattice distortion in the diffracting volume. Pattern sharpness can be used to assess the level of plasticity. Changes in the EBSP zone axis position can be used to measure the residual stress and small lattice rotations. EBSD can also provide information about the density of geometrically necessary dislocations (GNDs). However, the lattice distortion is measured relative to a reference pattern (EBSP0). The choice of reference pattern affects the measurement precision; e.g., a reference pattern deformed in tension will directly reduce the tensile strain magnitude derived from a high-resolution map while indirectly influencing the magnitude of other components and the spatial distribution of strain. Furthermore, the choice of EBSP0 slightly affects the GND density distribution and magnitude. (Full article...) -
Deep Impact was a NASA space probe launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on January 12, 2005. It was designed to study the interior composition of the comet Tempel 1 (9P/Tempel), by releasing an impactor into the comet. At 05:52 UTC on July 4, 2005, the Impactor successfully collided with the comet's nucleus. The impact excavated debris from the interior of the nucleus, forming an impact crater. Photographs taken by the spacecraft showed the comet to be more dusty and less icy than had been expected. The impact generated an unexpectedly large and bright dust cloud, obscuring the view of the impact crater.
Previous space missions to comets, such as Giotto, Deep Space 1, and Stardust, were fly-by missions. These missions were able to photograph and examine only the surfaces of cometary nuclei, and even then from considerable distances. The Deep Impact mission was the first to eject material from a comet's surface, and the mission garnered considerable publicity from the media, international scientists, and amateur astronomers alike. (Full article...) -
Robert Hooke FRS (/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...) -
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (right) after whom the Lorentz group is named and Albert Einstein whose special theory of relativity is the main source of application. Photo taken by Paul Ehrenfest 1921.
The Lorentz group is a Lie group of symmetries of the spacetime of special relativity. This group can be realized as a collection of matrices, linear transformations, or unitary operators on some Hilbert space; it has a variety of representations. This group is significant because special relativity together with quantum mechanics are the two physical theories that are most thoroughly established, and the conjunction of these two theories is the study of the infinite-dimensional unitary representations of the Lorentz group. These have both historical importance in mainstream physics, as well as connections to more speculative present-day theories. (Full article...) -
A depiction of the ultrasound signals emitted by a bat, and the echo from a nearby object
Echolocation, also called bio sonar, is a biological active sonar used by several animal groups, both in the air and underwater. Echolocating animals emit calls and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects. Echolocation is used for navigation, foraging, and hunting prey.
Echolocation calls can be frequency modulated (FM, varying in pitch during the call) or constant frequency (CF). FM offers precise range discrimination to localize the prey, at the cost of reduced operational range. CF allows both the prey's velocity and its movements to be detected by means of the Doppler effect. FM may be best for close, cluttered environments, while CF may be better in open environments or for hunting while perched. (Full article...) -
Joseph Sidney Gelders (November 20, 1898 – March 1, 1950) was an American physicist who later became an antiracist, civil rights activist, labor organizer, and communist. In the mid-1930s, he served as the secretary and southern-U.S. representative of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. In September 1936, Gelders was kidnapped, beaten, and nearly killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan for his civil rights and labor organizing activities. After his recovery, Gelders continued his activism and cofounded the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. He collaborated closely with other activists including Lucy Randolph Mason and Virginia Foster Durr. Internal injuries sustained during his kidnapping and assault led to Gelders' death on March 1, 1950. (Full article...) -
The Leibstadt Nuclear Power Plant in Switzerland
Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators in some space probes such as Voyager 2. Reactors producing controlled fusion power have been operated since 1958 but have yet to generate net power and are not expected to be commercially available in the near future.
The first nuclear power plant was built in the 1950s. The global installed nuclear capacity grew to 100 GW in the late 1970s, and then expanded during the 1980s, reaching 300 GW by 1990. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union resulted in increased regulation and public opposition to nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants supplied 2,602 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity in 2023, equivalent to about 9% of global electricity generation, and were the second largest low-carbon power source after hydroelectricity. As of November 2024,[update] there are 415 civilian fission reactors in the world, with overall capacity of 374 GW, 66 under construction and 87 planned, with a combined capacity of 72 GW and 84 GW, respectively. The United States has the largest fleet of nuclear reactors, generating almost 800 TWh of low-carbon electricity per year with an average capacity factor of 92%. The average global capacity factor is 89%. Most new reactors under construction are generation III reactors in Asia. (Full article...)
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January anniversaries
1 January
- 1894 - Satyendra Nath Bose's birthday.
- 1801 - Giuseppe Piazzi is the first to notice the dwarf planet Ceres. However, very soon astronomers lose sight of its orbital path. After some months, Giuseppe Piazzi finally calculates its correct position on December 31.
- 1985 - Ernie Wise, a comedian, places the first mobile phone call in the UK.
2 January
- 2 January 1822 - Rudolf Clausius was born.
8 January
- 8 January 1942 - Stephen Hawking was born, on the same day that Galileo Galilei died in 1642.
15 January
- 15 January 1908 - Edward Teller was born.
General images
The following are images from various physics-related articles on Wikipedia.
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The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, developer of ideas regarding fluid mechanics and buoyancy. (from History of physics) -
Chien-Shiung Wu worked on parity violation in 1956 and announced her results in January 1957. (from History of physics) -
Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782) (from History of physics) -
René Descartes (1596–1650) (from History of physics) -
Johannes Kepler.(1571–1630) (from History of physics) -
The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is remembered for his development of a heliocentric model of the Solar System. (from History of physics) -
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) (from History of physics) -
A 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) -
Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) (from History of physics) -
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes van der Waals with the helium liquefactor at Leiden in 1908 (from Condensed matter physics) -
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. (from History of physics) -
The first Bose–Einstein condensate observed in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms. The blue and white areas represent higher density. (from Condensed matter physics) -
Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) (from History of physics) -
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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. (from Modern physics) -
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) (from History of physics) -
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. (from Modern physics) -
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), photographed here in around 1905 (from History of physics) -
Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (from History of physics) -
An artist's rendition of Kepler-62f, a potentially habitable exoplanet discovered using data transmitted by the Kepler space telescope, named after Kepler. (from History of physics) -
Computer 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) -
Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) (from History of physics) -
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A composite montage comparing Jupiter (lefthand side) and its four Galilean moons (top to bottom: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto) (from History of physics) -
Image of X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal (from Condensed matter physics) -
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 the cylindricalequirectangular projection. (from History of physics) -
Richard Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge (from History of physics) -
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. (from History of physics) -
Max Planck (1858–1947) (from History of physics) -
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
(1867–1934) was awarded two Nobel prizes, Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) (from History of physics) -
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. (from History of physics) -
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
(1824–1907) (from History of physics) -
The Standard Model (from History of physics) -
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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. (from History of physics) -
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. (from History of physics) -
The quantum Hall effect: Components of the Hall resistivity as a function of the external magnetic field (from Condensed matter physics) -
Galileo Galilei, early proponent of the modern scientific worldview and method (1564–1642) (from History of physics) -
Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) (from History of physics) -
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) (from History of physics) -
Michael Faraday (1791–1867) (from History of physics)
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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.
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