Article
Article
Physics
Article By:
Barger, Vernon D. Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin.
Last reviewed:June 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.514300
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The scientific discipline concerned with those aspects of nature which can be understood in a fundamental way in terms of elementary principles and laws. Physics is one of the many modern disciplines recognized as its own field that emerged from under the original umbrella term of natural philosophy, along with examples including astronomy and chemistry. Physics has itself branched into many specialized subfields in the modern era. During this process, physics retained its original aim of understanding the structure of the natural world and explaining natural phenomena (Fig 1).
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