Portal:History of science/Article/21

The history of physics involves not only fundamental changes in ideas about the material world, mathematics and philosophy, but also, through technology, a transformation of society. Physics is considered both a body of knowledge and the practice that makes and transmits it. The Scientific Revolution, beginning about year 1600, is a convenient boundary between ancient thought and classical physics. The year 1900 marks the beginnings of a more modern physics; today, the science shows no sign of completion, as more issues are raised, with questions rising from the age of the universe, to the nature of the vacuum, to the ultimate nature of the properties of subatomic particles. Partial theories are currently the best that physics has to offer, at the present time. The list of unsolved problems in physics is large.

Since antiquity, people have tried to understand the behavior of matter: why unsupported objects drop to the ground, why different materials have different properties, and so forth. Also a mystery was the character of the universe, such as the form of the Earth and the behavior of celestial objects such as the Sun and the Moon. Typically the behavior and nature of the world was explained by invoking the actions of gods. Eventually speculative natural explanations were proposed based on considering such questions; most of them were wrong, but this is part of the nature of the enterprise of systematic explanation, and even modern theories of quantum mechanics and relativity are merely considered "theories that haven't been broken yet". Physical theories in antiquity were largely couched in philosophical terms, and rarely verified by systematic experimental testing.