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Physics is the natural science of matter, involving the 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, with its main goal being to understand how the universe behaves. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.
Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines and, through its inclusion of astronomy, perhaps the oldest. 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 emerged as unique research endeavors in their own right. 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 new products that have dramatically transformed modern-day 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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ZETA, short for Zero Energy Thermonuclear Assembly, was a major experiment in the early history of fusion power research. Based on the pinch plasma confinement technique, and built at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in the United Kingdom, ZETA was larger and more powerful than any fusion machine in the world at that time. Its goal was to produce large numbers of fusion reactions, although it was not large enough to produce net energy.
ZETA went into operation in August 1957 and by the end of the month it was giving off bursts of about a million neutrons per pulse. Measurements suggested the fuel was reaching between 1 and 5 million kelvins, a temperature that would produce nuclear fusion reactions, explaining the quantities of neutrons being seen. Early results were leaked to the press in September 1957, and the following January an extensive review was released. Front-page articles in newspapers around the world announced it as a breakthrough towards unlimited energy, a scientific advance for Britain greater than the recently launched Sputnik had been for the Soviet Union. (Full article...)Did you know -
- ... the mirage of astronomical objects is an optical phenomenon, which produces distorted or multiple images of astronomical objects such as the Sun, the Moon, the planets, bright stars and very bright comets
- ... that your watch would run slower when orbiting a black hole than it would on Earth?
- ... that homing pigeons wouldn't be able to navigate on Mercury because the planet has no magnetic field or atmosphere?
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Difference between classical and modern physics
While physics aims to discover universal laws, its theories lie in explicit domains of applicability. Loosely speaking, the laws of classical physics accurately describe systems whose important length scales are greater than the atomic scale and whose motions are much slower than the speed of light. Outside of this domain, observations do not match their predictions. Albert Einstein contributed the framework of special relativity, which replaced notions of absolute time and space with spacetime and allowed an accurate description of systems whose components have speeds approaching the speed of light. Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, and others introduced quantum mechanics, a probabilistic notion of particles and interactions that allowed an accurate description of atomic and subatomic scales. Later, quantum field theory unified quantum mechanics and special relativity. General relativity allowed for a dynamical, curved spacetime, with which highly massive systems and the large-scale structure of the universe can be well-described. General relativity has not yet been unified with the other fundamental descriptions; several candidate theories of quantum gravity are being developed.
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These are Good articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.
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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...) -
Otto Hahn (pronounced [ˈɔtoː ˈhaːn] ; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered radioactive isotopes of radium, thorium, protactinium and uranium. He also discovered the phenomena of atomic recoil and nuclear isomerism, and pioneered rubidium–strontium dating. In 1938, Hahn, Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn alone, was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nuclear fission was the basis for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.
A graduate of the University of Marburg, which awarded him a doctorate in 1901, Hahn studied under Sir William Ramsay at University College London and at McGill University in Montreal under Ernest Rutherford, where he discovered several new radioactive isotopes. He returned to Germany in 1906; Emil Fischer placed a former woodworking shop in the basement of the Chemical Institute at the University of Berlin at his disposal to use as a laboratory. Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907 and became a Privatdozent. In 1912, he became head of the Radioactivity Department of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Working with the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner in the building that now bears their names, he made a series of groundbreaking discoveries, culminating with her isolation of the longest-lived isotope of protactinium in 1918. (Full article...) -
Lise Meitner (/ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnər/ LEE-zə MYTE-nər, German: [ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnɐ] ; born Elise Meitner, 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was a Jewish-Austrian physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and would jointly confirm that nuclear fission was a replicable process within physics. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917.
Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the second woman from the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent much of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She lost her positions because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws in 1935, within what was now Nazi Germany. On 13-14 July 1938, she fled to Holland with the help of Dirk Coster after the Anschluss due to having her passport revoked for being Jewish, and then continued onto Stockholm, Sweden. Meitner lived for many years in Sweden, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen in 1949, but would relocate to Britain to be with other family members in the 1950s. (Full article...) -
Sir John Douglas Cockcroft OM KCB CBE FRS (27 May 1897 – 18 September 1967) was a British physicist who shared with Ernest Walton the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951 for splitting the atomic nucleus, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power.
After service on the Western Front with the Royal Field Artillery during the Great War, Cockcroft studied electrical engineering at Manchester Municipal College of Technology whilst he was an apprentice at Metropolitan Vickers Trafford Park and was also a member of their research staff. He then won a scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he sat the tripos exam in June 1924, becoming a wrangler. Ernest Rutherford accepted Cockcroft as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory, and Cockcroft completed his doctorate under Rutherford's supervision in 1928. With Ernest Walton and Mark Oliphant he built what became known as a Cockcroft–Walton generator. Cockcroft and Walton used this to perform the first artificial disintegration of an atomic nucleus, a feat popularly known as splitting the atom. (Full article...) -
A tau emerald (Hemicordulia tau) dragonfly has flight muscles attached directly to its wings.
Insects are the only group of invertebrates that have evolved wings and flight. Insects first flew in the Carboniferous, some 300 to 350 million years ago, making them the first animals to evolve flight. Wings may have evolved from appendages on the sides of existing limbs, which already had nerves, joints, and muscles used for other purposes. These may initially have been used for sailing on water, or to slow the rate of descent when gliding.
Two insect groups, the dragonflies and the mayflies, have flight muscles attached directly to the wings. In other winged insects, flight muscles attach to the thorax, which make it oscillate in order to induce the wings to beat. Of these insects, some (flies and some beetles) achieve very high wingbeat frequencies through the evolution of an "asynchronous" nervous system, in which the thorax oscillates faster than the rate of nerve impulses. (Full article...) -
Glenn Theodore Seaborg (/ˈsiːbɔːrɡ/ SEE-borg; April 19, 1912 – February 25, 1999) was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work in this area also led to his development of the actinide concept and the arrangement of the actinide series in the periodic table of the elements.
Seaborg spent most of his career as an educator and research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, serving as a professor, and, between 1958 and 1961, as the university's second chancellor. He advised ten US presidents—from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton—on nuclear policy and was Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, where he pushed for commercial nuclear energy and the peaceful applications of nuclear science. Throughout his career, Seaborg worked for arms control. He was a signatory to the Franck Report and contributed to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He was a well-known advocate of science education and federal funding for pure research. Toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, he was the principal author of the Seaborg Report on academic science, and, as a member of President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education, he was a key contributor to its 1983 report "A Nation at Risk". (Full article...) -
Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker FRS FRSE (24 October 1873 – 24 March 1956) was a British mathematician, physicist, and historian of science. Whittaker was a leading mathematical scholar of the early 20th century who contributed widely to applied mathematics and was renowned for his research in mathematical physics and numerical analysis, including the theory of special functions, along with his contributions to astronomy, celestial mechanics, the history of physics, and digital signal processing.
Among the most influential publications in Whittaker's bibliography, he authored several popular reference works in mathematics, physics, and the history of science, including A Course of Modern Analysis (better known as Whittaker and Watson), Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies, and A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity. Whittaker is also remembered for his role in the relativity priority dispute, as he credited Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz with developing special relativity in the second volume of his History, a dispute which has lasted several decades, though scientific consensus has remained with Einstein. Whittaker served as the Royal Astronomer of Ireland early in his career, a position he held from 1906 through 1912, before moving on to the chair of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh for the next three decades and, towards the end of his career, received the Copley Medal and was knighted. The School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh holds The Whittaker Colloquium, a yearly lecture, in his honour and the Edinburgh Mathematical Society promotes an outstanding young Scottish mathematician once every four years with the Sir Edmund Whittaker Memorial Prize, also given in his honour. (Full article...) -
William George Penney, Baron Penney, OM, KBE, FRS, FRSE (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...) -
Norris Edwin Bradbury (May 30, 1909 – August 20, 1997), was an American physicist who served as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years from 1945 to 1970. He succeeded Robert Oppenheimer, who personally chose Bradbury for the position of director after working closely with him on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Bradbury was in charge of the final assembly of "the Gadget", detonated in July 1945 for the Trinity test.
Bradbury took charge at Los Alamos at a difficult time. Staff were leaving in droves, living conditions were poor and there was a possibility that the laboratory would close. He managed to persuade enough staff to stay and got the University of California to renew the contract to manage the laboratory. He pushed continued development of nuclear weapons, transforming them from laboratory devices to production models. Numerous improvements made them safer, more reliable and easier to store and handle, and made more efficient use of scarce fissionable materiel. (Full article...) -
Chien-Shiung Wu (Chinese: 吳健雄; pinyin: Wú Jiànxióng; Wade–Giles: Wu2 Chien4-hsiung2; May 31, 1912 – February 16, 1997) was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research". (Full article...) -
Countries using the metric, imperial and US customary systems as of 2019
The history of the metric system began during the Age of Enlightenment with measures of length and weight derived from nature, along with their decimal multiples and fractions. The system became the standard of France and Europe within half a century. Other measures with unity ratios were added, and the system went on to be adopted across the world.
The first practical realisation of the metric system came in 1799, during the French Revolution, after the existing system of measures had become impractical for trade, and was replaced by a decimal system based on the kilogram and the metre. The basic units were taken from the natural world. The unit of length, the metre, was based on the dimensions of the Earth, and the unit of mass, the kilogram, was based on the mass of a volume of water of one litre (a cubic decimetre). Reference copies for both units were manufactured in platinum and remained the standards of measure for the next 90 years. After a period of reversion to the mesures usuelles due to unpopularity of the metric system, the metrication of France and much of Europe was complete by the 1850s. (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...) -
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes inside the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and radio waves to generate images of the organs in the body. MRI does not involve X-rays or the use of ionizing radiation, which distinguishes it from computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans. MRI is a medical application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) which can also be used for imaging in other NMR applications, such as NMR spectroscopy.
MRI is widely used in hospitals and clinics for medical diagnosis, staging and follow-up of disease. Compared to CT, MRI provides better contrast in images of soft tissues, e.g. in the brain or abdomen. However, it may be perceived as less comfortable by patients, due to the usually longer and louder measurements with the subject in a long, confining tube, although "open" MRI designs mostly relieve this. Additionally, implants and other non-removable metal in the body can pose a risk and may exclude some patients from undergoing an MRI examination safely. (Full article...) -
Edward Creutz (January 23, 1913 – June 27, 2009) was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war he became a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He was Vice President of Research at General Atomics from 1955 to 1970. He published over 65 papers on botany, physics, mathematics, metallurgy and science policy, and held 18 patents relating to nuclear energy.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Creutz helped Princeton University build its first cyclotron. During World War II he worked on nuclear reactor design under Eugene Wigner at the Metallurgical Laboratory, designing the cooling system for the first water-cooled reactors. He led a group that studied the metallurgy of uranium and other elements used in reactor designs. In October 1944, he moved to the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he became a group leader. (Full article...) -
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light and other electromagnetic waves, is capable of possessing enough energy to escape it. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to 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 it 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 characterize a black hole. 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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June anniversaries
- 1 June 1831 – James Clark Ross discovers the North Magnetic Pole.
- 1 June 1869 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric voting machine.
- 1 June 1910 – Robert Falcon Scott expedition leaves England for South Pole.
- 1 June 1978 – First Patent Cooperation Treaty international filings.
- 1 June 1980 – Cable News Network (CNN) begins broadcasting.
- 1 June 1990 – Bush and Gorbachev sign chemical weapons ban.
- 1 June 2000 – Patent Law Treaty is signed.
- 2 June 1966 – Surveyor 1 lands on the Moon.
- 2 June 2003 - ESA launches Mars Express probe to Mars.
- 3 June 1965 - First American spacewalk, mission Gemini IV
- 3 June 1973 – A Soviet supersonic Tupolev Tu-144 crashes.
- 4 June 781 BC – First historic solar eclipse is recorded in China.
- 4 June 1973 – A patent for the ATM is granted.
- 4 June 1996 - First flight. Ariane 5 rocket explodes after roughly 20 seconds.
- 5 June 1977 – Apple II, personal computer goes on sale.
Birthdays
- 1 June 1633 – Geminiano Montanari, Italian astronomer (d. 1687)
- 1 June 1796 – Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, French physicist (d. 1832)
- 1 June 1899 – Edward Charles Titchmarsh, English mathematician (d. 1963)
- 1 June 1907 – Frank Whittle, invented jet engine. (d. 1996)
- 1 June 1917 – William S. Knowles Nobel Prize laureate
- 1 June 1940 – Kip Thorne, American physicist
- 2 June 1930 – Pete Conrad, American astronaut (d. 1999)
- 2 June 1949 – Heather Couper, British astronomer
- 3 June 1659 – David Gregory, Scottish astronomer (d. 1708)
- 3 June 1923 – Igor Shafarevich, Russian mathematician
- 4 June 1704 – Benjamin Huntsman, English inventor and manufacturer (d. 1776)
- 4 June 1877 – Heinrich Wieland, German biochemist & Nobel laureate (d. 1957)
- 4 June 1916 – Robert F. Furchgott, American chemist & Nobel laureate (d. 2009)
- 4 June 1967 – Robert Shane Kimbrough, American astronaut
- 5 June 1760 – Johan Gadolin, Finnish scientist (d. 1852)
- 5 June 1819 – John Couch Adams, English astronomer (d. 1892)
- 5 June 1862 – Allvar Gullstrand, Swedish ophthalmologist Nobel laureate (d. 1930)
- 5 June 1900 – Dennis Gabor, Hungarian physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1979)
- 5 June 1965 – Michael E. Brown, American astronomer
- 13 June 1831 - James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist (d. 1879)
General images
The following are images from various physics-related articles on Wikipedia.
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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) -
Sir Isaac Newton
(1642–1727) (from History of physics) -
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Image of X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal (from Condensed matter physics) -
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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 cylindrical equirectangular projection. (from History of physics) -
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
(1867–1934) She was awarded two Nobel prizes, Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) (from History of physics) -
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Christiaan Huygens
(1629–1695) (from History of physics) -
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) -
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Albert Einstein (1879–1955), photographed here in around 1905 (from History of physics) -
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) -
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) -
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) -
The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, developer of ideas regarding fluid mechanics and buoyancy. (from History of physics) -
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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) -
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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 Standard Model. (from History of physics) -
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Johannes van der Waals with the helium liquefactor at Leiden in 1908 (from Condensed matter physics) -
A composite montage comparing Jupiter (lefthand side) and its four Galilean moons (top to bottom: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto). (from History of physics) -
Richard Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge (from History of physics) -
Chien-Shiung Wu worked on parity violation in 1956 and announced her results in January 1957. (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) -
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) -
The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is remembered for his development of a heliocentric model of the Solar System. (from History of physics) -
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The quantum Hall effect: Components of the Hall resistivity as a function of the external magnetic field (from Condensed matter 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) -
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Galileo Galilei, early proponent of the modern scientific worldview and method
(1564–1642) (from History of physics) -
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William 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.
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