Father of physics

History of physics

Physics is a branch of science whose primary objects of study are matter and energy. Discoveries of physics find applications throughout the natural sciences and in technology, since matter and energy are the basic constituents of the natural world. Some other domains of study—more limited in their scope—may be considered branches that have split off from physics to become sciences in their own right. Physics today may be divided loosely into classical physics and modern physics

Elements of what became physics were drawn primarily from the fields of astronomy, optics, and mechanics, which were methodologically united through the study of geometry. These mathematical disciplines began in antiquity with the Babylonians and with Hellenistic writers such as Archimedes and Ptolemy. Ancient philosophy, meanwhile – including what was called "physics" – focused on explaining nature through ideas such as Aristotle's four types of "cause".

Ancient Greece[edit]

The move towards a rational understanding of nature began at least since the Archaic period in Greece (650–480 BCE) with the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The philosopher Thales of Miletus (7th and 6th centuries BCE), dubbed "the Father of Science" for refusing to accept various supernatural, religious or mythological explanations for natural phenomena, proclaimed that every event had a natural cause.^[1] Thales also made advancements in 580 BCE by suggesting that water is the basic element, experimenting with the attraction between magnets and rubbed amber and formulating the first recorded cosmologies. Anaximander, famous for his proto-evolutionary theory, disputed Thales' ideas and proposed that rather than water, a substance called apeiron was the building block of all matter. Around 500 BCE, Heraclitus proposed that the only basic law governing the Universe was the principle of change and that nothing remains in the same state indefinitely. This observation made him one of the first scholars in ancient physics to address the role of time in the universe, a key and sometimes contentious concept in modern and present-day physics.^{[citation needed]} The early physicist Leucippus (fl. first half of the 5th century BCE) adamantly opposed the idea of direct divine intervention in the universe, proposing instead that natural phenomena had a natural cause. Leucippus and his student Democritus were the first to develop the theory of atomism, the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms