Physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

(Greek: physis

Physis

Physis is a Greek theological, philosophical, and scientific term usually translated into English as "nature."In The Odyssey, Homer uses the word once , referring to the intrinsic way of growth of a particular species of plant. In the pre-Socratic philosophers it developed a complex of other...

–φύσις meaning "nature") is the natural science

Natural science

The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...

 which examines basic concepts such as mass

Mass

Mass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...

, charge

Charge (physics)

In physics, a charge may refer to one of many different quantities, such as the electric charge in electromagnetism or the color charge in quantum chromodynamics. Charges are associated with conserved quantum numbers.-Formal definition:...

, matter

Matter

Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...

 and its motion

Motion (physics)

In physics, motion is a change in position of an object with respect to time. Change in action is the result of an unbalanced force. Motion is typically described in terms of velocity, acceleration, displacement and time . An object's velocity cannot change unless it is acted upon by a force, as...

 and all that derives from these, such as energy

Energy

In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...

, force

Force

In physics, a force is any influence that causes an object to undergo a change in speed, a change in direction, or a change in shape. In other words, a force is that which can cause an object with mass to change its velocity , i.e., to accelerate, or which can cause a flexible object to deform...

 and spacetime

Spacetime

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space as being three-dimensional and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort from the spatial dimensions...

. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

, conducted in order to understand how the world

World

World is a common name for the whole of human civilization, specifically human experience, history, or the human condition in general, worldwide, i.e. anywhere on Earth....

 and universe

Universe

The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...

 behave.

Articles related to physics include:

A

Abbe number

Abbe number

In physics and optics, the Abbe number, also known as the V-number or constringence of a transparent material, is a measure of the material's dispersion in relation to the refractive index...

- Absolute zero

Absolute zero

Absolute zero is the theoretical temperature at which entropy reaches its minimum value. The laws of thermodynamics state that absolute zero cannot be reached using only thermodynamic means....

- Accelerating universe

Accelerating universe

The accelerating universe is the observation that the universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate, which in formal terms means that the cosmic scale factor a has a positive second derivative, implying that the velocity at which a given galaxy is receding from us should be continually...

- Acceleration

Acceleration

In physics, acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with time. In one dimension, acceleration is the rate at which something speeds up or slows down. However, since velocity is a vector, acceleration describes the rate of change of both the magnitude and the direction of velocity. ...

- Acoustic theory

Acoustic theory

Acoustic theory is the field relating to mathematical description of sound waves. It is derived from fluid dynamics. See acoustics for the engineering approach....

- Action (physics)

Action (physics)

In physics, action is an attribute of the dynamics of a physical system. It is a mathematical functional which takes the trajectory, also called path or history, of the system as its argument and has a real number as its result. Action has the dimension of energy × time, and its unit is...

- Active laser medium

Active laser medium

The active laser medium is the source of optical gain within a laser. The gain results from the stimulated emission of electronic or molecular transitions to a lower energy state from a higher energy state...

- Adiabatic process

Adiabatic process

In thermodynamics, an adiabatic process or an isocaloric process is a thermodynamic process in which the net heat transfer to or from the working fluid is zero. Such a process can occur if the container of the system has thermally-insulated walls or the process happens in an extremely short time,...

- Aether theory
- Agrophysics

Agrophysics

Agrophysics is a branch of science bordering on agronomy and physics,whose objects of study are the agroecosystem - the biological objects, biotope and biocoenosis affected by human activity, studied and described using the methods of physical sciences....

- Aharonov–Bohm effect
- Alcubierre metric
- Alembert, Jean le Rond d'

Jean le Rond d'Alembert

Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie...

- Alferov, Zhores Ivanovich

Zhores Ivanovich Alferov

Zhores Ivanovich Alferov is a Soviet and Russian physicist and academic who contributed significantly to the creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics. He is an inventor of the heterotransistor and the winner of 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is also a Russian politician and has...

- Alfvén, Hannes Olof Gösta
- Alpha particle

Alpha particle

Alpha particles consist of two protons and two neutrons bound together into a particle identical to a helium nucleus, which is classically produced in the process of alpha decay, but may be produced also in other ways and given the same name...

- Alpher–Bethe–Gamow theory
- Alvarez, Luis Walter
- Amagat's law

Amagat's law

Amagat's law or the Law of Partial Volumes of 1880 describes the behaviour and properties of mixtures of ideal gases...

- Amorphous silicon

Amorphous silicon

Amorphous silicon is the non-crystalline allotropic form of silicon. It can be deposited in thin films at low temperatures onto a variety of substrates, offering some unique capabilities for a variety of electronics.-Description:...

- Ampere

Ampere

The ampere , often shortened to amp, is the SI unit of electric current and is one of the seven SI base units. It is named after André-Marie Ampère , French mathematician and physicist, considered the father of electrodynamics...

- Ampere model of magnetization
- Ampère's law

Ampère's law

In classical electromagnetism, Ampère's circuital law, discovered by André-Marie Ampère in 1826, relates the integrated magnetic field around a closed loop to the electric current passing through the loop...

- Angular frequency

Angular frequency

In physics, angular frequency ω is a scalar measure of rotation rate. Angular frequency is the magnitude of the vector quantity angular velocity...

- Angular momentum

Angular momentum

In physics, angular momentum, moment of momentum, or rotational momentum is a conserved vector quantity that can be used to describe the overall state of a physical system...

- Angular velocity

Angular velocity

In physics, the angular velocity is a vector quantity which specifies the angular speed of an object and the axis about which the object is rotating. The SI unit of angular velocity is radians per second, although it may be measured in other units such as degrees per second, revolutions per...

- Annihilation operator
- Antenna theory
- Antiferromagnetism

Antiferromagnetism

In materials that exhibit antiferromagnetism, the magnetic moments of atoms or molecules, usuallyrelated to the spins of electrons, align in a regular pattern with neighboring spins pointing in opposite directions. This is, like ferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism, a manifestation of ordered magnetism...

- Antimatter

Antimatter

In particle physics, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter, where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles...

- Antiparticle

Antiparticle

Corresponding to most kinds of particles, there is an associated antiparticle with the same mass and opposite electric charge. For example, the antiparticle of the electron is the positively charged antielectron, or positron, which is produced naturally in certain types of radioactive decay.The...

- Application of tensor theory in engineering science
- Applied mathematics

Applied mathematics

Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...

- Applied physics

Applied physics

Applied physics is a general term for physics which is intended for a particular technological or practical use.It is usually considered as a bridge or a connection between "pure" physics and engineering....

- Archimedes' "mechanical method"

Archimedes' use of infinitesimals

The Method of Mechanical Theorems is a work by Archimedes which contains the first attested explicit use of infinitesimals. The work was originally thought to be lost, but was rediscovered in the celebrated Archimedes Palimpsest...

- Area

Area

Area is a quantity that expresses the extent of a two-dimensional surface or shape in the plane. Area can be understood as the amount of material with a given thickness that would be necessary to fashion a model of the shape, or the amount of paint necessary to cover the surface with a single coat...

- Argand, Aimé

Aimé Argand

François Pierre Ami Argand was a Swiss physicist and chemist. He invented the Argand lamp, a great improvement on the traditional oil lamp. -Early years:...

- Argand, Jean-Robert

Jean-Robert Argand

Jean-Robert Argand was a gifted amateur mathematician. In 1806, while managing a bookstore in Paris, he published the idea of geometrical interpretation of complex numbers known as the Argand diagram.-Life:...

- Arrhenius, Svante

Svante Arrhenius

Svante August Arrhenius was a Swedish scientist, originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, and one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry...

- Arrow of time

Arrow of time

The arrow of time, or time’s arrow, is a term coined in 1927 by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington to describe the "one-way direction" or "asymmetry" of time...

- Aston, Francis William

Francis William Aston

Francis William Aston was a British chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his enunciation of the whole-number rule...

- Astronomy

Astronomy

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

- Astrometry

Astrometry

Astrometry is the branch of astronomy that involves precise measurements of the positions and movements of stars and other celestial bodies. The information obtained by astrometric measurements provides information on the kinematics and physical origin of our Solar System and our Galaxy, the Milky...

- Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Astrophysics is the branch of astronomy that deals with the physics of the universe, including the physical properties of celestial objects, as well as their interactions and behavior...

- Atkinson, Robert

Robert d'Escourt Atkinson

Robert d'Escourt Atkinson was a British astronomer, physicist and inventor.-Biography:...

- Atom

Atom

The atom is a basic unit of matter that consists of a dense central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons. The atomic nucleus contains a mix of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons...

- Atomic clock

Atomic clock

An atomic clock is a clock that uses an electronic transition frequency in the microwave, optical, or ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum of atoms as a frequency standard for its timekeeping element...

- Atomic electron transition
- Atomic force microscopy
- Atomic mass unit

Atomic mass unit

The unified atomic mass unit or dalton is a unit that is used for indicating mass on an atomic or molecular scale. It is defined as one twelfth of the rest mass of an unbound neutral atom of carbon-12 in its nuclear and electronic ground state, and has a value of...

- Atomic nucleus

Atomic nucleus

The nucleus is the very dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom. It was discovered in 1911, as a result of Ernest Rutherford's interpretation of the famous 1909 Rutherford experiment performed by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, under the direction of Rutherford. The...

- Atomic number

Atomic number

In chemistry and physics, the atomic number is the number of protons found in the nucleus of an atom and therefore identical to the charge number of the nucleus. It is conventionally represented by the symbol Z. The atomic number uniquely identifies a chemical element...

- Atomic physics

Atomic physics

Atomic physics is the field of physics that studies atoms as an isolated system of electrons and an atomic nucleus. It is primarily concerned with the arrangement of electrons around the nucleus and...

- International Atomic Time

International Atomic Time

International Atomic Time is a high-precision atomic coordinate time standard based on the notional passage of proper time on Earth's geoid...

- Atomic units

Atomic units

Atomic units form a system of natural units which is especially convenient for atomic physics calculations. There are two different kinds of atomic units, which one might name Hartree atomic units and Rydberg atomic units, which differ in the choice of the unit of mass and charge. This article...

- Atomic weight

Atomic weight

Atomic weight is a dimensionless physical quantity, the ratio of the average mass of atoms of an element to 1/12 of the mass of an atom of carbon-12...

- Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics

Atomic, molecular, and optical physics

Atomic, molecular, and optical physics is the study of matter-matter and light-matter interactions on the scale of single atoms or structures containing a few atoms. The three areas are grouped together because of their interrelationships, the similarity of methods used, and the commonality of the...

- Avogadro, Amedeo

Amedeo Avogadro

Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro di Quaregna e di Cerreto, Count of Quaregna and Cerreto was an Italian savant. He is most noted for his contributions to molecular theory, including what is known as Avogadro's law...

B

Babinet's principle

Babinet's principle

In physics, Babinet's principle is a theorem concerning diffraction that states that the diffraction pattern from an opaque body is identical to that from a hole of the same size and shape except for the overall forward beam intensity.-Explanation:...

- Baez, John
- Balmer, Johann
- Balmer line
- Bandgap
- Bardeen, John

John Bardeen

John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer, the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a...

- Barkla, Charles Glover

Charles Glover Barkla

Charles Glover Barkla was a British physicist, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1917 for his work in X-ray spectroscopy and related areas in the study of X-rays .-Biography:...

- Barn (unit)

Barn (unit)

A barn is a unit of area. Originally used in nuclear physics for expressing the cross sectional area of nuclei and nuclear reactions, today it is used in all fields of high energy physics to express the cross sections of any scattering process, and is best understood as a measure of the...

- Barycenter
- Baryon

Baryon

A baryon is a composite particle made up of three quarks . Baryons and mesons belong to the hadron family, which are the quark-based particles...

- Basov, Nicolay Gennadiyevich
- BCS theory

BCS theory

BCS theory — proposed by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer in 1957 — is the first microscopic theory of superconductivity since its discovery in 1911. The theory describes superconductivity as a microscopic effect caused by a "condensation" of pairs of electrons into a boson-like state...

- Becquerel, Henri

Henri Becquerel

Antoine Henri Becquerel was a French physicist, Nobel laureate, and the discoverer of radioactivity along with Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, for which all three won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.-Early life:...

- Bednorz, J. Georg
- Bekenstein, Jacob

Jacob Bekenstein

Jacob David Bekenstein is an Israeli theoretical physicist who has contributed to the foundation of black hole thermodynamics and to other aspects of the connections between information and gravitation.-Biography:...

- Bell's inequality
- Bell, John Stewart

John Stewart Bell

John Stewart Bell FRS was a British physicist from Northern Ireland , and the originator of Bell's theorem, a significant theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden variable theories.- Early life and work :...

- Bernoulli, Daniel

Daniel Bernoulli

Daniel Bernoulli was a Dutch-Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics...

- Bernoulli, James
- Bernoulli, Johann

Johann Bernoulli

Johann Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family...

- Bernoulli's theorem
- Berry phase
- Bessel function

Bessel function

In mathematics, Bessel functions, first defined by the mathematician Daniel Bernoulli and generalized by Friedrich Bessel, are canonical solutions y of Bessel's differential equation:...

- Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm
- Beta particle

Beta particle

Beta particles are high-energy, high-speed electrons or positrons emitted by certain types of radioactive nuclei such as potassium-40. The beta particles emitted are a form of ionizing radiation also known as beta rays. The production of beta particles is termed beta decay...

- Bethe, Hans

Hans Bethe

Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and...

- Big Bang

Big Bang

The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion caused the young Universe to cool and resulted in...

- Big Crunch

Big Crunch

In physical cosmology, the Big Crunch is one possible scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the metric expansion of space eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately ending as a black hole singularity.- Overview :...

- Binding energy

Binding energy

Binding energy is the mechanical energy required to disassemble a whole into separate parts. A bound system typically has a lower potential energy than its constituent parts; this is what keeps the system together—often this means that energy is released upon the creation of a bound state...

- Binnig, Gerd

Gerd Binnig

Gerd Binnig is a German physicist, and a Nobel laureate.He was born in Frankfurt am Main and played in the ruins of the city during his childhood. His family lived partly in Frankfurt and partly in Offenbach am Main, and he attended school in both cities. At the age of 10, he decided to become a...

- Biophysics

Biophysics

Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that uses the methods of physical science to study biological systems. Studies included under the branches of biophysics span all levels of biological organization, from the molecular scale to whole organisms and ecosystems...

- Biot-Savart law

Biot-Savart law

The Biot–Savart law is an equation in electromagnetism that describes the magnetic field B generated by an electric current. The vector field B depends on the magnitude, direction, length, and proximity of the electric current, and also on a fundamental constant called the magnetic constant...

- Biot, Jean-Baptist
- Bipolar transistor
- Black body

Black body

A black body is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation. Because of this perfect absorptivity at all wavelengths, a black body is also the best possible emitter of thermal radiation, which it radiates incandescently in a characteristic, continuous spectrum...

- Blackbody
- Blackett, Patrick Maynard Stuart
- Black hole

Black hole

A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that...

- Black hole thermodynamics

Black hole thermodynamics

In physics, black hole thermodynamics is the area of study that seeks to reconcile the laws of thermodynamics with the existence of black hole event horizons...

- Bloch, Felix

Felix Bloch

Felix Bloch was a Swiss physicist, working mainly in the U.S.-Life and work:Bloch was born in Zürich, Switzerland to Jewish parents Gustav and Agnes Bloch. He was educated there and at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, also in Zürich. Initially studying engineering he soon changed to physics...

- Bloch spectrum
- Bloembergen, Nicolaas

Nicolaas Bloembergen

Nicolaas Bloembergen is a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate.He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Leiden in 1948; while pursuing his PhD at Harvard, Bloembergen also worked part-time as a graduate research assistant for Edward Mills Purcell at the MIT Radiation Laboratory...

- Bohm, David

David Bohm

David Joseph Bohm FRS was an American-born British quantum physicist who contributed to theoretical physics, philosophy, neuropsychology, and the Manhattan Project.-Youth and college:...

- Bohm interpretation

Bohm interpretation

The de Broglie–Bohm theory, also called the pilot-wave theory, Bohmian mechanics, and the causal interpretation, is an interpretation of quantum theory. In addition to a wavefunction on the space of all possible configurations, it also includes an actual configuration, even in situations where...

- Bohr Einstein debate
- Bohr model

Bohr model

In atomic physics, the Bohr model, introduced by Niels Bohr in 1913, depicts the atom as a small, positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus—similar in structure to the solar system, but with electrostatic forces providing attraction,...

- Bohr radius

Bohr radius

The Bohr radius is a physical constant, approximately equal to the most probable distance between the proton and electron in a hydrogen atom in its ground state. It is named after Niels Bohr, due to its role in the Bohr model of an atom...

- Bohr, Aage
- Bohr, Niels

Niels Bohr

Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in...

- Boltzmann constant
- Boltzmann, Ludwig

Ludwig Boltzmann

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics...

- Born, Max

Max Born

Max Born was a German-born physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s...

- Boscovich, Rudjer Josip
- Bose-Einstein condensate
- Bose-Einstein statistics
- Bose, Satyendra Nath

Satyendra Nath Bose

Satyendra Nath Bose FRS was an Indian mathematician and physicist noted for his collaboration with Albert Einstein in developing a theory regarding the gaslike qualities of electromagnetic radiation. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation...

- Boson

Boson

In particle physics, bosons are subatomic particles that obey Bose–Einstein statistics. Several bosons can occupy the same quantum state. The word boson derives from the name of Satyendra Nath Bose....

- Bothe, Walther

Walther Bothe

Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born....

- Boussinesq approximation (buoyancy)
- Boussinesq approximation (water waves)

Boussinesq approximation (water waves)

In fluid dynamics, the Boussinesq approximation for water waves is an approximation valid for weakly non-linear and fairly long waves. The approximation is named after Joseph Boussinesq, who first derived them in response to the observation by John Scott Russell of the wave of translation...

- Boyle's law

Boyle's law

Boyle's law is one of many gas laws and a special case of the ideal gas law. Boyle's law describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system...

- Boyle, Robert

Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle FRS was a 17th century natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor, also noted for his writings in theology. He has been variously described as English, Irish, or Anglo-Irish, his father having come to Ireland from England during the time of the English plantations of...

- Bradley, James

James Bradley

James Bradley FRS was an English astronomer and served as Astronomer Royal from 1742, succeeding Edmund Halley. He is best known for two fundamental discoveries in astronomy, the aberration of light , and the nutation of the Earth's axis...

- Bra-ket notation

Bra-ket notation

Bra-ket notation is a standard notation for describing quantum states in the theory of quantum mechanics composed of angle brackets and vertical bars. It can also be used to denote abstract vectors and linear functionals in mathematics...

- Bragg's law

Bragg's law

In physics, Bragg's law gives the angles for coherent and incoherent scattering from a crystal lattice. When X-rays are incident on an atom, they make the electronic cloud move as does any electromagnetic wave...

- Bragg, Sir William Henry
- Bragg, William Lawrence

William Lawrence Bragg

Sir William Lawrence Bragg CH OBE MC FRS was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer of the Bragg law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915. He was knighted...

- Brattain, Walter Houser

Walter Houser Brattain

Walter Houser Brattain was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, along with John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the transistor. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention. He devoted much of his life to research on surface states.- Early life and education :He was...

- Braun, Karl Ferdinand

Karl Ferdinand Braun

Karl Ferdinand Braun was a German inventor, physicist and Nobel laureate in physics. Braun contributed significantly to the development of the radio and television technology: he shared with Guglielmo Marconi the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics.-Biography:Braun was born in Fulda, Germany, and...

- Bravais lattice
- Breaking wave

Breaking wave

In fluid dynamics, a breaking wave is a wave whose amplitude reaches a critical level at which some process can suddenly start to occur that causes large amounts of wave energy to be transformed into turbulent kinetic energy...

- Brewster, David

David Brewster

Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA FSSA MICE was a Scottish physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, writer and university principal.-Early life:...

- Brewster's angle

Brewster's angle

Brewster's angle is an angle of incidence at which light with a particular polarization is perfectly transmitted through a transparent dielectric surface, with no reflection. When unpolarized light is incident at this angle, the light that is reflected from the surface is therefore perfectly...

- Bridgman, Percy Williams

Percy Williams Bridgman

Percy Williams Bridgman was an American physicist who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the physics of high pressures. He also wrote extensively on the scientific method and on other aspects of the philosophy of science.- Biography :Bridgman entered Harvard University in 1900,...

- Briggs, Henry

Henry Briggs (mathematician)

Henry Briggs was an English mathematician notable for changing the original logarithms invented by John Napier into common logarithms, which are sometimes known as Briggsian logarithms in his honour....

- Brockhouse, Bertram N.
- Broglie, Louis-Victor de
- Brownian motion

Brownian motion

Brownian motion or pedesis is the presumably random drifting of particles suspended in a fluid or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, which is often called a particle theory.The mathematical model of Brownian motion has several real-world applications...

- Bubble chamber

Bubble chamber

A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. It was invented in 1952 by Donald A. Glaser, for which he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics...

- Bucket argument

Bucket argument

Isaac Newton's rotating bucket argument was designed to demonstrate that true rotational motion cannot be defined as the relative rotation of the body with respect to the immediately surrounding bodies...

- Bullialdus, Ismael

Ismaël Bullialdus

Ismaël Bullialdus was a French astronomer.Bullialdus was born Ismaël Boulliau in Loudun, Vienne, France, the first surviving son to Calvinists Susanna Motet and Ismaël Boulliau, a notary by profession and amateur astronomer. At age twenty-one he converted to Catholicism, and by twenty-six was...

- Buoyancy

Buoyancy

In physics, buoyancy is a force exerted by a fluid that opposes an object's weight. In a column of fluid, pressure increases with depth as a result of the weight of the overlying fluid. Thus a column of fluid, or an object submerged in the fluid, experiences greater pressure at the bottom of the...

C

C-symmetry

C-symmetry

In physics, C-symmetry means the symmetry of physical laws under a charge-conjugation transformation. Electromagnetism, gravity and the strong interaction all obey C-symmetry, but weak interactions violate C-symmetry.-Charge reversal in electromagnetism:...

- Calabi–Yau manifold
- Caloric theory

Caloric theory

The caloric theory is an obsolete scientific theory that heat consists of a self-repellent fluid called caloric that flows from hotter bodies to colder bodies. Caloric was also thought of as a weightless gas that could pass in and out of pores in solids and liquids...

- Candle

Candle

A candle is a solid block or cylinder of wax with an embedded wick, which is lit to provide light, and sometimes heat.Today, most candles are made from paraffin. Candles can also be made from beeswax, soy, other plant waxes, and tallow...

- Canonical commutation relation

Canonical commutation relation

In physics, the canonical commutation relation is the relation between canonical conjugate quantities , for example:[x,p_x] = i\hbar...

- Canonical distribution
- Capra, Fritjof

Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College....

- Carnot, Sadi

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot was a French military engineer who, in his 1824 Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, gave the first successful theoretical account of heat engines, now known as the Carnot cycle, thereby laying the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics...

- Cartesian coordinate system

Cartesian coordinate system

A Cartesian coordinate system specifies each point uniquely in a plane by a pair of numerical coordinates, which are the signed distances from the point to two fixed perpendicular directed lines, measured in the same unit of length...

- Cartesian product

Cartesian product

In mathematics, a Cartesian product is a construction to build a new set out of a number of given sets. Each member of the Cartesian product corresponds to the selection of one element each in every one of those sets...

- Casimir effect

Casimir effect

In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect and the Casimir–Polder force are physical forces arising from a quantized field. The typical example is of two uncharged metallic plates in a vacuum, like capacitors placed a few micrometers apart, without any external electromagnetic field...

- Casimir, Hendrik

Hendrik Casimir

Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir FRS was a Dutch physicist best known for his research on the two-fluid model of superconductors in 1934 and the Casimir effect Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir FRS (July 15, 1909 in The Hague, Netherlands – May 4, 2000 in Heeze) was a Dutch physicist best known...

- Cathode ray

Cathode ray

Cathode rays are streams of electrons observed in vacuum tubes. If an evacuated glass tube is equipped with two electrodes and a voltage is applied, the glass opposite of the negative electrode is observed to glow, due to electrons emitted from and travelling perpendicular to the cathode Cathode...

- Cathodoluminescence

Cathodoluminescence

Cathodoluminescence is an optical and electrical phenomenon whereby a beam of electrons is generated by an electron gun and then impacts on a luminescent material such as a phosphor, causing the material to emit visible light. The most common example is the screen of a television...

- Causality

Causality

Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....

- Cavendish experiment

Cavendish experiment

The Cavendish experiment, performed in 1797–98 by British scientist Henry Cavendish was the first experiment to measure the force of gravity between masses in the laboratory, and the first to yield accurate values for the gravitational constant. Because of the unit conventions then in use,...

- Cavendish, Henry

Henry Cavendish

Henry Cavendish FRS was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper "On Factitious Airs". Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and...

- Celestial mechanics

Celestial mechanics

Celestial mechanics is the branch of astronomy that deals with the motions of celestial objects. The field applies principles of physics, historically classical mechanics, to astronomical objects such as stars and planets to produce ephemeris data. Orbital mechanics is a subfield which focuses on...

- Center of gravity

Center of gravity

In physics, a center of gravity of a material body is a point that may be used for a summary description of gravitational interactions. In a uniform gravitational field, the center of mass serves as the center of gravity...

- Center of mass

Center of mass

In physics, the center of mass or barycenter of a system is the average location of all of its mass. In the case of a rigid body, the position of the center of mass is fixed in relation to the body...

- Centrifugal force

Centrifugal force

Centrifugal force can generally be any force directed outward relative to some origin. More particularly, in classical mechanics, the centrifugal force is an outward force which arises when describing the motion of objects in a rotating reference frame...

- Centripetal force

Centripetal force

Centripetal force is a force that makes a body follow a curved path: it is always directed orthogonal to the velocity of the body, toward the instantaneous center of curvature of the path. The mathematical description was derived in 1659 by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens...

- Centroid

Centroid

In geometry, the centroid, geometric center, or barycenter of a plane figure or two-dimensional shape X is the intersection of all straight lines that divide X into two parts of equal moment about the line. Informally, it is the "average" of all points of X...

- CERN

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

- Chadwick, James

James Chadwick

Sir James Chadwick CH FRS was an English Nobel laureate in physics awarded for his discovery of the neutron....

- Chamberlain, Owen

Owen Chamberlain

Owen Chamberlain was an American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his discovery, with collaborator Emilio Segrè, of antiprotons, a sub-atomic antiparticle.-Biography:...

- Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS ) was an Indian origin American astrophysicist who, with William A. Fowler, won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for key discoveries that led to the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars...

- Chandrasekhar limit

Chandrasekhar limit

When a star starts running out of fuel, it usually cools off and collapses into one of three compact forms, depending on its total mass:* a White Dwarf, a big lump of Carbon and Oxygen atoms, almost like one huge molecule...

- Charge

Charge (physics)

In physics, a charge may refer to one of many different quantities, such as the electric charge in electromagnetism or the color charge in quantum chromodynamics. Charges are associated with conserved quantum numbers.-Formal definition:...

- Charles' law
- Charpak, Georges

Georges Charpak

Georges Charpak was a French physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992.-Life:Georges Charpak was born to Jewish family in the village of Dąbrowica in Poland . Charpak's family moved from Poland to Paris when he was seven years old...

- Chebyshev, Pafnuty Lvovich

Pafnuty Chebyshev

Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev was a Russian mathematician. His name can be alternatively transliterated as Chebychev, Chebysheff, Chebyshov, Tschebyshev, Tchebycheff, or Tschebyscheff .-Early years:One of nine children, Chebyshev was born in the village of Okatovo in the district of Borovsk,...

- Chemical potential

Chemical potential

Chemical potential, symbolized by μ, is a measure first described by the American engineer, chemist and mathematical physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs. It is the potential that a substance has to produce in order to alter a system...

- Cherenkov effect
- Cherenkov-Vavilov effect
- Cherenkov, Pavel Alekseyevich

Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov

Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov was a Soviet physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1958 with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934.-Biography:...

- Chladni, Ernst

Ernst Chladni

Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was a German physicist and musician. His important works include research on vibrating plates and the calculation of the speed of sound for different gases. For this some call him the "Father of Acoustics"...

- CHSH inequality

CHSH inequality

In physics, the CHSH Bell test is an application of Bell's theorem, intended to distinguish between the entanglement hypothesis of quantum mechanics and local hidden variable theories. CHSH stands for John Clauser, Michael Horne, Abner Shimony and Richard Holt, who described it in a much-cited...

- Chu, Steven

Steven Chu

Steven Chu is an American physicist and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. Chu is known for his research at Bell Labs in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and...

- Circular dichroism

Circular dichroism

Circular dichroism refers to the differential absorption of left and right circularly polarized light. This phenomenon was discovered by Jean-Baptiste Biot, Augustin Fresnel, and Aimé Cotton in the first half of the 19th century. It is exhibited in the absorption bands of optically active chiral...

- Circular motion

Circular motion

In physics, circular motion is rotation along a circular path or a circular orbit. It can be uniform, that is, with constant angular rate of rotation , or non-uniform, that is, with a changing rate of rotation. The rotation around a fixed axis of a three-dimensional body involves circular motion of...

- Circular polarization

Circular polarization

In electrodynamics, circular polarization of an electromagnetic wave is a polarization in which the electric field of the passing wave does not change strength but only changes direction in a rotary type manner....

- Classical mechanics

Classical mechanics

In physics, classical mechanics is one of the two major sub-fields of mechanics, which is concerned with the set of physical laws describing the motion of bodies under the action of a system of forces...

- Clapeyron, Émile
- Clausius, Rudolf

Rudolf Clausius

Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius , was a German physicist and mathematician and is considered one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he put the theory of heat on a truer and sounder basis...

- Cloud chamber

Cloud chamber

The cloud chamber, also known as the Wilson chamber, is a particle detector used for detecting ionizing radiation. In its most basic form, a cloud chamber is a sealed environment containing a supersaturated vapor of water or alcohol. When a charged particle interacts with the mixture, it ionizes it...

- Cockcroft, Sir John Douglas
- Cockcroft, John

John Cockcroft

Sir John Douglas Cockcroft OM KCB CBE FRS was a British physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atomic nucleus with Ernest Walton, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power....

- Coefficients of potential
- Cohen-Tannoudji, Claude

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji is a French physicist and Nobel Laureate. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips for research in methods of laser cooling and trapping atoms...

- Coherence length

Coherence length

In physics, coherence length is the propagation distance from a coherent source to a point where an electromagnetic wave maintains a specified degree of coherence. The significance is that interference will be strong within a coherence length of the source, but not beyond it...

- Cold fusion

Cold fusion

Cold fusion, also called low-energy nuclear reaction , refers to the hypothesis that nuclear fusion might explain the results of a group of experiments conducted at ordinary temperatures . Both the experimental results and the hypothesis are disputed...

- Collision

Collision

A collision is an isolated event which two or more moving bodies exert forces on each other for a relatively short time.Although the most common colloquial use of the word "collision" refers to accidents in which two or more objects collide, the scientific use of the word "collision" implies...

- Color charge

Color charge

In particle physics, color charge is a property of quarks and gluons that is related to the particles' strong interactions in the theory of quantum chromodynamics . Color charge has analogies with the notion of electric charge of particles, but because of the mathematical complications of QCD,...

- Color force
- Commutator

Commutator

In mathematics, the commutator gives an indication of the extent to which a certain binary operation fails to be commutative. There are different definitions used in group theory and ring theory.-Group theory:...

- Complementary experiments

Complementary experiments

In physics, two experimental techniques are often called complementary if they investigate the same subject in two different ways such that two different properties or aspects can be investigated...

- Compton, Arthur Holly
- Compressible flow

Compressible flow

Compressible flow is the area of fluid mechanics that deals with fluids in which the fluid density varies significantly in response to a change in pressure. Compressibility effects are typically considered significant if the Mach number of the flow exceeds 0.3, or if the fluid undergoes very large...

- Compton effect
- Computational physics

Computational physics

Computational physics is the study and implementation of numerical algorithms to solve problems in physics for which a quantitative theory already exists...

- Condensed matter physics

Condensed matter physics

Condensed matter physics deals with the physical properties of condensed phases of matter. These properties appear when a number of atoms at the supramolecular and macromolecular scale interact strongly and adhere to each other or are otherwise highly concentrated in a system. The most familiar...

- Conservation law

Conservation law

In physics, a conservation law states that a particular measurable property of an isolated physical system does not change as the system evolves....

- Conservation of energy

Conservation of energy

The nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...

- Conservation of mass

Conservation of mass

The law of conservation of mass, also known as the principle of mass/matter conservation, states that the mass of an isolated system will remain constant over time...

- Conservation of momentum
- Conservative force

Conservative force

A conservative force is a force with the property that the work done in moving a particle between two points is independent of the path taken. Equivalently, if a particle travels in a closed loop, the net work done by a conservative force is zero.It is possible to define a numerical value of...

- Constitutive equation

Constitutive equation

In physics, a constitutive equation is a relation between two physical quantities that is specific to a material or substance, and approximates the response of that material to external forces...

- Counterfactual definiteness

Counterfactual definiteness

In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, counterfactual definiteness is the ability to speak with meaning of the definiteness of the results of measurements that have not been performed...

- Continuity equation

Continuity equation

A continuity equation in physics is a differential equation that describes the transport of a conserved quantity. Since mass, energy, momentum, electric charge and other natural quantities are conserved under their respective appropriate conditions, a variety of physical phenomena may be described...

- Continuum mechanics

Continuum mechanics

Continuum mechanics is a branch of mechanics that deals with the analysis of the kinematics and the mechanical behavior of materials modelled as a continuous mass rather than as discrete particles...

- Continuum postulate
- convection

Convection

Convection is the movement of molecules within fluids and rheids. It cannot take place in solids, since neither bulk current flows nor significant diffusion can take place in solids....

- Conversion of units

Conversion of units

Conversion of units is the conversion between different units of measurement for the same quantity, typically through multiplicative conversion factors.- Process :...

- Cooper pair

Cooper pair

In condensed matter physics, a Cooper pair or BCS pair is two electrons that are bound together at low temperatures in a certain manner first described in 1956 by American physicist Leon Cooper...

- Cooper, Leon Neil
- Coordinate system

Coordinate system

In geometry, a coordinate system is a system which uses one or more numbers, or coordinates, to uniquely determine the position of a point or other geometric element. The order of the coordinates is significant and they are sometimes identified by their position in an ordered tuple and sometimes by...

- Copenhagen interpretation

Copenhagen interpretation

The Copenhagen interpretation is one of the earliest and most commonly taught interpretations of quantum mechanics. It holds that quantum mechanics does not yield a description of an objective reality but deals only with probabilities of observing, or measuring, various aspects of energy quanta,...

- Copernicus, Nicolaus

Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe....

- Coriolis effect

Coriolis effect

In physics, the Coriolis effect is a deflection of moving objects when they are viewed in a rotating reference frame. In a reference frame with clockwise rotation, the deflection is to the left of the motion of the object; in one with counter-clockwise rotation, the deflection is to the right...

- Coriolis force
- Cornell, Eric A.
- Corpuscular theory

Corpuscular theory

In optics, corpuscular theory of light, set forward by Sir Isaac Newton, states that light is made up of small discrete particles called "corpuscles" which travel in a straight line with a finite velocity and possess kinetic energy....

- Correspondence principle

Correspondence principle

In physics, the correspondence principle states that the behavior of systems described by the theory of quantum mechanics reproduces classical physics in the limit of large quantum numbers....

- Coulomb
- Coulomb's law

Coulomb's law

Coulomb's law or Coulomb's inverse-square law, is a law of physics describing the electrostatic interaction between electrically charged particles. It was first published in 1785 by French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb and was essential to the development of the theory of electromagnetism...

- CP-symmetry
- CPT theorem

CPT theorem

In quantum field theory the CPT theorem states that any canonical quantum field theory is invariant under the CPT operation, which is a combination of three discrete transformations: charge conjugation C, parity transformation P, and time reversal T...

- CPT-symmetry
- Creation operator
- Crookes radiometer

Crookes radiometer

The Crookes radiometer, also known as the light mill, consists of an airtight glass bulb, containing a partial vacuum. Inside are a set of vanes which are mounted on a spindle. The vanes rotate when exposed to light, with faster rotation for more intense light, providing a quantitative measurement...

- Cross section

Cross section (physics)

A cross section is the effective area which governs the probability of some scattering or absorption event. Together with particle density and path length, it can be used to predict the total scattering probability via the Beer-Lambert law....

- Cryogenics

Cryogenics

In physics, cryogenics is the study of the production of very low temperature and the behavior of materials at those temperatures. A person who studies elements under extremely cold temperature is called a cryogenicist. Rather than the relative temperature scales of Celsius and Fahrenheit,...

- Crystal

Crystal

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions. The scientific study of crystals and crystal formation is known as crystallography...

- Crystal optics

Crystal optics

Crystal optics is the branch of optics that describes the behaviour of light in anisotropic media, that is, media in which light behaves differently depending on which direction the light is propagating. The index of refraction depends on both composition and crystal structure and can be...

- Crystal lattice
- Crystal structure

Crystal structure

In mineralogy and crystallography, crystal structure is a unique arrangement of atoms or molecules in a crystalline liquid or solid. A crystal structure is composed of a pattern, a set of atoms arranged in a particular way, and a lattice exhibiting long-range order and symmetry...

- Crystallography

Crystallography

Crystallography is the experimental science of the arrangement of atoms in solids. The word "crystallography" derives from the Greek words crystallon = cold drop / frozen drop, with its meaning extending to all solids with some degree of transparency, and grapho = write.Before the development of...

- Curie point

Curie point

In physics and materials science, the Curie temperature , or Curie point, is the temperature at which a ferromagnetic or a ferrimagnetic material becomes paramagnetic on heating; the effect is reversible. A magnet will lose its magnetism if heated above the Curie temperature...

- Curvature

Curvature

In mathematics, curvature refers to any of a number of loosely related concepts in different areas of geometry. Intuitively, curvature is the amount by which a geometric object deviates from being flat, or straight in the case of a line, but this is defined in different ways depending on the context...

- Curvature form

Curvature form

In differential geometry, the curvature form describes curvature of a connection on a principal bundle. It can be considered as an alternative to or generalization of curvature tensor in Riemannian geometry.-Definition:...

- Curve

Curve

In mathematics, a curve is, generally speaking, an object similar to a line but which is not required to be straight...

- Cyclic process
- Cyclotron

Cyclotron

In technology, a cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator. In physics, the cyclotron frequency or gyrofrequency is the frequency of a charged particle moving perpendicularly to the direction of a uniform magnetic field, i.e. a magnetic field of constant magnitude and direction...

- Cyclotron radiation

Cyclotron radiation

Cyclotron radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted by moving charged particles deflected by a magnetic field. The Lorentz force on the particles acts perpendicular to both the magnetic field lines and the particles' motion through them, creating an acceleration of charged particles that...

- Cylindrical coordinate
- Cylindrical coordinate system

Cylindrical coordinate system

A cylindrical coordinate system is a three-dimensional coordinate systemthat specifies point positions by the distance from a chosen reference axis, the direction from the axis relative to a chosen reference direction, and the distance from a chosen reference plane perpendicular to the axis...

- Czochralski process

Czochralski process

The Czochralski process is a method of crystal growth used to obtain single crystals of semiconductors , metals , salts, and synthetic gemstones...

D

Dalén, Nils Gustaf
- Dalitz, Richard

Richard Dalitz

Richard Henry Dalitz was an Australian physicist known for his work in particle physics.Born Dimboola, Victoria near Melbourne, Dalitz studied physics and mathematics at Melbourne University before moving to the United Kingdom in 1946, starting his PhD research at the University of Cambridge...

- Dalton, John

John Dalton

John Dalton FRS was an English chemist, meteorologist and physicist. He is best known for his pioneering work in the development of modern atomic theory, and his research into colour blindness .-Early life:John Dalton was born into a Quaker family at Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth, Cumberland,...

- Dalton's law

Dalton's law

In chemistry and physics, Dalton's law states that the total pressure exerted by a gaseous mixture is equal to the sum of the partial pressures of each individual component in a gas mixture...

- Darcy–Weisbach equation
- Dark exciton
- Dark matter

Dark matter

In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is matter that neither emits nor scatters light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so cannot be directly detected via optical or radio astronomy...

- Dark state

Dark state

The term dark state refers to state of an atom or molecule which can no longer absorb photons and therefore appears dark. All atoms and molecules are described by quantum states -- different states can have different energies and a system can make a transition from one energy level to another by,...

- Davis Jr., Raymond

Raymond Davis Jr.

Raymond Davis, Jr. was an American chemist, physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate.-Early life and education:...

- Davisson, Clinton Joseph
- de Broglie, Louis-Victor
- de Broglie wave
- de Donder, Théophile

Théophile de Donder

Théophile Ernest de Donder was a Belgian mathematician and physicist famous for his 1923 work in developing correlations between the Newtonian concept of chemical affinity and the Gibbsian concept of free energy.-Education:...

- Debye, Peter

Peter Debye

Peter Joseph William Debye FRS was a Dutch physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.-Early life:...

- Debye length

Debye length

In plasma physics, the Debye length , named after the Dutch physicist and physical chemist Peter Debye, is the scale over which mobile charge carriers screen out electric fields in plasmas and other conductors. In other words, the Debye length is the distance over which significant charge...

- Debye shielding
- Decay mode
- de Gennes, Pierre-Gilles

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991.-Biography:...

- Defining equation (physics)

Defining equation (physics)

In physics, defining equations are equations that define new quantities in terms of base quantities. This article uses the current SI system of units, not natural or characteristic units.-Treatment of vectors:There are many forms of vector notation...

- Degenerate matter

Degenerate matter

Degenerate matter is matter that has such extraordinarily high density that the dominant contribution to its pressure is attributable to the Pauli exclusion principle. The pressure maintained by a body of degenerate matter is called the degeneracy pressure, and arises because the Pauli principle...

- Dehmelt, Hans G.
- Delbruck scattering

Delbruck scattering

Delbrück scattering, the deflection of high-energy photons in the Coulomb field of nuclei as a consequence of vacuum polarization has been observed. However, the process of scattering of light by light, has not been observed...

- Density matrix

Density matrix

In quantum mechanics, a density matrix is a self-adjoint positive-semidefinite matrix of trace one, that describes the statistical state of a quantum system...

- Density functional theory

Density functional theory

Density functional theory is a quantum mechanical modelling method used in physics and chemistry to investigate the electronic structure of many-body systems, in particular atoms, molecules, and the condensed phases. With this theory, the properties of a many-electron system can be determined by...

- Descartes, René

René Descartes

René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...

- Deutsch, David

David Deutsch

David Elieser Deutsch, FRS is an Israeli-British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford...

- Dewar, James

James Dewar

Sir James Dewar FRS was a Scottish chemist and physicist. He is probably best-known today for his invention of the Dewar flask, which he used in conjunction with extensive research into the liquefaction of gases...

- DeWitt, Bryce

Bryce DeWitt

Bryce Seligman DeWitt was a theoretical physicist renowned for advancing gravity and field theories.-Biography:...

- Diamagnetism

Diamagnetism

Diamagnetism is the property of an object which causes it to create a magnetic field in opposition to an externally applied magnetic field, thus causing a repulsive effect. Specifically, an external magnetic field alters the orbital velocity of electrons around their nuclei, thus changing the...

- Dichroism

Dichroism

Dichroism has two related but distinct meanings in optics. A dichroic material is either one which causes visible light to be split up into distinct beams of different wavelengths , or one in which light rays having different polarizations are absorbed by different amounts.The original meaning of...

- Dichromatism

Dichromatism

Dichromatism is a phenomenon where the hue of the colour in materials or solutions are dependent on both the concentration of the absorbing substance and the depth or thickness of the medium traversed...

- Dielectric

Dielectric

A dielectric is an electrical insulator that can be polarized by an applied electric field. When a dielectric is placed in an electric field, electric charges do not flow through the material, as in a conductor, but only slightly shift from their average equilibrium positions causing dielectric...

- Dielectric relaxation
- Differential equations of mathematical physics
- Differential geometry
- Diffraction

Diffraction

Diffraction refers to various phenomena which occur when a wave encounters an obstacle. Italian scientist Francesco Maria Grimaldi coined the word "diffraction" and was the first to record accurate observations of the phenomenon in 1665...

- Diffusion

Diffusion

Molecular diffusion, often called simply diffusion, is the thermal motion of all particles at temperatures above absolute zero. The rate of this movement is a function of temperature, viscosity of the fluid and the size of the particles...

- Dimension

Dimension

In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a space or object is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus a line has a dimension of one because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it...

- Dimensional analysis

Dimensional analysis

In physics and all science, dimensional analysis is a tool to find or check relations among physical quantities by using their dimensions. The dimension of a physical quantity is the combination of the basic physical dimensions which describe it; for example, speed has the dimension length per...

- Dimensionless number
- Diode

Diode

In electronics, a diode is a type of two-terminal electronic component with a nonlinear current–voltage characteristic. A semiconductor diode, the most common type today, is a crystalline piece of semiconductor material connected to two electrical terminals...

- Dipole

Dipole

In physics, there are several kinds of dipoles:*An electric dipole is a separation of positive and negative charges. The simplest example of this is a pair of electric charges of equal magnitude but opposite sign, separated by some distance. A permanent electric dipole is called an electret.*A...

- Dirac equation

Dirac equation

The Dirac equation is a relativistic quantum mechanical wave equation formulated by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. It provided a description of elementary spin-½ particles, such as electrons, consistent with both the principles of quantum mechanics and the theory of special relativity, and...

- Dirac, Paul

Paul Dirac

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics...

- Direct bandgap
- Dispersion relation

Dispersion relation

In physics and electrical engineering, dispersion most often refers to frequency-dependent effects in wave propagation. Note, however, that there are several other uses of the word "dispersion" in the physical sciences....

- Dispersion (optics)

Dispersion (optics)

In optics, dispersion is the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its frequency, or alternatively when the group velocity depends on the frequency.Media having such a property are termed dispersive media...

- Displacement (vector)

Displacement (vector)

A displacement is the shortest distance from the initial to the final position of a point P. Thus, it is the length of an imaginary straight path, typically distinct from the path actually travelled by P...

- Divergence theorem

Divergence theorem

In vector calculus, the divergence theorem, also known as Gauss' theorem , Ostrogradsky's theorem , or Gauss–Ostrogradsky theorem is a result that relates the flow of a vector field through a surface to the behavior of the vector field inside the surface.More precisely, the divergence theorem...

- Doppler effect

Doppler effect

The Doppler effect , named after Austrian physicist Christian Doppler who proposed it in 1842 in Prague, is the change in frequency of a wave for an observer moving relative to the source of the wave. It is commonly heard when a vehicle sounding a siren or horn approaches, passes, and recedes from...

- Doppler, Christiaan

Christian Doppler

Christian Andreas Doppler was an Austrian mathematician and physicist.-Life and work:Christian Doppler was raised in Salzburg, Austria, the son of a stonemason. Doppler could not work in his father's business because of his generally weak physical condition...

- Double pendulum

Double pendulum

In mathematics, in the area of dynamical systems, a double pendulum is a pendulum with another pendulum attached to its end, and is a simple physical system that exhibits rich dynamic behavior with a strong sensitivity to initial conditions. The motion of a double pendulum is governed by a set of...

- Double-slit experiment

Double-slit experiment

The double-slit experiment, sometimes called Young's experiment, is a demonstration that matter and energy can display characteristics of both waves and particles...

- Drift velocity

Drift velocity

The drift velocity is the average velocity that a particle, such as an electron, attains due to an electric field. It can also be referred to as Axial Drift Velocity since particles defined are assumed to be moving along a plane. In general, an electron will 'rattle around' in a conductor at the...

- Dual space

Dual space

In mathematics, any vector space, V, has a corresponding dual vector space consisting of all linear functionals on V. Dual vector spaces defined on finite-dimensional vector spaces can be used for defining tensors which are studied in tensor algebra...

- Wave-particle duality
- Duarte, Frank

F. J. Duarte

F. J. Duarte is a laser physicist and author/editor of several well-known books on tunable lasers. He introduced the generalized multiple-prism dispersion theory and has discovered various multiple-prism grating oscillator laser configurations...

- Dulong-Petit law
- Dye laser

Dye laser

A dye laser is a laser which uses an organic dye as the lasing medium, usually as a liquid solution. Compared to gases and most solid state lasing media, a dye can usually be used for a much wider range of wavelengths. The wide bandwidth makes them particularly suitable for tunable lasers and...

- Dynamical mean field theory

Dynamical mean field theory

Dynamical Mean Field Theory is a method to determine the electronic structure of strongly correlated materials. In such materials, the approximation of independent electrons, which is used in Density Functional Theory and usual band structure calculations, breaks down...

 (DMFT)
- Dynamical system

Dynamical system

A dynamical system is a concept in mathematics where a fixed rule describes the time dependence of a point in a geometrical space. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a clock pendulum, the flow of water in a pipe, and the number of fish each springtime in a...

- Dynamical systems and chaos theory
- A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

"A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" is the third of James Clerk Maxwell's papers regarding electromagnetism, published in 1865. It is the paper in which the original set of four Maxwell's equations first appeared...

- Dynamical variable
- Dynamics

Dynamics (mechanics)

In the field of physics, the study of the causes of motion and changes in motion is dynamics. In other words the study of forces and why objects are in motion. Dynamics includes the study of the effect of torques on motion...

- Dyson, Freeman

Freeman Dyson

Freeman John Dyson FRS is a British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...

E

Earnshaw's theorem

Earnshaw's theorem

Earnshaw's theorem states that a collection of point charges cannot be maintained in a stable stationary equilibrium configuration solely by the electrostatic interaction of the charges. This was first proven by British mathematician Samuel Earnshaw in 1842. It is usually referenced to magnetic...

- Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

- Effective mass (spring-mass system)

Effective mass (spring-mass system)

In a spring-mass system the mass of the spring m, as well as the suspended mass M, have an influence on the motion. However, since not all of the spring moves at the same velocity as the suspended mass, the mass of the spring cannot be simply added to the suspended mass...

- Ehrenfest, Paul

Paul Ehrenfest

Paul Ehrenfest was an Austrian and Dutch physicist, who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem.- Biography :Paul Ehrenfest was born and grew up in Vienna in a Jewish...

- Eigenvector
- Einstein

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...

- Einstein field equations

Einstein field equations

The Einstein field equations or Einstein's equations are a set of ten equations in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity which describe the fundamental interaction of gravitation as a result of spacetime being curved by matter and energy...

- Einstein–Infeld–Hoffmann equations
- Einstein notation

Einstein notation

In mathematics, especially in applications of linear algebra to physics, the Einstein notation or Einstein summation convention is a notational convention useful when dealing with coordinate formulae...

- Einstein shift
- Einstein, Albert

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...

- Elasticity
- Electric charge

Electric charge

Electric charge is a physical property of matter that causes it to experience a force when near other electrically charged matter. Electric charge comes in two types, called positive and negative. Two positively charged substances, or objects, experience a mutual repulsive force, as do two...

- Electric field

Electric field

In physics, an electric field surrounds electrically charged particles and time-varying magnetic fields. The electric field depicts the force exerted on other electrically charged objects by the electrically charged particle the field is surrounding...

- Electric field screening

Electric field screening

Screening is the damping of electric fields caused by the presence of mobile charge carriers. It is an important part of the behavior of charge-carrying fluids, such as ionized gases and conduction electrons in semiconductors and metals....

- Electrical charge
- Electrical circuit
- Electrical conductance
- Electrical conduction
- Electrical conductivity
- Electrical dipole
- Electrical energy
- Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

- Electrical force
- Electrical generator

Electrical generator

In electricity generation, an electric generator is a device that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy. A generator forces electric charge to flow through an external electrical circuit. It is analogous to a water pump, which causes water to flow...

- Electrical length

Electrical length

In telecommunications, electrical length is the length of a transmission medium or antenna element expressed as the number of wavelengths of the signal propagating in the medium....

- Electrical monopole
- Electrical network

Electrical network

An electrical network is an interconnection of electrical elements such as resistors, inductors, capacitors, transmission lines, voltage sources, current sources and switches. An electrical circuit is a special type of network, one that has a closed loop giving a return path for the current...

- Electrical phenomenon
- Electrical potential
- Electrical quadrupole
- Electrical resistance

Electrical resistance

The electrical resistance of an electrical element is the opposition to the passage of an electric current through that element; the inverse quantity is electrical conductance, the ease at which an electric current passes. Electrical resistance shares some conceptual parallels with the mechanical...

- Electrical resistivity
- Electricity

Electricity

Electricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire...

- Electrodynamics
- Electroluminescence

Electroluminescence

Electroluminescence is an optical phenomenon and electrical phenomenon in which a material emits light in response to the passage of an electric current or to a strong electric field...

- Electromagnetic field

Electromagnetic field

An electromagnetic field is a physical field produced by moving electrically charged objects. It affects the behavior of charged objects in the vicinity of the field. The electromagnetic field extends indefinitely throughout space and describes the electromagnetic interaction...

- Electromagnetic induction

Electromagnetic induction

Electromagnetic induction is the production of an electric current across a conductor moving through a magnetic field. It underlies the operation of generators, transformers, induction motors, electric motors, synchronous motors, and solenoids....

- Electromagnetic radiation

Electromagnetic radiation

Electromagnetic radiation is a form of energy that exhibits wave-like behavior as it travels through space...

- Electromagnetic spectrum

Electromagnetic spectrum

The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The "electromagnetic spectrum" of an object is the characteristic distribution of electromagnetic radiation emitted or absorbed by that particular object....

- Electromagnetism

Electromagnetism

Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. The other three are the strong interaction, the weak interaction and gravitation...

- Electromotive force

Electromotive force

In physics, electromotive force, emf , or electromotance refers to voltage generated by a battery or by the magnetic force according to Faraday's Law, which states that a time varying magnetic field will induce an electric current.It is important to note that the electromotive "force" is not a...

- Electron

Electron

The electron is a subatomic particle with a negative elementary electric charge. It has no known components or substructure; in other words, it is generally thought to be an elementary particle. An electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton...

- Electron configuration

Electron configuration

In atomic physics and quantum chemistry, electron configuration is the arrangement of electrons of an atom, a molecule, or other physical structure...

- Electron hole

Electron hole

An electron hole is the conceptual and mathematical opposite of an electron, useful in the study of physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering. The concept describes the lack of an electron at a position where one could exist in an atom or atomic lattice...

- Electron microscope

Electron microscope

An electron microscope is a type of microscope that uses a beam of electrons to illuminate the specimen and produce a magnified image. Electron microscopes have a greater resolving power than a light-powered optical microscope, because electrons have wavelengths about 100,000 times shorter than...

- Electron volt
- Electronic transition
- Electronics

Electronics

Electronics is the branch of science, engineering and technology that deals with electrical circuits involving active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies...

- Electronuclear force
- Electrostatic discharge

Electrostatic discharge

Electrostatic discharge is a serious issue in solid state electronics, such as integrated circuits. Integrated circuits are made from semiconductor materials such as silicon and insulating materials such as silicon dioxide...

- Electrostatics

Electrostatics

Electrostatics is the branch of physics that deals with the phenomena and properties of stationary or slow-moving electric charges....

- Electroweak force
- Electroweak theory
- Elementary charge

Elementary charge

The elementary charge, usually denoted as e, is the electric charge carried by a single proton, or equivalently, the absolute value of the electric charge carried by a single electron. This elementary charge is a fundamental physical constant. To avoid confusion over its sign, e is sometimes called...

- Ellipsoid
- Elliptical polarization

Elliptical polarization

In electrodynamics, elliptical polarization is the polarization of electromagnetic radiation such that the tip of the electric field vector describes an ellipse in any fixed plane intersecting, and normal to, the direction of propagation...

- Ellis, Charles Drummond

Charles Drummond Ellis

Sir Charles Drummond Ellis was a physicist and scientific administrator. His work on the magnetic spectrum of the beta-rays helped to develop a better understanding of nuclear structure....

- Emergent complexity
- Empiricism

Empiricism

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...

- Empirical research

Empirical research

Empirical research is a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience. Empirical evidence can be analyzed quantitatively or qualitatively...

- Energy

Energy

In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...

- Energy conversion efficiency

Energy conversion efficiency

Energy conversion efficiency is the ratio between the useful output of an energy conversion machine and the input, in energy terms. The useful output may be electric power, mechanical work, or heat.-Overview:...

- Energy level

Energy level

A quantum mechanical system or particle that is bound -- that is, confined spatially—can only take on certain discrete values of energy. This contrasts with classical particles, which can have any energy. These discrete values are called energy levels...

- Engineering

Engineering

Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...

- Enthalpy

Enthalpy

Enthalpy is a measure of the total energy of a thermodynamic system. It includes the internal energy, which is the energy required to create a system, and the amount of energy required to make room for it by displacing its environment and establishing its volume and pressure.Enthalpy is a...

- Entropy

Entropy

Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when...

- Eotvos, Loránd

Loránd Eötvös

Baron Loránd Eötvös de Vásárosnamény , more commonly called Baron Roland von Eötvös in English literature, was a Hungarian physicist. He is remembered today largely for his work on gravitation and surface tension.-Life:...

- EPR paradox

EPR paradox

The EPR paradox is a topic in quantum physics and the philosophy of science concerning the measurement and description of microscopic systems by the methods of quantum physics...

- Equation of motion

Equation of motion

Equations of motion are equations that describe the behavior of a system in terms of its motion as a function of time...

- Equation of state

Equation of state

In physics and thermodynamics, an equation of state is a relation between state variables. More specifically, an equation of state is a thermodynamic equation describing the state of matter under a given set of physical conditions...

- Equations of state/History
- Equipartition theorem

Equipartition theorem

In classical statistical mechanics, the equipartition theorem is a general formula that relates the temperature of a system with its average energies. The equipartition theorem is also known as the law of equipartition, equipartition of energy, or simply equipartition...

- Esaki, Leo

Leo Esaki

Reona Esaki also known as Leo Esaki is a Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Ivar Giaever and Brian David Josephson for his discovery of the phenomenon of electron tunneling. He is known for his invention of the Esaki diode, which exploited that phenomenon...

- Essential singularity

Essential singularity

In complex analysis, an essential singularity of a function is a "severe" singularity near which the function exhibits extreme behavior.The category essential singularity is a "left-over" or default group of singularities that are especially unmanageable: by definition they fit into neither of the...

- Eternity

Eternity

While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existence for a limitless amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside time. By contrast, infinite temporal existence is then called sempiternity. Something eternal exists outside time; by contrast,...

- Euclid

Euclid

Euclid , fl. 300 BC, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I...

- Euclidean space

Euclidean space

In mathematics, Euclidean space is the Euclidean plane and three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry, as well as the generalizations of these notions to higher dimensions...

- Euler, Leonhard

Leonhard Euler

Leonhard Euler was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist. He made important discoveries in fields as diverse as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion...

- Euler angles

Euler angles

The Euler angles are three angles introduced by Leonhard Euler to describe the orientation of a rigid body. To describe such an orientation in 3-dimensional Euclidean space three parameters are required...

- Event horizon

Event horizon

In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. In layman's terms it is defined as "the point of no return" i.e. the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape impossible. The most common case...

- Everett many-worlds interpretation
- Everett, Hugh

Hugh Everett

Hugh Everett III was an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, which he termed his "relative state" formulation....

- Examples of electrical phenomena
- Exchange bias

Exchange bias

Exchange bias or exchange anisotropy occurs in bilayers of magnetic materials where the hard magnetization behavior of an antiferromagnetic thin film causes a shift in the soft magnetization curve of a ferromagnetic film...

- Exchange particle
- Exciton

Exciton

An exciton is a bound state of an electron and hole which are attracted to each other by the electrostatic Coulomb force. It is an electrically neutral quasiparticle that exists in insulators, semiconductors and some liquids...

- Exotic atom

Exotic atom

An exotic atom is an otherwise normal atom in which one or more sub-atomic particles have been replaced by other particles of the same charge. For example, electrons may be replaced by other negatively charged particles such as muons or pions...

- Exotic matter

Exotic matter

In physics, exotic matter is a term which refers to matter which would somehow deviate from the norm and have "exotic" properties. There are several uses of the term....

- Extended X-ray absorption fine structure

Extended X-Ray Absorption Fine Structure

X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy includes both Extended X-Ray Absorption Fine Structure and X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure . XAS is the measurement of the x-ray absorption coefficient of a material as a function of energy...

 (EXAFS)
- Extensive variable
- Extreme physical information

Extreme physical information

Extreme physical information is a principle, first described and formulated in 1998 by B. Roy Frieden, Emeritus Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, that states, the precipitation of scientific laws can be derived through Fisher information, taking the form of differential...

F

Faraday cage

Faraday cage

A Faraday cage or Faraday shield is an enclosure formed by conducting material or by a mesh of such material. Such an enclosure blocks out external static and non-static electric fields...

 
- Faraday constant 
- Faraday's laws of electrolysis

Faraday's laws of electrolysis

Faraday's laws of electrolysis are quantitative relationships based on the electrochemical researches published by Michael Faraday in 1834.-Statements of the laws:Several versions of the laws can be found in textbooks and the scientific literature...

 
- Faraday's law of induction

Faraday's law of induction

Faraday's law of induction dates from the 1830s, and is a basic law of electromagnetism relating to the operating principles of transformers, inductors, and many types of electrical motors and generators...

 
- Faraday, Michael

Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday, FRS was an English chemist and physicist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry....

 
- Fahrenheit

Fahrenheit

Fahrenheit is the temperature scale proposed in 1724 by, and named after, the German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit . Within this scale, the freezing of water into ice is defined at 32 degrees, while the boiling point of water is defined to be 212 degrees...

 
- Fahrenheit, Daniel Gabriel

Gabriel Fahrenheit

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was a German physicist, engineer, and glass blower who is best known for inventing the alcohol thermometer and the mercury thermometer , and for developing a temperature scale now named after him.- Biography :Fahrenheit was born in 1686 in Danzig , the Polish-Lithuanian...

 
- Fast Fourier transform

Fast Fourier transform

A fast Fourier transform is an efficient algorithm to compute the discrete Fourier transform and its inverse. "The FFT has been called the most important numerical algorithm of our lifetime ." There are many distinct FFT algorithms involving a wide range of mathematics, from simple...

 
- Faster-than-light

Faster-than-light

Faster-than-light communications and travel refer to the propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light....

 
- Fermat's principle

Fermat's principle

In optics, Fermat's principle or the principle of least time is the principle that the path taken between two points by a ray of light is the path that can be traversed in the least time. This principle is sometimes taken as the definition of a ray of light...

 
- Fermi energy

Fermi energy

The Fermi energy is a concept in quantum mechanics usually referring to the energy of the highest occupied quantum state in a system of fermions at absolute zero temperature....

 
- Fermi gas

Fermi gas

A Fermi gas is an ensemble of a large number of fermions. Fermions, named after Enrico Fermi, are particles that obey Fermi–Dirac statistics. These statistics determine the energy distribution of fermions in a Fermi gas in thermal equilibrium, and is characterized by their number density,...

 
- Fermi liquid theory 
- Fermi paradox

Fermi paradox

The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations....

 
- Fermi–Dirac statistics 
- Fermi, Enrico

Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi was an Italian-born, naturalized American physicist particularly known for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics...

 
- Fermi–Thomas screening wave vector
- Fermion

Fermion

In particle physics, a fermion is any particle which obeys the Fermi–Dirac statistics . Fermions contrast with bosons which obey Bose–Einstein statistics....

 
- Fermionic condensate

Fermionic condensate

A fermionic condensate is a superfluid phase formed by fermionic particles at low temperatures. It is closely related to the Bose–Einstein condensate, a superfluid phase formed by bosonic atoms under similar conditions. Unlike the Bose–Einstein condensates, fermionic condensates are formed using...

 
- Ferroelectric effect 
- Ferromagnetism

Ferromagnetism

Ferromagnetism is the basic mechanism by which certain materials form permanent magnets, or are attracted to magnets. In physics, several different types of magnetism are distinguished...

 
- Feynman diagram

Feynman diagram

Feynman diagrams are a pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, first developed by the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman, and first introduced in 1948...

 
- Feynman, Richard

Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...

 
- Fick's law of diffusion

Fick's law of diffusion

Fick's laws of diffusion describe diffusion and can be used to solve for the diffusion coefficient, D. They were derived by Adolf Fick in the year 1855.- Fick's first law :...

 
- Field (physics)

Field (physics)

In physics, a field is a physical quantity associated with each point of spacetime. A field can be classified as a scalar field, a vector field, a spinor field, or a tensor field according to whether the value of the field at each point is a scalar, a vector, a spinor or, more generally, a tensor,...

 
- Fifth force

Fifth force

Occasionally, physicists have postulated the existence of a fifth force in addition to the four known fundamental forces. The force is generally believed to have roughly the strength of gravity Occasionally, physicists have postulated the existence of a fifth force in addition to the four known...

 
- Fincke, Thomas

Thomas Fincke

Thomas Fincke was a Danish mathematician and physicist, and a professor at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years.Fincke was born in Flensburg, Schleswig and died in Copenhagen...

 
- Finite difference

Finite difference

A finite difference is a mathematical expression of the form f − f. If a finite difference is divided by b − a, one gets a difference quotient...

 
- Finite element method

Finite element method

The finite element method is a numerical technique for finding approximate solutions of partial differential equations as well as integral equations...

 
- Fitch, Val Logsdon

Val Logsdon Fitch

Val Logsdon Fitch is an American nuclear physicist. A native of Merriman, Nebraska, he graduated from Gordon High School and attended Chadron State College for three years before being drafted into the U.S. army in 1943...

 
- FitzGerald, George Francis 
- FitzGerald–Lorentz Contraction 
- Fizeau, Armand Hippolyte Louis

Hippolyte Fizeau

Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau was a French physicist.-Biography:Fizeau was born in Paris. His earliest work was concerned with improvements in photographic processes. Following suggestions by François Arago, Léon Foucault and Fizeau collaborated in a series of investigations on the interference of...

 
- Fizeau–Foucault apparatus 
- Float zone process 
- Fluid dynamics

Fluid dynamics

In physics, fluid dynamics is a sub-discipline of fluid mechanics that deals with fluid flow—the natural science of fluids in motion. It has several subdisciplines itself, including aerodynamics and hydrodynamics...

 
- Fluid mechanics

Fluid mechanics

Fluid mechanics is the study of fluids and the forces on them. Fluid mechanics can be divided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest; fluid kinematics, the study of fluids in motion; and fluid dynamics, the study of the effect of forces on fluid motion...

 
- Fokker–Planck equation 
- Forbidden line 
- Force (physics) 
- Force carrier

Force carrier

In particle physics, quantum field theories such as the Standard Model describe nature in terms of fields. Each field has a complementary description as the set of particles of a particular type...

 
- Force spectroscopy

Force spectroscopy

Force spectroscopy is a dynamic analytical technique that allows the study of the mechanical properties of single polymer molecules or proteins, or individual chemical bonds. It is performed by pulling on the system under scrutiny with controlled forces...

 
- Foucault, Jean Bernard Léon

Léon Foucault

Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was a French physicist best known for the invention of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation...

 
- Four-momentum

Four-momentum

In special relativity, four-momentum is the generalization of the classical three-dimensional momentum to four-dimensional spacetime. Momentum is a vector in three dimensions; similarly four-momentum is a four-vector in spacetime...

 
- Fourier analysis 
- Fourier series

Fourier series

In mathematics, a Fourier series decomposes periodic functions or periodic signals into the sum of a set of simple oscillating functions, namely sines and cosines...

 
- Fourier transform

Fourier transform

In mathematics, Fourier analysis is a subject area which grew from the study of Fourier series. The subject began with the study of the way general functions may be represented by sums of simpler trigonometric functions...

 
- Fourier, Jean Baptiste Joseph 
- Fowler, William Alfred

William Alfred Fowler

William Alfred "Willy" Fowler was an American astrophysicist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983. He should not be confused with the British astronomer Alfred Fowler....

 
- Frame of reference

Frame of reference

A frame of reference in physics, may refer to a coordinate system or set of axes within which to measure the position, orientation, and other properties of objects in it, or it may refer to an observational reference frame tied to the state of motion of an observer.It may also refer to both an...

 
- Franck, James

James Franck

James Franck was a German Jewish physicist and Nobel laureate.-Biography:Franck was born to Jacob Franck and Rebecca Nachum Drucker. Franck completed his Ph.D...

 
- Frank, Il'ja Mikhailovich 
- Franklin, Benjamin

Benjamin Franklin

Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...

 
- Fraunhofer, Joseph von

Joseph von Fraunhofer

Joseph von Fraunhofer was a German optician. He is known for the discovery of the dark absorption lines known as Fraunhofer lines in the Sun's spectrum, and for making excellent optical glass and achromatic telescope objectives.-Biography:Fraunhofer was born in Straubing, Bavaria...

 
- Fraunhofer diffraction

Fraunhofer diffraction

In optics, the Fraunhofer diffraction equation is used to model the diffraction of waves when the diffraction pattern is viewed at a long distance from the diffracting object, and also when it is viewed at the focal plane of an imaging lens....

 
- Fraunhofer line 
- Free energy

Thermodynamic free energy

The thermodynamic free energy is the amount of work that a thermodynamic system can perform. The concept is useful in the thermodynamics of chemical or thermal processes in engineering and science. The free energy is the internal energy of a system less the amount of energy that cannot be used to...

 
- Fredkin Finite Nature Hypothesis

Fredkin finite nature hypothesis

In digital physics, the Fredkin Finite Nature Hypothesis states that ultimately all quantities of physics, including space and time, are discrete and finite. All measurable physical quantities arise from some Planck scale substrate for multiverse information processing...

- Free electron gas 
- Free-electron laser 
- Free space loss 
- Frequency

Frequency

Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency...

 
- Fresnel, Augustin-Jean

Augustin-Jean Fresnel

Augustin-Jean Fresnel , was a French engineer who contributed significantly to the establishment of the theory of wave optics. Fresnel studied the behaviour of light both theoretically and experimentally....

 
- Fresnel diffraction

Fresnel diffraction

In optics, the Fresnel diffraction equation for near-field diffraction, is an approximation of Kirchhoff-Fresnel diffraction that can be applied to the propagation of waves in the near field....

 
- Fresnel equations

Fresnel equations

The Fresnel equations , deduced by Augustin-Jean Fresnel , describe the behaviour of light when moving between media of differing refractive indices...

 
- Fresnel zone

Fresnel zone

In optics and radio communications , a Fresnel zone , named for physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, is one of a number of concentric ellipsoids which define volumes in the radiation pattern of a circular aperture...

 
- Friction

Friction

Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and/or material elements sliding against each other. There are several types of friction:...

 
- Friedman, Jerome I. 
- Fundamental force 
- Fundamental particle 
- Furth, Harold

Harold Furth

Harold P. Furth was an Austrian-American physicist.Furth emigrated to the United States in 1941. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor's degree in 1951 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960...

 
- Fusion

Nuclear fusion

Nuclear fusion is the process by which two or more atomic nuclei join together, or "fuse", to form a single heavier nucleus. This is usually accompanied by the release or absorption of large quantities of energy...

 

G

G force

G force

The g-force associated with an object is its acceleration relative to free-fall.It may also refer to:* G-Force , a 2009 film by Disney** G-Force , a 2009 video game based on the film...

 
- Gabor, Dennis

Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor CBE, FRS was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and inventor, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics....

 
- Galilean relativity 
- Galilean–Newtonian relativity 
- Galilean invariance

Galilean invariance

Galilean invariance or Galilean relativity is a principle of relativity which states that the fundamental laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames...

 
- Galilean transformation

Galilean transformation

The Galilean transformation is used to transform between the coordinates of two reference frames which differ only by constant relative motion within the constructs of Newtonian physics. This is the passive transformation point of view...

 
- Galilei, Galileo

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...

 
- Galvanometer

Galvanometer

A galvanometer is a type of ammeter: an instrument for detecting and measuring electric current. It is an analog electromechanical transducer that produces a rotary deflection of some type of pointer in response to electric current flowing through its coil in a magnetic field. .Galvanometers were...

 
- Gamma ray

Gamma ray

Gamma radiation, also known as gamma rays or hyphenated as gamma-rays and denoted as γ, is electromagnetic radiation of high frequency . Gamma rays are usually naturally produced on Earth by decay of high energy states in atomic nuclei...

 
- Gamow, George

George Gamow

George Gamow , born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov , was a Russian-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He discovered alpha decay via quantum tunneling and worked on radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, cosmic microwave...

 
- Gamow factor

Gamow factor

The Gamow Factor or Gamow-Sommerfeld Factor, named after its discoverer George Gamow, is a probability factor for two nuclear particles' chance of overcoming the Coulomb barrier in order to undergo nuclear reactions, for example in nuclear fusion...

 
- Gas mechanics 
- Gas

Gas

Gas is one of the three classical states of matter . Near absolute zero, a substance exists as a solid. As heat is added to this substance it melts into a liquid at its melting point , boils into a gas at its boiling point, and if heated high enough would enter a plasma state in which the electrons...

 
- Gaseous dielectrics 
- Gas laws

Gas laws

The early gas laws were developed at the end of the 18th century, when scientists began to realize that relationships between the pressure, volume and temperature of a sample of gas could be obtained which would hold for all gases...

 
- Gauge boson

Gauge boson

In particle physics, gauge bosons are bosonic particles that act as carriers of the fundamental forces of nature. More specifically, elementary particles whose interactions are described by gauge theory exert forces on each other by the exchange of gauge bosons, usually as virtual particles.-...

 
- Gauge invariance 
- Gauge theory

Gauge theory

In physics, gauge invariance is the property of a field theory in which different configurations of the underlying fundamental but unobservable fields result in identical observable quantities. A theory with such a property is called a gauge theory...

 
- Gauge transformation 
- Gauss

Gauss (unit)

The gauss, abbreviated as G, is the cgs unit of measurement of a magnetic field B , named after the German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. One gauss is defined as one maxwell per square centimeter; it equals 1 tesla...

 
- Gauss's law

Gauss's law

In physics, Gauss's law, also known as Gauss's flux theorem, is a law relating the distribution of electric charge to the resulting electric field. Gauss's law states that:...

 
- Gauss, Carl Friedrich

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician and scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics.Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum...

 
- Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

- External links :* from the American Chemical Society* from the Encyclopædia Britannica, 10th Edition * , Paris...

 
- Gay-Lussac's law 
- Gee

Standard gravity

Standard gravity, or standard acceleration due to free fall, usually denoted by g0 or gn, is the nominal acceleration of an object in a vacuum near the surface of the Earth. It is defined as precisely , or about...

 
- Geiger-Marsden experiment

Geiger-Marsden experiment

The Geiger–Marsden experiment was an experiment to probe the structure of the atom performed by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909, under the direction of Ernest Rutherford at the Physical Laboratories of the University of Manchester...

 
- Gell-Mann, Murray

Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles...

 
- General relativity

General relativity

General relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics...

 
- Geodesic

Geodesic

In mathematics, a geodesic is a generalization of the notion of a "straight line" to "curved spaces". In the presence of a Riemannian metric, geodesics are defined to be the shortest path between points in the space...

 
- Geometer 
- Geometers 
- Geometrized units 
- Geophysics

Geophysics

Geophysics is the physics of the Earth and its environment in space; also the study of the Earth using quantitative physical methods. The term geophysics sometimes refers only to the geological applications: Earth's shape; its gravitational and magnetic fields; its internal structure and...

 
- GHZ experiment

GHZ experiment

GHZ experiments are a class of physics experiments that may be used to generate starkly contrasting predictions from local hidden variable theory and quantum mechanical theory, and permit immediate comparison with actual experimental results. A GHZ experiment is similar to a test of Bell's...

 
- Giacconi, Riccardo

Riccardo Giacconi

Riccardo Giacconi is an Italian/American Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid the foundations of X-ray astronomy. He is currently a professor at the Johns Hopkins University.- Biography :...

 
- Giaever, Ivar

Ivar Giaever

Ivar Giaever is a physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson "for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids". Giaever's share of the prize was specifically for his "experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in ......

 
- Gibbs, Willard 
- Gibbs paradox

Gibbs paradox

In statistical mechanics, a semi-classical derivation of the entropy that doesn't take into account the indistinguishability of particles, yields an expression for the entropy which is not extensive...

 
- Glaser, Donald Arthur 
- Glashow, Sheldon Lee

Sheldon Lee Glashow

Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University.-Birth and education:...

 
- Gluon

Gluon

Gluons are elementary particles which act as the exchange particles for the color force between quarks, analogous to the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles....

 
- Goeppert-Mayer, Maria 
- Graham's law

Graham's law

Graham's law, known as Graham's law of effusion, was formulated by Scottish physical chemist Thomas Graham in 1846. Graham found experimentally that the rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of the mass of its particles...

 
- Grand unification theory

Grand unification theory

The term Grand Unified Theory, often abbreviated as GUT, refers to any of several similar candidate models in particle physics in which at high-energy, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model which define the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, are merged into one single...

 
- Grandfather paradox

Grandfather paradox

The grandfather paradox is a proposed paradox of time travel first described by the science fiction writer René Barjavel in his 1943 book Le Voyageur Imprudent . The paradox is this: suppose a man traveled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveler's...

 
- Gravitational binding energy

Gravitational binding energy

The gravitational binding energy of an object consisting of loose material, held together by gravity alone, is the amount of energy required to pull all of the material apart, to infinity...

 
- Gravitational constant

Gravitational constant

The gravitational constant, denoted G, is an empirical physical constant involved in the calculation of the gravitational attraction between objects with mass. It appears in Newton's law of universal gravitation and in Einstein's theory of general relativity. It is also known as the universal...

 
- Gravitational force 
- Gravitational red shift 
- Gravitational singularity

Gravitational singularity

A gravitational singularity or spacetime singularity is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system...

 
- Gravitational wave 
- Gravitoelectromagnetism 
- Graviton

Graviton

In physics, the graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that mediates the force of gravitation in the framework of quantum field theory. If it exists, the graviton must be massless and must have a spin of 2...

 
- Gravity 
- Gravity Probe A

Gravity Probe A

Gravity Probe A was a space-based experiment to test the theory of general relativity, performed jointly by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration...

 - Gravity Probe B

Gravity Probe B

Gravity Probe B is a satellite-based mission which launched on 20 April 2004 on a Delta II rocket. The spaceflight phase lasted until 2005; its aim was to measure spacetime curvature near Earth, and thereby the stress–energy tensor in and near Earth...

 
- Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit

Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit

The Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit is a theoretical upper limit on the energy of cosmic rays coming from "distant" sources. The limit is 5×1019 eV, or about 8 joules. The limit is set by slowing-interactions of cosmic ray protons with the microwave background radiation over long distances...

 
- Grimaldi, Francesco Maria

Francesco Maria Grimaldi

Francesco Maria Grimaldi was an Italian Jesuit priest, mathematician and physicist who taught at the Jesuit college in Bologna....

 
- Ground state

Ground state

The ground state of a quantum mechanical system is its lowest-energy state; the energy of the ground state is known as the zero-point energy of the system. An excited state is any state with energy greater than the ground state...

 
- Group delay

Group delay

Group delay is a measure of the time delay of the amplitude envelopes of the various sinusoidal components of a signal through a device under test, and is a function of frequency for each component...

 
- Group transformation 
- Group velocity

Group velocity

The group velocity of a wave is the velocity with which the overall shape of the wave's amplitudes — known as the modulation or envelope of the wave — propagates through space....

 
- Guillaume, Charles Edouard

Charles Edouard Guillaume

Charles Édouard Guillaume was a Swiss physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920 in recognition of the service he had rendered to precision measurements in physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys.Guillaume is known for his discovery of nickel-steel alloys he...

 
- Gyrocompass

Gyrocompass

A gyrocompass­ is a type of non-magnetic compass which bases on a fast-spinning disc and rotation of our planet to automatically find geographical direction...

 
- Gyroscope

Gyroscope

A gyroscope is a device for measuring or maintaining orientation, based on the principles of angular momentum. In essence, a mechanical gyroscope is a spinning wheel or disk whose axle is free to take any orientation...

 

H

Hadron

Hadron

In particle physics, a hadron is a composite particle made of quarks held together by the strong force...

 
- Hadronization

Hadronization

In particle physics, hadronization is the process of the formation of hadrons out of quarks and gluons. This occurs after high-energy collisions in a particle collider in which free quarks or gluons are created. Due to postulated colour confinement, these cannot exist individually...

 
- Hagen, Gotthilf

Gotthilf Heinrich Ludwig Hagen

Gotthilf Heinrich Ludwig Hagen was a German physicist and hydraulic engineer.Hagen was born in Königsberg, East Prussia . He studied mathematics, architecture, and civil engineering at the University of Königsberg...

 
- Hall, Edwin

Edwin Hall

Edwin Herbert Hall was an American physicist who discovered the "Hall effect". Hall conducted thermoelectric research at Harvard and also wrote numerous physics textbooks and laboratory manuals.- Biography :...

 
- Hartree–Fock Talk:Hartree–Fock
- Hall effect

Hall effect

The Hall effect is the production of a voltage difference across an electrical conductor, transverse to an electric current in the conductor and a magnetic field perpendicular to the current...

 
- Halley, Edmund 
- William Rowan Hamilton

William Rowan Hamilton

Sir William Rowan Hamilton was an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, who made important contributions to classical mechanics, optics, and algebra. His studies of mechanical and optical systems led him to discover new mathematical concepts and techniques...

 
- Hamilton, William Rowan

William Rowan Hamilton

Sir William Rowan Hamilton was an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, who made important contributions to classical mechanics, optics, and algebra. His studies of mechanical and optical systems led him to discover new mathematical concepts and techniques...

 
- Hamilton-Jacobi equation 
- Hamiltonian

Hamiltonian (quantum mechanics)

In quantum mechanics, the Hamiltonian H, also Ȟ or Ĥ, is the operator corresponding to the total energy of the system. Its spectrum is the set of possible outcomes when one measures the total energy of a system...

 
- Hamiltonian mechanics

Hamiltonian mechanics

Hamiltonian mechanics is a reformulation of classical mechanics that was introduced in 1833 by Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton.It arose from Lagrangian mechanics, a previous reformulation of classical mechanics introduced by Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1788, but can be formulated without...

 
- Hamiltonian (quantum mechanics)

Hamiltonian (quantum mechanics)

In quantum mechanics, the Hamiltonian H, also Ȟ or Ĥ, is the operator corresponding to the total energy of the system. Its spectrum is the set of possible outcomes when one measures the total energy of a system...

 
- Harmonic oscillator

Harmonic oscillator

In classical mechanics, a harmonic oscillator is a system that, when displaced from its equilibrium position, experiences a restoring force, F, proportional to the displacement, x: \vec F = -k \vec x \, where k is a positive constant....

 
- Hartree energy

Hartree energy

The hartree , also known as the Hartree energy, is the atomic unit of energy, named after the British physicist Douglas Hartree. It is defined as...

 
- Hawking, Stephen

Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA is an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity...

 
- Hawking radiation

Hawking radiation

Hawking radiation is a thermal radiation with a black body spectrum predicted to be emitted by black holes due to quantum effects. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking, who provided a theoretical argument for its existence in 1974, and sometimes also after the physicist Jacob Bekenstein...

 
- Heat

Heat

In physics and thermodynamics, heat is energy transferred from one body, region, or thermodynamic system to another due to thermal contact or thermal radiation when the systems are at different temperatures. It is often described as one of the fundamental processes of energy transfer between...

 
- Heat equation

Heat equation

The heat equation is an important partial differential equation which describes the distribution of heat in a given region over time...

 
- Heaviside, Oliver

Oliver Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques to the solution of differential equations , reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and...

 
- Heisenberg, Werner

Werner Heisenberg

Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory...

 
- Heisenberg, Werner Karl 
- Heisenberg's inequality 
- Hellmann–Feynman theorem 
- Helmholtz, Hermann von

Hermann von Helmholtz

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science...

 
- Helmholtz coil

Helmholtz coil

A Helmholtz coil is a device for producing a region of nearly uniform magnetic field. It is named in honor of the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz.- Description :A Helmholtz pair consists of two identical circular magnetic...

 
- Hermite, Charles

Charles Hermite

Charles Hermite was a French mathematician who did research on number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra....

 
- Hermitian (disambiguation) 
- Hermitian adjoint

Hermitian adjoint

In mathematics, specifically in functional analysis, each linear operator on a Hilbert space has a corresponding adjoint operator.Adjoints of operators generalize conjugate transposes of square matrices to infinite-dimensional situations...

 
- Hermitian operator 
- Hero of Alexandria

Hero of Alexandria

Hero of Alexandria was an ancient Greek mathematician and engineerEnc. Britannica 2007, "Heron of Alexandria" who was active in his native city of Alexandria, Roman Egypt...

 
- Henry, Joseph

Joseph Henry

Joseph Henry was an American scientist who served as the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, as well as a founding member of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution. During his lifetime, he was highly regarded...

 
- Hertz, Gustav Ludwig

Gustav Ludwig Hertz

Gustav Ludwig Hertz was a German experimental physicist and Nobel Prize winner, and a nephew of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.-Biography:...

 
- Hertz, Heinrich 
- Hess, Victor Franz 
- Hessian matrix

Hessian matrix

In mathematics, the Hessian matrix is the square matrix of second-order partial derivatives of a function; that is, it describes the local curvature of a function of many variables. The Hessian matrix was developed in the 19th century by the German mathematician Ludwig Otto Hesse and later named...

- Hewish, Antony

Antony Hewish

Antony Hewish FRS is a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for his work on the development of radio aperture synthesis and its role in the discovery of pulsars...

 
- Hidden variable theory

Hidden variable theory

Historically, in physics, hidden variable theories were espoused by some physicists who argued that quantum mechanics is incomplete. These theories argue against the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the Copenhagen Interpretation...

 
- Higgs boson

Higgs boson

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Its existence is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in the Standard Model...

 
- Higgs field 
- Higgs mechanism

Higgs mechanism

In particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is the process in which gauge bosons in a gauge theory can acquire non-vanishing masses through absorption of Nambu-Goldstone bosons arising in spontaneous symmetry breaking....

 
- Higgs Boson

Higgs boson

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Its existence is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in the Standard Model...

 
- Higgs, Peter

Peter Higgs

Peter Ware Higgs, FRS, FRSE, FKC , is an English theoretical physicist and an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh....

 
- High energy physics 
- High pressure physics 
- Hilbert space

Hilbert space

The mathematical concept of a Hilbert space, named after David Hilbert, generalizes the notion of Euclidean space. It extends the methods of vector algebra and calculus from the two-dimensional Euclidean plane and three-dimensional space to spaces with any finite or infinite number of dimensions...

 
- History of physics

History of physics

As forms of science historically developed out of philosophy, physics was originally referred to as natural philosophy, a term describing a field of study concerned with "the workings of nature".-Early history:...

 
- Hofstadter, Robert

Robert Hofstadter

Robert Hofstadter was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons."-Biography :Born in New York City, he entered City...

 
- Holography

Holography

Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that when an imaging system is placed in the reconstructed beam, an image of the object will be seen even when the object is no longer present...

 
- Hooft, Gerardus 't

Gerardus 't Hooft

Gerardus 't Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G...

 
- Hooke's law

Hooke's law

In mechanics, and physics, Hooke's law of elasticity is an approximation that states that the extension of a spring is in direct proportion with the load applied to it. Many materials obey this law as long as the load does not exceed the material's elastic limit. Materials for which Hooke's law...

 
- Hooke, Robert

Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke FRS was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath.His adult life comprised three distinct periods: as a scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666, but...

 
- Houtermans, Fritz

Fritz Houtermans

Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Houtermans was a Dutch-Austrian-German atomic and nuclear physicist born in Zoppot near Danzig, West Prussia...

 
- Hückel, Erich 
- Hückel, Erich

Erich Hückel

Erich Armand Arthur Joseph Hückel was a German physicist and physical chemist. He is known for two major contributions:*The Debye–Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions...

 
- Hull, Gordon Ferrie

Gordon Ferrie Hull

Gordon Ferrie Hull was a Canadian / American teacher, mathematician and physicist, especially known for the experimental detection of the radiation pressure exerted by light which he achieved in 1903....

 
- Hume, David

David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...

 
- Hydraulics

Hydraulics

Hydraulics is a topic in applied science and engineering dealing with the mechanical properties of liquids. Fluid mechanics provides the theoretical foundation for hydraulics, which focuses on the engineering uses of fluid properties. In fluid power, hydraulics is used for the generation, control,...

 
- Hydromechanics

Hydromechanics

The history of fluid mechanics, the study of how fluids move and the forces on them, dates back to the Ancient Greeks.-Archimedes:The fundamental principles of hydrostatics were given by Archimedes in his work On Floating Bodies, around 250 BC. In it, Archimedes develops the law of buoyancy, also...

 
- Hydrostatics 
- Huygens, Christiaan 
- Huygens' principle 
- hydraulics

Hydraulics

Hydraulics is a topic in applied science and engineering dealing with the mechanical properties of liquids. Fluid mechanics provides the theoretical foundation for hydraulics, which focuses on the engineering uses of fluid properties. In fluid power, hydraulics is used for the generation, control,...

 
- Hydrodynamics 
- Hydrogen atom

Hydrogen atom

A hydrogen atom is an atom of the chemical element hydrogen. The electrically neutral atom contains a single positively-charged proton and a single negatively-charged electron bound to the nucleus by the Coulomb force...

 
- Hydrostatic equilibrium

Hydrostatic equilibrium

Hydrostatic equilibrium or hydrostatic balance is the condition in fluid mechanics where a volume of a fluid is at rest or at constant velocity. This occurs when compression due to gravity is balanced by a pressure gradient force...

 
- Hydrostatics 
- Hypercharge

Hypercharge

In particle physics, the hypercharge Y of a particle is related to the strong interaction, and is distinct from the similarly named weak hypercharge, which has an analogous role in the electroweak interaction...

 
- Hyperfine structure

Hyperfine structure

The term hyperfine structure refers to a collection of different effects leading to small shifts and splittings in the energy levels of atoms, molecules and ions. The name is a reference to the fine structure which results from the interaction between the magnetic moments associated with electron...

 
- Hysteresis

Hysteresis

Hysteresis is the dependence of a system not just on its current environment but also on its past. This dependence arises because the system can be in more than one internal state. To predict its future evolution, either its internal state or its history must be known. If a given input alternately...

 

I

Ideal gas

Ideal gas

An ideal gas is a theoretical gas composed of a set of randomly-moving, non-interacting point particles. The ideal gas concept is useful because it obeys the ideal gas law, a simplified equation of state, and is amenable to analysis under statistical mechanics.At normal conditions such as...

 
- Ideal gas law

Ideal gas law

The ideal gas law is the equation of state of a hypothetical ideal gas. It is a good approximation to the behavior of many gases under many conditions, although it has several limitations. It was first stated by Émile Clapeyron in 1834 as a combination of Boyle's law and Charles's law...

 
- Ideally imperfect gas 
- Identical particles

Identical particles

Identical particles, or indistinguishable particles, are particles that cannot be distinguished from one another, even in principle. Species of identical particles include elementary particles such as electrons, and, with some clauses, composite particles such as atoms and molecules.There are two...

 
- Imaginary time

Imaginary time

Imaginary time is a concept derived from quantum mechanics and is essential in connecting quantum mechanics with statistical mechanics.- In quantum mechanics :...

 
- Impedance

Electrical impedance

Electrical impedance, or simply impedance, is the measure of the opposition that an electrical circuit presents to the passage of a current when a voltage is applied. In quantitative terms, it is the complex ratio of the voltage to the current in an alternating current circuit...

 
- Impulse (physics) 
- Incompressible flow

Incompressible flow

In fluid mechanics or more generally continuum mechanics, incompressible flow refers to flow in which the material density is constant within an infinitesimal volume that moves with the velocity of the fluid...

 
- Indirect bandgap 
- Inertia

Inertia

Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion. It is proportional to an object's mass. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles of classical physics which are used to...

 
- Inertial force 
- Inertial frame of reference

Inertial frame of reference

In physics, an inertial frame of reference is a frame of reference that describes time homogeneously and space homogeneously, isotropically, and in a time-independent manner.All inertial frames are in a state of constant, rectilinear motion with respect to one another; they are not...

 
- Infinite divisibility

Infinite divisibility

The concept of infinite divisibility arises in different ways in philosophy, physics, economics, order theory , and probability theory...

 
- Insulator 
- Intellectual history of time 
- Intensive variable 
- Interaction energy

Interaction energy

In physics, interaction energy is the contribution to the total energy that is caused by an interaction between the objects being considered.The interaction energy usually depends on the relative position of the objects...

 
- Interatomic force 
- Interferometry

Interferometry

Interferometry refers to a family of techniques in which electromagnetic waves are superimposed in order to extract information about the waves. An instrument used to interfere waves is called an interferometer. Interferometry is an important investigative technique in the fields of astronomy,...

 
- Intermolecular force

Intermolecular force

Intermolecular forces are forces of attraction or repulsion which act between neighboring particles: atoms, molecules or ions. They are weak compared to the intramolecular forces, the forces which keep a molecule together...

 
- International Geophysical Year

International Geophysical Year

The International Geophysical Year was an international scientific project that lasted from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958. It marked the end of a long period during the Cold War when scientific interchange between East and West was seriously interrupted...

 
- Interpretation of quantum mechanics

Interpretation of quantum mechanics

An interpretation of quantum mechanics is a set of statements which attempt to explain how quantum mechanics informs our understanding of nature. Although quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and thorough experimental testing, many of these experiments are open to different interpretations...

 
- Invariant (physics)

Invariant (physics)

In mathematics and theoretical physics, an invariant is a property of a system which remains unchanged under some transformation.-Examples:In the current era, the immobility of polaris under the diurnal motion of the celestial sphere is a classical illustration of physical invariance.Another...

 
- Inverse-square law

Inverse-square law

In physics, an inverse-square law is any physical law stating that a specified physical quantity or strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of that physical quantity....

 
- Iridescence

Iridescence

Iridescence is generally known as the property of certain surfaces which appear to change color as the angle of view or the angle of illumination changes...

 
- Isentropic process

Isentropic process

In thermodynamics, an isentropic process or isoentropic process is one in which for purposes of engineering analysis and calculation, one may assume that the process takes place from initiation to completion without an increase or decrease in the entropy of the system, i.e., the entropy of the...

 
- Ising model

Ising model

The Ising model is a mathematical model of ferromagnetism in statistical mechanics. The model consists of discrete variables called spins that can be in one of two states . The spins are arranged in a graph , and each spin interacts with its nearest neighbors...

 
- Isolated singularity 
- Isospin

Isospin

In physics, and specifically, particle physics, isospin is a quantum number related to the strong interaction. This term was derived from isotopic spin, but the term is confusing as two isotopes of a nucleus have different numbers of nucleons; in contrast, rotations of isospin maintain the number...

 
- Isotopic spin 

J

Jacobi, Carl Gustav Jakob

Carl Gustav Jakob Jacobi

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi was a German mathematician, widely considered to be the most inspiring teacher of his time and is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation.-Biography:...

 
- Jacobian matrix and determinant 
- Jaynes, Edwin 
- Jellium

Jellium

Jellium, also known as the uniform electron gas or homogeneous electron gas , is a quantum mechanical model of interacting electrons in a solid where the positive charges are assumed to be uniformly distributed in space whence the electron densityis a uniform quantity as well in space...

 
- Jensen, J. Hans D.

J. Hans D. Jensen

Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranium Club, in which he made contributions to the separation of uranium isotopes. After the war Jensen was a professor at the University of Heidelberg...

 
- Johnson-Nyquist noise 
- Josephson effect

Josephson effect

The Josephson effect is the phenomenon of supercurrent across two superconductors coupled by a weak link...

 
- Josephson, Brian David

Brian David Josephson

Brian David Josephson, FRS is a Welsh physicist. He became a Nobel Prize laureate in 1973 for the prediction of the eponymous Josephson effect....

 
- Joule, James Prescott

James Prescott Joule

James Prescott Joule FRS was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work . This led to the theory of conservation of energy, which led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The...

 
- Joule-Thomson effect

Joule-Thomson effect

In thermodynamics, the Joule–Thomson effect or Joule–Kelvin effect or Kelvin–Joule effect describes the temperature change of a gas or liquid when it is forced through a valve or porous plug while kept insulated so that no heat is exchanged with the environment. This procedure is called a...

 
- Joule's law

Joule's law

Joule's laws are a pair of laws concerning the heat produced by a current and the energy dependence of an ideal gas to that of pressure, volume, and temperature, respectively...

 

K

Kaluza–Klein theory

Kaluza–Klein theory

In physics, Kaluza–Klein theory is a model that seeks to unify the two fundamental forces of gravitation and electromagnetism. The theory was first published in 1921. It was proposed by the mathematician Theodor Kaluza who extended general relativity to a five-dimensional spacetime...

 
- Kamerlingh-Onnes, Heike 
- Kapitsa, Pyotr Leonidovich 
- Kastler, Alfred

Alfred Kastler

Alfred Kastler was a French physicist, and Nobel Prize laureate.Kastler was born in Guebwiller and later attended the Lycée Bartholdi in Colmar, Alsace, and École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1921...

 
- Kelvin

Kelvin

The kelvin is a unit of measurement for temperature. It is one of the seven base units in the International System of Units and is assigned the unit symbol K. The Kelvin scale is an absolute, thermodynamic temperature scale using as its null point absolute zero, the temperature at which all...

 
- Kelvin, William Thomson, 1st Baron

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin OM, GCVO, PC, PRS, PRSE, was a mathematical physicist and engineer. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging...

 
- Kelvin–Helmholtz instability 
- Kelvin probe force microscope

Kelvin probe force microscope

Kelvin probe force microscopy , also known as surface potential microscopy, is a noncontact variant of atomic force microscopy that was invented in 1991. With KPFM, the work function of surfaces can be observed at atomic or molecular scales...

 
- Kendall, Henry W. 
- Kendall, Henry W. 
- Kennedy–Thorndike experiment 
- Kepler, Johannes

Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican...

 
- Kerr metric

Kerr metric

The Kerr metric describes the geometry of empty spacetime around an uncharged axially-symmetric black-hole with an event horizon which is topologically a sphere. The Kerr metric is an exact solution of the Einstein field equations of general relativity; these equations are highly non-linear, which...

 Kerr metric
- Ketterle, Wolfgang

Wolfgang Ketterle

Wolfgang Ketterle is a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His research has focused on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero, and he led one of the first groups to realize Bose-Einstein condensation in these...

 
- Kilby, Jack S. 
- Kinematics

Kinematics

Kinematics is the branch of classical mechanics that describes the motion of bodies and systems without consideration of the forces that cause the motion....

 
- Kinetic energy

Kinetic energy

The kinetic energy of an object is the energy which it possesses due to its motion.It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes...

 
- Kinetic theory

Kinetic theory

The kinetic theory of gases describes a gas as a large number of small particles , all of which are in constant, random motion. The rapidly moving particles constantly collide with each other and with the walls of the container...

 
- Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation

Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation

In thermodynamics, Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation, or Kirchhoff's law for short, is a general statement equating emission and absorption in heated objects, proposed by Gustav Kirchhoff in 1859, following from general considerations of thermodynamic equilibrium and detailed balance.An object...

 
- Kirchhoff's circuit laws

Kirchhoff's circuit laws

Kirchhoff's circuit laws are two equalities that deal with the conservation of charge and energy in electrical circuits, and were first described in 1845 by Gustav Kirchhoff...

 
- Kirchhoff, Gustav

Gustav Kirchhoff

Gustav Robert Kirchhoff was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects...

 
- Kirkendall effect

Kirkendall effect

The Kirkendall effect is the motion of the boundary layer between two metals that occurs as a consequence of the difference in diffusion rates of the metal atoms...

 
- Klein paradox

Klein paradox

In 1929, physicist Oskar Klein obtained a surprising result by applying the Dirac equation to the familiar problem of electron scattering from a potential barrier. In nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, electron tunneling into a barrier is observed, with exponential damping...

 
- Knife-edge effect

Knife-edge effect

In electromagnetic wave propagation, the knife-edge effect or edge diffraction is a redirection by diffraction of a portion of the incident radiation that strikes a well-defined obstacle such as a mountain range or the edge of a building....

 
- Kondo effect

Kondo effect

In physics, the Kondo effect describes the scattering of conduction electrons in a metal due to magnetic impurities. It is a measure of how electrical resistivity changes with temperature....

 
- Koshiba, Masatoshi

Masatoshi Koshiba

is a Japanese physicist. He jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002.He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1951 and received a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Rochester, New York, in 1955...

 
- Kroemer, Herbert

Herbert Kroemer

Herbert Kroemer , a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor, setting the stage...

 
- Kusch, Polykarp

Polykarp Kusch

Polykarp Kusch was a German-American physicist. In 1955 he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics with Willis Eugene Lamb for his accurate determination that the magnetic moment of the electron was greater than its theoretical value, thus leading to reconsideration of—and...

 

L

LADAR 
- Ladder operator

Ladder operator

In linear algebra , a raising or lowering operator is an operator that increases or decreases the eigenvalue of another operator. In quantum mechanics, the raising operator is sometimes called the creation operator, and the lowering operator the annihilation operator...

 
- Langevin, Paul

Paul Langevin

Paul Langevin was a prominent French physicist who developed Langevin dynamics and the Langevin equation. He was one of the founders of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, an antifascist organization created in the wake of the 6 February 1934 far right riots...

 
- Langevin equation

Langevin equation

In statistical physics, a Langevin equation is a stochastic differential equation describing the time evolution of a subset of the degrees of freedom. These degrees of freedom typically are collective variables changing only slowly in comparison to the other variables of the system...

 
- Lagrange, Joseph Louis

Joseph Louis Lagrange

Joseph-Louis Lagrange , born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia, was a mathematician and astronomer, who was born in Turin, Piedmont, lived part of his life in Prussia and part in France, making significant contributions to all fields of analysis, to number theory, and to classical and celestial mechanics...

 
- Lagrange bracket

Lagrange bracket

Lagrange brackets are certain expressions closely related to Poisson brackets that were introduced by Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1808–1810 for the purposes of mathematical formulation of classical mechanics, but unlike the Poisson brackets, have fallen out of use....

 
- Lagrange multipliers

Lagrange multipliers

In mathematical optimization, the method of Lagrange multipliers provides a strategy for finding the maxima and minima of a function subject to constraints.For instance , consider the optimization problem...

 
- Lagrangian

Lagrangian

The Lagrangian, L, of a dynamical system is a function that summarizes the dynamics of the system. It is named after Joseph Louis Lagrange. The concept of a Lagrangian was originally introduced in a reformulation of classical mechanics by Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton known as...

 
- Lagrangian mechanics

Lagrangian mechanics

Lagrangian mechanics is a re-formulation of classical mechanics that combines conservation of momentum with conservation of energy. It was introduced by the Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange in 1788....

 
- Lagrangian point

Lagrangian point

The Lagrangian points are the five positions in an orbital configuration where a small object affected only by gravity can theoretically be stationary relative to two larger objects...

 
- Lamb, Willis Eugene 
- Lamb shift 
- Lambert, Johann Heinrich

Johann Heinrich Lambert

Johann Heinrich Lambert was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer.Asteroid 187 Lamberta was named in his honour.-Biography:...

 
- Laminar flow

Laminar flow

Laminar flow, sometimes known as streamline flow, occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between the layers. At low velocities the fluid tends to flow without lateral mixing, and adjacent layers slide past one another like playing cards. There are no cross currents...

 
- Landau, Lev Davidovich 
- Lande g-factor

Landé g-factor

In physics, the Landé g-factor is a particular example of a g-factor, namely for an electron with both spin and orbital angular momenta. It is named after Alfred Landé, who first described it in 1921....

 
- Langmuir, Irving

Irving Langmuir

Irving Langmuir was an American chemist and physicist. His most noted publication was the famous 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his...

 
- Laplace operator

Laplace operator

In mathematics the Laplace operator or Laplacian is a differential operator given by the divergence of the gradient of a function on Euclidean space. It is usually denoted by the symbols ∇·∇, ∇2 or Δ...

 
- Laplace's equation

Laplace's equation

In mathematics, Laplace's equation is a second-order partial differential equation named after Pierre-Simon Laplace who first studied its properties. This is often written as:where ∆ = ∇² is the Laplace operator and \varphi is a scalar function...

 
- Laplace, Pierre Simon 
- Large Electron Positron 
- Large Hadron Collider

Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It is expected to address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature....

 
- Laser

Laser

A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of photons. The term "laser" originated as an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...

 
- Laser applications

Laser applications

Many scientific, military, medical and commercial laser applications have been developed since the invention of the laser in the 1958. The coherency, high monochromaticity, and ability to reach extremely high powers are all properties which allow for these specialized applications.-Scientific:In...

 
- Laser construction

Laser construction

A laser is constructed from three principal parts:*An energy source ,*A gain medium or laser medium, and*Two or more mirrors that form an optical resonator.-Pump source:...

 
- Laser diode

Laser diode

The laser diode is a laser where the active medium is a semiconductor similar to that found in a light-emitting diode. The most common type of laser diode is formed from a p-n junction and powered by injected electric current...

 
- Laser science

Laser science

Laser science or laser physics is a branch of optics that describes the theory and practice of lasers.Laser science is principally concerned with quantum electronics, laser construction, optical cavity design, the physics of producing a population inversion in laser media, and the temporal...

 
- Lattes, César

César Lattes

Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes , also known as Cesar Lattes, was a Brazilian experimental physicist, one of the discoverers of the pion, a composite subatomic particle made of a quark and an antiquark.-Life:Lattes was born to a family of Italian Jewish immigrants in Curitiba, Southern Brazil...

- Laue, Max von

Max von Laue

Max Theodor Felix von Laue was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals...

 
- Laughlin, Robert B.

Robert B. Laughlin

Robert Betts Laughlin is a professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Along with Horst L. Störmer of Columbia University and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University, he was awarded a share of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics for their explanation of the fractional quantum Hall...

 
- Law of Charles and Gay-Lussac 
- Law of conservation of energy 
- Law of heat conduction 
- Law of mass-energy conservation 
- Lawrence, Ernest Orlando 
- Laws of physics

Physical law

A physical law or scientific law is "a theoretical principle deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined group or class of phenomena, and expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions be present." Physical laws are typically conclusions...

 
- Laws of thermodynamics

Laws of thermodynamics

The four laws of thermodynamics summarize its most important facts. They define fundamental physical quantities, such as temperature, energy, and entropy, in order to describe thermodynamic systems. They also describe the transfer of energy as heat and work in thermodynamic processes...

 
- Lederman, Leon 
- Lederman, Leon M.

Leon M. Lederman

Leon Max Lederman is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his work with neutrinos. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, USA...

 
- Lee, David M. 
- Lee, Tsung-Dao

Tsung-Dao Lee

Tsung-Dao Lee is a Chinese born-American physicist, well known for his work on parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion physics, nontopological solitons and soliton stars....

 
- Lenard, Philip von

Philipp Lenard

Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard , known in Hungarian as Lénárd Fülöp Eduárd Antal, was a Hungarian - German physicist and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays and the discovery of many of their properties...

 
- Length

Length

In geometric measurements, length most commonly refers to the longest dimension of an object.In certain contexts, the term "length" is reserved for a certain dimension of an object along which the length is measured. For example it is possible to cut a length of a wire which is shorter than wire...

 
- Length contraction

Length contraction

In physics, length contraction – according to Hendrik Lorentz – is the physical phenomenon of a decrease in length detected by an observer of objects that travel at any non-zero velocity relative to that observer...

 
- Josef Lense

Josef Lense

Josef Lense was an Austrian physicistIn 1914 Lense got his doctorate under Samuel Oppenheim. From 1927-28 he was Professor ordinarius and from 1928-1946 Professor extraordinarius for applied mathematics at the Technical University of Munich...

 Josef Lense
- Lense-Thirring effect 
- Heinrich Lenz

Heinrich Lenz

Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz was a Russian physicist of Baltic German ethnicity. He is most noted for formulating Lenz's law in electrodynamics in 1833....

 
- Lenz's law

Lenz's law

Lenz's law is a common way of understanding how electromagnetic circuits must always obey Newton's third law and The Law of Conservation of Energy...

 
- Lepton

Lepton

A lepton is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. The best known of all leptons is the electron which governs nearly all of chemistry as it is found in atoms and is directly tied to all chemical properties. Two main classes of leptons exist: charged leptons , and neutral...

 
- Lever

Lever

In physics, a lever is a rigid object that is used with an appropriate fulcrum or pivot point to either multiply the mechanical force that can be applied to another object or resistance force , or multiply the distance and speed at which the opposite end of the rigid object travels.This leverage...

 
- Lever

Lever

In physics, a lever is a rigid object that is used with an appropriate fulcrum or pivot point to either multiply the mechanical force that can be applied to another object or resistance force , or multiply the distance and speed at which the opposite end of the rigid object travels.This leverage...

age
- Lever rule

Lever rule

The lever rule is a tool used to determine weight percentages of each phase of a binary equilibrium phase diagram. It is used to determine the percent weight of liquid and solid phases for a given binary composition and temperature that is between the liquidus and solidus.-Binary Phase...

- LIDAR

LIDAR

LIDAR is an optical remote sensing technology that can measure the distance to, or other properties of a target by illuminating the target with light, often using pulses from a laser...

 
- Lie algebra

Lie algebra

In mathematics, a Lie algebra is an algebraic structure whose main use is in studying geometric objects such as Lie groups and differentiable manifolds. Lie algebras were introduced to study the concept of infinitesimal transformations. The term "Lie algebra" was introduced by Hermann Weyl in the...

 
- Lie group

Lie group

In mathematics, a Lie group is a group which is also a differentiable manifold, with the property that the group operations are compatible with the smooth structure...

 
- Lie superalgebra

Lie superalgebra

In mathematics, a Lie superalgebra is a generalisation of a Lie algebra to include a Z2-grading. Lie superalgebras are important in theoretical physics where they are used to describe the mathematics of supersymmetry...

 
- Lie, Sophus

Sophus Lie

Marius Sophus Lie was a Norwegian mathematician. He largely created the theory of continuous symmetry, and applied it to the study of geometry and differential equations.- Biography :...

 
- Light

Light

Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. Visible light has wavelength in a range from about 380 nanometres to about 740 nm, with a frequency range of about 405 THz to 790 THz...

 
- Likelihood

Likelihood

Likelihood is a measure of how likely an event is, and can be expressed in terms of, for example, probability or odds in favor.-Likelihood function:...

 
- Likelihood-ratio test

Likelihood-ratio test

In statistics, a likelihood ratio test is a statistical test used to compare the fit of two models, one of which is a special case of the other . The test is based on the likelihood ratio, which expresses how many times more likely the data are under one model than the other...

 
- Linear momentum 
- Linear motor

Linear motor

A linear motor is an electric motor that has had its stator and rotor "unrolled" so that instead of producing a torque it produces a linear force along its length...

 
- Linear operator 
- Linear polarization

Linear polarization

In electrodynamics, linear polarization or plane polarization of electromagnetic radiation is a confinement of the electric field vector or magnetic field vector to a given plane along the direction of propagation...

 
- Liouville operator 
- Lippmann, Gabriel

Gabriel Lippmann

Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference....

 
- Liquid drop model 
- Liquid helium

Liquid helium

Helium exists in liquid form only at extremely low temperatures. The boiling point and critical point depend on the isotope of the helium; see the table below for values. The density of liquid helium-4 at its boiling point and 1 atmosphere is approximately 0.125 g/mL Helium-4 was first liquefied...

 
- Liquid mechanics 
- List of Common Physics Abbreviations 
- List of equations in classical mechanics 
- List of elementary physics formulae 
- List of important publications in physics 
- List of laws in science 
- List of letters used in mathematics and science 
- List of noise topics 
- List of physicists 
- List of physics topics 
- List of optical topics 
- List of scientific journals in physics 
- List of scientific units named after people

Scientific units named after people

This is a list of scientific units named after people. For other lists of eponyms see eponym.Note that by convention, the name of the unit is properly written in all-lowercase, but its abbreviation is capitalized.-SI base units:...

- List of wave topics 
- Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was a Russian mathematician and geometer, renowned primarily for his pioneering works on hyperbolic geometry, otherwise known as Lobachevskian geometry...

 
- Local coordinate system 
- Locality principle 
- Loop quantum gravity

Loop quantum gravity

Loop quantum gravity , also known as loop gravity and quantum geometry, is a proposed quantum theory of spacetime which attempts to reconcile the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity...

 
- Lorentz, Hendrik

Hendrik Lorentz

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect...

 
- Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction hypothesis 
- Lorentz force

Lorentz force

In physics, the Lorentz force is the force on a point charge due to electromagnetic fields. It is given by the following equation in terms of the electric and magnetic fields:...

 
- Lorentz group

Lorentz group

In physics , the Lorentz group is the group of all Lorentz transformations of Minkowski spacetime, the classical setting for all physical phenomena...

 
- Lorentz–Poincaré group 
- Lorentz transformation

Lorentz transformation

In physics, the Lorentz transformation or Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformation describes how, according to the theory of special relativity, two observers' varying measurements of space and time can be converted into each other's frames of reference. It is named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik...

 
- Lorentz transformation equations 
- Lorentzian relativity 
- Lucretius

Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...

 
- Luminiferous aether

Luminiferous aether

In the late 19th century, luminiferous aether or ether, meaning light-bearing aether, was the term used to describe a medium for the propagation of light....

 
- Luminosity

Luminosity

Luminosity is a measurement of brightness.-In photometry and color imaging:In photometry, luminosity is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to luminance, which is the density of luminous intensity in a given direction. The SI unit for luminance is candela per square metre.The luminosity function...

 
- Lyman, Theodore

Theodore Lyman

Theodore Lyman was a U.S. physicist and spectroscopist, born in Boston. He graduated from Harvard in 1897, from which he also received his Ph.D. in 1900. He became an assistant professor in physics at Harvard, where he remained, becoming full professor in 1917, and where he was also director of...

 

M

M-theory

M-theory

In theoretical physics, M-theory is an extension of string theory in which 11 dimensions are identified. Because the dimensionality exceeds that of superstring theories in 10 dimensions, proponents believe that the 11-dimensional theory unites all five string theories...

 
- M-theory simplified 
- Mach, Ernst

Ernst Mach

Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, noted for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves...

 
- Mach's principle

Mach's principle

In theoretical physics, particularly in discussions of gravitation theories, Mach's principle is the name given by Einstein to an imprecise hypothesis often credited to the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach....

 
- Magnetic confinement 
- Magnetic dipole

Magnetic dipole

A magnetic dipole is the limit of either a closed loop of electric current or a pair of poles as the dimensions of the source are reduced to zero while keeping the magnetic moment constant. It is a magnetic analogue of the electric dipole, but the analogy is not complete. In particular, a magnetic...

 
- Magnetic field

Magnetic field

A magnetic field is a mathematical description of the magnetic influence of electric currents and magnetic materials. The magnetic field at any given point is specified by both a direction and a magnitude ; as such it is a vector field.Technically, a magnetic field is a pseudo vector;...

 
- Magnetic flux

Magnetic flux

Magnetic flux , is a measure of the amount of magnetic B field passing through a given surface . The SI unit of magnetic flux is the weber...

 
- Magnetic levitation

Magnetic levitation

Magnetic levitation, maglev, or magnetic suspension is a method by which an object is suspended with no support other than magnetic fields...

- Magnetic moment

Magnetic moment

The magnetic moment of a magnet is a quantity that determines the force that the magnet can exert on electric currents and the torque that a magnetic field will exert on it...

 
- Magnetic monopole

Magnetic monopole

A magnetic monopole is a hypothetical particle in particle physics that is a magnet with only one magnetic pole . In more technical terms, a magnetic monopole would have a net "magnetic charge". Modern interest in the concept stems from particle theories, notably the grand unified and superstring...

 
- Magnetic permeability 
- Magnetic quadrupole 
- Magnetic resonance imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging , nuclear magnetic resonance imaging , or magnetic resonance tomography is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structures...

 
- Magnetic susceptibility

Magnetic susceptibility

In electromagnetism, the magnetic susceptibility \chi_m is a dimensionless proportionality constant that indicates the degree of magnetization of a material in response to an applied magnetic field...

 
- Magnetism

Magnetism

Magnetism is a property of materials that respond at an atomic or subatomic level to an applied magnetic field. Ferromagnetism is the strongest and most familiar type of magnetism. It is responsible for the behavior of permanent magnets, which produce their own persistent magnetic fields, as well...

 
- Magnetodynamics 
- Magnetohydrodynamics

Magnetohydrodynamics

Magnetohydrodynamics is an academic discipline which studies the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids. Examples of such fluids include plasmas, liquid metals, and salt water or electrolytes...

 
- Magnetohydrodynamoic Generator

MHD generator

The MHD generator or dynamo transforms thermal energy or kinetic energy directly into electricity. MHD generators are different from traditional electric generators in that they can operate at high temperatures without moving parts...

 
- Magnetoresistance

Magnetoresistance

Magnetoresistance is the property of a material to change the value of its electrical resistance when an external magnetic field is applied to it. The effect was first discovered by William Thomson in 1856, but he was unable to lower the electrical resistance of anything by more than 5%. This...

 
- Magnetostatics

Magnetostatics

Magnetostatics is the study of magnetic fields in systems where the currents are steady . It is the magnetic analogue of electrostatics, where the charges are stationary. The magnetization need not be static; the equations of magnetostatics can be used to predict fast magnetic switching events that...

 
- Magnetostriction

Magnetostriction

Magnetostriction is a property of ferromagnetic materials that causes them to change their shape or dimensions during the process of magnetization. The variation of material's magnetization due to the applied magnetic field changes the magnetostrictive strain until reaching its saturation value, λ...

 
- Magnetron 
- Order of magnitude

Order of magnitude

An order of magnitude is the class of scale or magnitude of any amount, where each class contains values of a fixed ratio to the class preceding it. In its most common usage, the amount being scaled is 10 and the scale is the exponent being applied to this amount...

 Magnitude (disambiguation page)
- Magnitude comparison 
- Malus, Etienne-Louis

Étienne-Louis Malus

- External links :...

- Mandelshtam, Leonid Isaakovich 
- Manhattan Project

Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...

 
- Many-minds interpretation

Many-minds interpretation

The many-minds interpretation of quantum mechanics extends the many-worlds interpretation by proposing that the distinction between worlds should be made at the level of the mind of an individual observer. The concept was first introduced in 1970 by H...

 
- Many-worlds interpretation

Many-worlds interpretation

The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction, but denies the actuality of wavefunction collapse. Many-worlds implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an...

 
- Marconi, Guglielmo

Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and indeed he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand...

 
- Mariotte, Edme

Edme Mariotte

Edme Mariotte was a French physicist and priest.- Biography :Edme Mariotte was the youngest son of Simon Mariotte, administrator at the district Til-Châtel , and Catherine Denisot . His parents lived in Til-Châtel and had 4 other children: Jean, Denise, Claude, and Catharine...

 
- Maser

Maser

A maser is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. Historically, “maser” derives from the original, upper-case acronym MASER, which stands for "Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"...

 
- Mass

Mass

Mass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...

 
- Mass (relativistic) 
- Mass-energy equivalence

Mass-energy equivalence

In physics, mass–energy equivalence is the concept that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. In this concept, mass is a property of all energy, and energy is a property of all mass, and the two properties are connected by a constant...

 
- Material equivalence 
- Material implication 
- Materials science

Materials science

Materials science is an interdisciplinary field applying the properties of matter to various areas of science and engineering. This scientific field investigates the relationship between the structure of materials at atomic or molecular scales and their macroscopic properties. It incorporates...

 
- Mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics

Mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics

The mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics are those mathematical formalisms that permit a rigorous description of quantum mechanics. Such are distinguished from mathematical formalisms for theories developed prior to the early 1900s by the use of abstract mathematical structures, such as...

 
- Mathematical descriptions of physical laws

Mathematical descriptions of physical laws

Physical laws are often summarized by a single equation, or at least a small set of equations. This article tabulates many of the important bands of physics where such laws occur.-Conservation and continuity:...

 
- Mathematical descriptions of the electromagnetic field

Mathematical descriptions of the electromagnetic field

There are various mathematical descriptions of the electromagnetic field that are used in the study of electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. In this article four approaches are discussed.-Vector field approach:...

 
- Mathematical physics

Mathematical physics

Mathematical physics refers to development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The Journal of Mathematical Physics defines this area as: "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and...

 
- Matrix mechanics

Matrix mechanics

Matrix mechanics is a formulation of quantum mechanics created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925.Matrix mechanics was the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. It extended the Bohr Model by describing how the quantum jumps...

 
- Matter

Matter

Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...

 
- Matter wave
- Matteucci effect 
- Maupertuis' principle

Maupertuis' principle

In classical mechanics, Maupertuis' principle is an integral equation that determines the path followed by a physical system without specifying the time parameterization of that path. It is a special case of the more generally stated principle of least action...

 
- Maxwell coil

Maxwell coil

A Maxwell coil is a device for producing a large volume of almost constant magnetic field.-Description:A constant-field Maxwell coil set consists of three coils oriented on the surface of a virtual sphere...

 
- Maxwell's demon

Maxwell's demon

In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell to "show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty." It demonstrates Maxwell's point by hypothetically describing how to...

 
- Maxwell's equations

Maxwell's equations

Maxwell's equations are a set of partial differential equations that, together with the Lorentz force law, form the foundation of classical electrodynamics, classical optics, and electric circuits. These fields in turn underlie modern electrical and communications technologies.Maxwell's equations...

 
- Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution 
- Maxwell, James

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell of Glenlair was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. This united all previously unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and optics into a consistent theory...

 
- Mean free path

Mean free path

In physics, the mean free path is the average distance covered by a moving particle between successive impacts which modify its direction or energy or other particle properties.-Derivation:...

 
- Measurement

Measurement

Measurement is the process or the result of determining the ratio of a physical quantity, such as a length, time, temperature etc., to a unit of measurement, such as the metre, second or degree Celsius...

 
- Measurement problem

Measurement problem

The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is the unresolved problem of how wavefunction collapse occurs. The inability to observe this process directly has given rise to different interpretations of quantum mechanics, and poses a key set of questions that each interpretation must answer...

 
- Measuring instruments 
- Mechanical advantage

Mechanical advantage

Mechanical advantage is a measure of the force amplification achieved by using a tool, mechanical device or machine system. Ideally, the device preserves the input power and simply trades off forces against movement to obtain a desired amplification in the output force...

 
- Mechanical equilibrium

Mechanical equilibrium

A standard definition of static equilibrium is:This is a strict definition, and often the term "static equilibrium" is used in a more relaxed manner interchangeably with "mechanical equilibrium", as defined next....

 Mechanical equilibrium
- Mechanical wave

Mechanical wave

A mechanical or material wave is a wave that needs a medium to travel. The oscillating material does not move far from its initial equilibrium position, as only the energy is transferred by connected particles. Ocean waves and sound are examples of this phenomenon.A mechanical wave requires an...

 Mechanical wave
- Mechanics

Mechanics

Mechanics is the branch of physics concerned with the behavior of physical bodies when subjected to forces or displacements, and the subsequent effects of the bodies on their environment....

 
- Mechanics of fluids 
- Medical physics

Medical physics

Medical physics is the application of physics to medicine. It generally concerns physics as applied to medical imaging and radiotherapy, although a medical physicist may also work in many other areas of healthcare...

 
- Meissner effect

Meissner effect

The Meissner effect is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state. The German physicists Walther Meissner and Robert Ochsenfeld discovered the phenomenon in 1933 by measuring the magnetic field distribution outside superconducting tin...

 
- Meson

Meson

In particle physics, mesons are subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of sub-particles, they have a physical size, with a radius roughly one femtometer: 10−15 m, which is about the size of a proton...

 
- Mesonic atom 
- Metric space

Metric space

In mathematics, a metric space is a set where a notion of distance between elements of the set is defined.The metric space which most closely corresponds to our intuitive understanding of space is the 3-dimensional Euclidean space...

 
- Metric tensor

Metric tensor

In the mathematical field of differential geometry, a metric tensor is a type of function defined on a manifold which takes as input a pair of tangent vectors v and w and produces a real number g in a way that generalizes many of the familiar properties of the dot product of vectors in Euclidean...

 
- MHD generator

MHD generator

The MHD generator or dynamo transforms thermal energy or kinetic energy directly into electricity. MHD generators are different from traditional electric generators in that they can operate at high temperatures without moving parts...

 
- Michelson-Morley experiment

Michelson-Morley experiment

The Michelson–Morley experiment was performed in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Its results are generally considered to be the first strong evidence against the theory of a luminiferous ether and in favor of special...

 
- Michelson, Albert Abraham

Albert Abraham Michelson

Albert Abraham Michelson was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson-Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics...

 
- Microcanonical distribution 
- Mie theory

Mie theory

The Mie solution to Maxwell's equations describes the scattering of electromagnetic radiation by a sphere...

 
- Miller, Dayton C.

Dayton Miller

Dayton Clarence Miller was an American physicist, astronomer, acoustician, and accomplished amateur flautist...

 
- Millikan, Robert

Robert Millikan

Robert A. Millikan was an American experimental physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his measurement of the charge on the electron and for his work on the photoelectric effect. He served as president of Caltech from 1921 to 1945...

 
- Mills, Robert

Robert Mills (physicist)

Robert L. Mills was a physicist, specializing in quantum field theory, the theory of alloys, and many-body theory. While sharing an office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in 1954, Chen Ning Yang and Mills proposed a tensor equation for what are now called Yang-Mills fields...

 
- Minkowski space

Minkowski space

In physics and mathematics, Minkowski space or Minkowski spacetime is the mathematical setting in which Einstein's theory of special relativity is most conveniently formulated...

 
- Minkowski, Hermann

Hermann Minkowski

Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, who created and developed the geometry of numbers and who used geometrical methods to solve difficult problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.- Life and work :Hermann Minkowski was born...

 
- Mobility

Mobility

Mobility may refer to:* Mobility * "Mobiliy" , a song by Moby* Mobility * Mobility , the ability of military units or weapon systems to move to an objective-See also:* Academic mobility* Apprentices mobility...

- Modern physics

Modern physics

The term modern physics refers to the post-Newtonian conception of physics. The term implies that classical descriptions of phenomena are lacking, and that an accurate, "modern", description of reality requires theories to incorporate elements of quantum mechanics or Einsteinian relativity, or both...

 
- Modified Newtonian Dynamics

Modified Newtonian dynamics

In physics, Modified Newtonian dynamics is a hypothesis that proposes a modification of Newton's law of gravity to explain the galaxy rotation problem. When the uniform velocity of rotation of galaxies was first observed, it was unexpected because Newtonian theory of gravity predicts that objects...

 
- Molar mass

Molar mass

Molar mass, symbol M, is a physical property of a given substance , namely its mass per amount of substance. The base SI unit for mass is the kilogram and that for amount of substance is the mole. Thus, the derived unit for molar mass is kg/mol...

 
- Molecular dynamics

Molecular dynamics

Molecular dynamics is a computer simulation of physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a period of time, giving a view of the motion of the atoms...

 
- Molecular physics

Molecular physics

Molecular physics is the study of the physical properties of molecules, the chemical bonds between atoms as well as the molecular dynamics. Its most important experimental techniques are the various types of spectroscopy...

 
- Molecule

Molecule

A molecule is an electrically neutral group of at least two atoms held together by covalent chemical bonds. Molecules are distinguished from ions by their electrical charge...

 
- Moment (physics)

Moment (physics)

In physics, the term moment can refer to many different concepts:*Moment of force is the tendency of a force to twist or rotate an object; see the article torque for details. This is an important, basic concept in engineering and physics. A moment is valued mathematically as the product of the...

 
- Momentum

Momentum

In classical mechanics, linear momentum or translational momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object...

 
- Moment of inertia

Moment of inertia

In classical mechanics, moment of inertia, also called mass moment of inertia, rotational inertia, polar moment of inertia of mass, or the angular mass, is a measure of an object's resistance to changes to its rotation. It is the inertia of a rotating body with respect to its rotation...

 
- Morley, Edward

Edward Morley

Edward Williams Morley was an American scientist famous for the Michelson–Morley experiment.-Biography:...

 
- Mössbauer effect

Mössbauer effect

The Mössbauer effect, or recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence‎, is a physical phenomenon discovered by Rudolf Mössbauer in 1958. It involves the resonant and recoil-free emission and absorption of γ radiation by atomic nuclei bound in a solid...

 
- Mössbauer, Rudolf Ludwig 
- Motion

Motion (physics)

In physics, motion is a change in position of an object with respect to time. Change in action is the result of an unbalanced force. Motion is typically described in terms of velocity, acceleration, displacement and time . An object's velocity cannot change unless it is acted upon by a force, as...

 
- Mott, Sir Nevill Francis 
- Mottelson, Ben Roy

Ben Roy Mottelson

Benjamin Roy Mottelson is an American-born Danish nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei....

 
- Mpemba effect

Mpemba effect

The Mpemba effect is the observation that warmer water sometimes freezes faster than colder water. Although the observation has been verified, there is no single scientific explanation for the effect.-Historical observations:...

 
- Müller, Karl Alexander

Karl Alexander Müller

Karl Alexander Müller is a Swiss physicist and Nobel laureate. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 with Johannes Georg Bednorz for their work in superconductivity in ceramic materials.-Biography:...

 
- Mulliken, Robert S.

Robert S. Mulliken

Robert Sanderson Mulliken was an American physicist and chemist, primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory, i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules. Dr. Mulliken received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1966...

 
- Multipath interference

Multipath interference

Multipath interference is a phenomenon in the physics of waves whereby a wave from a source travels to a detector via two or more paths and, under the right condition, the two components of the wave interfere...

 
- Muon

Muon

The muon |mu]] used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with a unitary negative electric charge and a spin of ½. Together with the electron, the tau, and the three neutrinos, it is classified as a lepton...

 
- Muonium

Muonium

Muonium is an exotic atom made up of an antimuon and an electron, which was discovered in 1960 and is given the chemical symbol . During the muon's lifetime, muonium can enter into compounds such as muonium chloride or sodium muonide . Due to the mass difference between the antimuon and the...

 

N

N-body problem

N-body problem

The n-body problem is the problem of predicting the motion of a group of celestial objects that interact with each other gravitationally. Solving this problem has been motivated by the need to understand the motion of the Sun, planets and the visible stars...

 
- Naked singularity

Naked singularity

In general relativity, a naked singularity is a gravitational singularity, without an event horizon. In a black hole, there is a region around the singularity, the event horizon, where the gravitational force of the singularity is strong enough so that light cannot escape. Hence, the singularity...

 
- Natural science

Natural science

The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...

 
- Nature (journal)

Nature (journal)

Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

 
- Navier–Stokes equations 
- Néel, Félix 
- Neel temperature

Néel temperature

The Néel temperature or magnetic ordering temperature , TN, is the temperature above which an antiferromagnetic material becomes paramagnetic—that is, the thermal energy becomes large enough to destroy the macroscopic magnetic ordering within the material....

 
- Nernst, Walther

Walther Nernst

Walther Hermann Nernst FRS was a German physical chemist and physicist who is known for his theories behind the calculation of chemical affinity as embodied in the third law of thermodynamics, for which he won the 1920 Nobel Prize in chemistry...

 
- Neumann, John von

John von Neumann

John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...

 
- Neutrino

Neutrino

A neutrino is an electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particle with a half-integer spin, chirality and a disputed but small non-zero mass. It is able to pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected...

 
- Neutrino mass 
- Neutrino oscillation

Neutrino oscillation

Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanical phenomenon predicted by Bruno Pontecorvowhereby a neutrino created with a specific lepton flavor can later be measured to have a different flavor. The probability of measuring a particular flavor for a neutrino varies periodically as it propagates...

 
- Neutron

Neutron

The neutron is a subatomic hadron particle which has the symbol or , no net electric charge and a mass slightly larger than that of a proton. With the exception of hydrogen, nuclei of atoms consist of protons and neutrons, which are therefore collectively referred to as nucleons. The number of...

 
- Neutronium

Neutronium

Neutronium is a proposed name for a substance composed purely of neutrons. The word was coined by scientist Andreas von Antropoff in 1926 for the conjectured "element of atomic number zero" that he placed at the head of the periodic table...

 
- Newton's bucket 
- Newton (force) 
- Newton's law of cooling 
- Newton laws of gravity. See gravity.
- Newton's laws of motion

Newton's laws of motion

Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basis for classical mechanics. They describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces...

 
- Newton, Isaac

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...

 
- Isaac Newton (in depth) 
- Newtonian fluid

Newtonian fluid

A Newtonian fluid is a fluid whose stress versus strain rate curve is linear and passes through the origin. The constant of proportionality is known as the viscosity.-Definition:...

 
- Newtonian physics 
- Newtonian relativity 
- Newton's cannonball

Newton's cannonball

Newton's cannonball was a thought experiment Isaac Newton used to hypothesize that the force of gravity was universal, and it was the key force for planetary motion...

- Nichols, Ernest Fox

Ernest Fox Nichols

Ernest Fox Nichols was a U.S. educator and physicist. He was born in Leavenworth County, Kansas, and received his undergraduate degree from Kansas State University in 1888. After working for a year in the Chemistry Department at Kansas State, he matriculated to graduate school at Cornell...

 
- Nichols radiometer

Nichols radiometer

A Nichols radiometer was the apparatus used by Ernest Fox Nichols and Gordon Ferrie Hull in 1901 for the measurement of radiation pressure. It consisted of a pair of small silvered glass mirrors suspended in the manner of a torsion balance by a fine quartz fibre within an enclosure in which the air...

 
- Nobel Prize in Physics

Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...

 
- No cloning theorem

No cloning theorem

The no-cloning theorem is a result of quantum mechanics that forbids the creation of identical copies of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. It was stated by Wootters, Zurek, and Dieks in 1982, and has profound implications in quantum computing and related fields.The state of one system can be...

 
- Noether, Emmy

Emmy Noether

Amalie Emmy Noether was an influential German mathematician known for her groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Described by David Hilbert, Albert Einstein and others as the most important woman in the history of mathematics, she revolutionized the theories of...

 
- Noether's theorem

Noether's theorem

Noether's theorem states that any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. The theorem was proved by German mathematician Emmy Noether in 1915 and published in 1918...

 
- Non-critical string 
- Non-Euclidean geometry

Non-Euclidean geometry

Non-Euclidean geometry is the term used to refer to two specific geometries which are, loosely speaking, obtained by negating the Euclidean parallel postulate, namely hyperbolic and elliptic geometry. This is one term which, for historical reasons, has a meaning in mathematics which is much...

 
- Nonlinear Coulomb field 
- Non-linear dynamical system 
- Nonlinear optics

Nonlinear optics

Nonlinear optics is the branch of optics that describes the behavior of light in nonlinear media, that is, media in which the dielectric polarization P responds nonlinearly to the electric field E of the light...

 
- Non-Newtonian fluid

Non-Newtonian fluid

A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid whose flow properties differ in any way from those of Newtonian fluids. Most commonly the viscosity of non-Newtonian fluids is not independent of shear rate or shear rate history...

 
- Novikov self-consistency principle

Novikov self-consistency principle

The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general...

 
- Novikov, Igor Dmitrievich 
- Nuclear chain reaction

Nuclear chain reaction

A nuclear chain reaction occurs when one nuclear reaction causes an average of one or more nuclear reactions, thus leading to a self-propagating number of these reactions. The specific nuclear reaction may be the fission of heavy isotopes or the fusion of light isotopes...

 
- Nuclear fission

Nuclear fission

In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, nuclear fission is a nuclear reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts , often producing free neutrons and photons , and releasing a tremendous amount of energy...

 
- Nuclear fusion

Nuclear fusion

Nuclear fusion is the process by which two or more atomic nuclei join together, or "fuse", to form a single heavier nucleus. This is usually accompanied by the release or absorption of large quantities of energy...

 
- Nuclear magnetic resonance

Nuclear magnetic resonance

Nuclear magnetic resonance is a physical phenomenon in which magnetic nuclei in a magnetic field absorb and re-emit electromagnetic radiation...

 
- Nuclear physics

Nuclear physics

Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies the building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei. The most commonly known applications of nuclear physics are nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons technology, but the research has provided application in many fields, including those...

 
- Nucleon

Nucleon

In physics, a nucleon is a collective name for two particles: the neutron and the proton. These are the two constituents of the atomic nucleus. Until the 1960s, the nucleons were thought to be elementary particles...

 

O

Oersted

Oersted

Oersted is the unit of magnetizing field in the CGS system of units.-Difference between cgs and SI systems:...

 
- Ørsted, Hans Christian

Hans Christian Ørsted

Hans Christian Ørsted was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, an important aspect of electromagnetism...

 
- Ohm, Georg

Georg Ohm

Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist. As a high school teacher, Ohm began his research with the recently-invented electrochemical cell, invented by Italian Count Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm determined that there is a direct proportionality between the potential...

 
- Ohm's law

Ohm's law

Ohm's law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the potential difference across the two points...

 
- Oil-drop experiment

Oil-drop experiment

The oil drop experiment was an experiment performed by Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher in 1909 to measure the elementary electric charge ....

 
- Olber's paradox 
- Onsager, Lars

Lars Onsager

Lars Onsager was a Norwegian-born American physical chemist and theoretical physicist, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University....

 
- Operational calculus

Operational calculus

Operational calculus, also known as operational analysis, is a technique by which problems in analysis, in particular differential equations, are transformed into algebraic problems, usually the problem of solving a polynomial equation.-History:...

 
- Operator

Operator (physics)

In physics, an operator is a function acting on the space of physical states. As a resultof its application on a physical state, another physical state is obtained, very often along withsome extra relevant information....

 
- Oppenheimer, Robert

Robert Oppenheimer

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first...

 
- Optical levitation

Optical levitation

Optical levitation is a method developed by Arthur Ashkin whereby a material is levitated against the downward force of gravity by an upward force stemming from photon momentum transfer...

 
- Optical spectrum 
- Optics

Optics

Optics is the branch of physics which involves the behavior and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behavior of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light...

 
- Optoelectronic 
- Orders of magnitude 
- Ørsted, Hans Christian

Hans Christian Ørsted

Hans Christian Ørsted was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, an important aspect of electromagnetism...

 
- Orthogonal matrix

Orthogonal matrix

In linear algebra, an orthogonal matrix , is a square matrix with real entries whose columns and rows are orthogonal unit vectors ....

 
- Orthonormal basis

Orthonormal basis

In mathematics, particularly linear algebra, an orthonormal basis for inner product space V with finite dimension is a basis for V whose vectors are orthonormal. For example, the standard basis for a Euclidean space Rn is an orthonormal basis, where the relevant inner product is the dot product of...

 
- Osheroff, Douglas D.

Douglas D. Osheroff

Douglas Dean Osheroff is an American physicist known for his work in experimental condensed matter physics, in particular for his co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3. For his contributions he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David Lee and Robert C...

 

P

P-symmetry 
- Pake doublet

Pake doublet

A Pake Doublet is a characteristic line shape seen in solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance and Electron paramagnetic resonance. It was first described by George Pake....

 
- Parallel universe

Many-worlds interpretation

The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction, but denies the actuality of wavefunction collapse. Many-worlds implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an...

 
- Paramagnetism

Paramagnetism

Paramagnetism is a form of magnetism whereby the paramagnetic material is only attracted when in the presence of an externally applied magnetic field. In contrast with this, diamagnetic materials are repulsive when placed in a magnetic field...

 
- Paraphysics 
- Pardies, Ignace 
- Parity (physics)

Parity (physics)

In physics, a parity transformation is the flip in the sign of one spatial coordinate. In three dimensions, it is also commonly described by the simultaneous flip in the sign of all three spatial coordinates:...

 
- Parity law 
- Parity violation 
- Subatomic particle

Subatomic particle

In physics or chemistry, subatomic particles are the smaller particles composing nucleons and atoms. There are two types of subatomic particles: elementary particles, which are not made of other particles, and composite particles...

 
- Particle accelerator

Particle accelerator

A particle accelerator is a device that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to high speeds and to contain them in well-defined beams. An ordinary CRT television set is a simple form of accelerator. There are two basic types: electrostatic and oscillating field accelerators.In...

 
- Particle in a box

Particle in a box

In quantum mechanics, the particle in a box model describes a particle free to move in a small space surrounded by impenetrable barriers. The model is mainly used as a hypothetical example to illustrate the differences between classical and quantum systems...

 
- Particle in a one-dimensional lattice (periodic potential)

Particle in a one-dimensional lattice (periodic potential)

In quantum mechanics, the particle in a one-dimensional lattice is a problem that occurs in the model of a periodic crystal lattice. The potential is caused by ions in the periodic structure of the crystal creating an electromagnetic field so electrons are subject to a regular potential inside...

 
- Particle in a ring

Particle in a ring

In quantum mechanics, the case of a particle in a one-dimensional ring is similar to the particle in a box. The Schrödinger equation for a free particle which is restricted to a ring is...

 
- Particle physics

Particle physics

Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the existence and interactions of particles that are the constituents of what is usually referred to as matter or radiation. In current understanding, particles are excitations of quantum fields and interact following their dynamics...

 
- Particle radiation

Particle radiation

Particle radiation is the radiation of energy by means of fast-moving subatomic particles. Particle radiation is referred to as a particle beam if the particles are all moving in the same direction, similar to a light beam....

 
- Partition function (statistical mechanics)

Partition function (statistical mechanics)

Partition functions describe the statistical properties of a system in thermodynamic equilibrium. It is a function of temperature and other parameters, such as the volume enclosing a gas...

- Partition function (quantum field theory)

Partition function (quantum field theory)

In quantum field theory, we have a generating functional, Z[J] of correlation functions and this value, called the partition function is usually expressed by something like the following functional integral:...

- Pascal, Blaise

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...

 
- Paschen, Friedrich

Friedrich Paschen

Louis Karl Heinrich Friedrich Paschen , was a German physicist, known for his work on electrical discharges. He is also known for the Paschen series, a series of hydrogen spectral lines in the infrared region that he first observed in 1908...

 
- Path integral formulation of quantum mechanics 
- Paul, Wolfgang

Wolfgang Paul

Wolfgang Paul was a German physicist, who co-developed the non-magnetic quadrupole mass filter which laid the foundation for what we now call an ion trap...

 
- Pauli effect

Pauli effect

The Pauli effect is a term referring to the apparently mysterious 'anecdotal' failure of technical equipment in the presence of certain people. The term was coined using the name of the Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli...

 
- Pauli matrices

Pauli matrices

The Pauli matrices are a set of three 2 × 2 complex matrices which are Hermitian and unitary. Usually indicated by the Greek letter "sigma" , they are occasionally denoted with a "tau" when used in connection with isospin symmetries...

 
- Pauli exclusion principle

Pauli exclusion principle

The Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle that no two identical fermions may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. A more rigorous statement is that the total wave function for two identical fermions is anti-symmetric with respect to exchange of the particles...

 
- Pauli, Wolfgang Ernst 
- Pauling, Linus

Linus Pauling

Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century...

 
- Péclet, Jean Claude Eugène

Jean Claude Eugène Péclet

Jean Claude Eugène Péclet was a French physicist.He was born in Besançon, France.Péclet became, in 1812, one of the first students of the École Normale in Paris with Gay-Lussac and Dulong being his professors. In 1816, he was elected professor at the Collège de Marseille and taught physical...

 
- Péclet number

Péclet number

The Péclet number is a dimensionless number relevant in the study of transport phenomena in fluid flows. It is named after the French physicist Jean Claude Eugène Péclet. It is defined to be the ratio of the rate of advection of a physical quantity by the flow to the rate of diffusion of the same...

 
- Pelletron

Pelletron

A pelletron is a type of electrostatic particle accelerator similar to a Van de Graaff generator. Pelletrons have been built in many sizes, from small units producing voltages up to 500 kilovolts and beam energies up to 1 megaelectronvolt of kinetic energy, to the largest system, which has...

- Peltier effect 
- Pendulum

Pendulum

A pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. When a pendulum is displaced from its resting equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position...

 
- Pendulum (mathematics)

Pendulum (mathematics)

The mathematics of pendulums are in general quite complicated. Simplifying assumptions can be made, which in the case of a simple pendulum allows the equations of motion to be solved analytically for small-angle oscillations.- Simple gravity pendulum :...

 
- Penrose, Roger

Roger Penrose

Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College...

 
- Penzias, Arno Allan

Arno Allan Penzias

Arno Allan Penzias is an American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.-Early life and education:Penzias was born in Munich, Germany. At age six he was among the Jewish children evacuated to Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation...

 
- Perfect gas

Perfect gas

In physics, a perfect gas is a theoretical gas that differs from real gases in a way that makes certain calculations easier to handle. Its behavior is more simplified compared to an ideal gas...

 
- Perfect gas equation of state 
- Perl, Martin 
- Permeability

Permeability (electromagnetism)

In electromagnetism, permeability is the measure of the ability of a material to support the formation of a magnetic field within itself. In other words, it is the degree of magnetization that a material obtains in response to an applied magnetic field. Magnetic permeability is typically...

 
- Permittivity

Permittivity

In electromagnetism, absolute permittivity is the measure of the resistance that is encountered when forming an electric field in a medium. In other words, permittivity is a measure of how an electric field affects, and is affected by, a dielectric medium. The permittivity of a medium describes how...

 
- Perrin, Jean Baptiste

Jean Baptiste Perrin

Jean Baptiste Perrin was a French physicist and Nobel laureate.-Early years:Born in Lille, France, Perrin attended the École Normale Supérieure, the elite grande école in Paris. He became an assistant at the school during the period of 1894-97 when he began the study of cathode rays and X-rays...

 
- Perturbation theory (quantum mechanics)

Perturbation theory (quantum mechanics)

In quantum mechanics, perturbation theory is a set of approximation schemes directly related to mathematical perturbation for describing a complicated quantum system in terms of a simpler one. The idea is to start with a simple system for which a mathematical solution is known, and add an...

 
- Phase diagram

Phase diagram

A phase diagram in physical chemistry, engineering, mineralogy, and materials science is a type of chart used to show conditions at which thermodynamically distinct phases can occur at equilibrium...

 
- Phase of matter 
- Phase space

Phase space

In mathematics and physics, a phase space, introduced by Willard Gibbs in 1901, is a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space...

 
- Phase transition

Phase transition

A phase transition is the transformation of a thermodynamic system from one phase or state of matter to another.A phase of a thermodynamic system and the states of matter have uniform physical properties....

 
- Phase velocity

Phase velocity

The phase velocity of a wave is the rate at which the phase of the wave propagates in space. This is the speed at which the phase of any one frequency component of the wave travels. For such a component, any given phase of the wave will appear to travel at the phase velocity...

 
- Phasor (physics) 
- Phillips, William D. 
- Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Latin for "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", often referred to as simply the Principia, is a work in three books by Sir Isaac Newton, first published 5 July 1687. Newton also published two further editions, in 1713 and 1726...

 
- Phonon

Phonon

In physics, a phonon is a collective excitation in a periodic, elastic arrangement of atoms or molecules in condensed matter, such as solids and some liquids...

 
- Photoconductivity

Photoconductivity

Photoconductivity is an optical and electrical phenomenon in which a material becomes more electrically conductive due to the absorption of electromagnetic radiation such as visible light, ultraviolet light, infrared light, or gamma radiation....

 
- Photodiode

Photodiode

A photodiode is a type of photodetector capable of converting light into either current or voltage, depending upon the mode of operation.The common, traditional solar cell used to generateelectric solar power is a large area photodiode....

 
- Photoelectric effect

Photoelectric effect

In the photoelectric effect, electrons are emitted from matter as a consequence of their absorption of energy from electromagnetic radiation of very short wavelength, such as visible or ultraviolet light. Electrons emitted in this manner may be referred to as photoelectrons...

 
- Photon

Photon

In physics, a photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of the electromagnetic interaction and the basic unit of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation. It is also the force carrier for the electromagnetic force...

 
- Physical chemistry

Physical chemistry

Physical chemistry is the study of macroscopic, atomic, subatomic, and particulate phenomena in chemical systems in terms of physical laws and concepts...

 
- Physical constant

Physical constant

A physical constant is a physical quantity that is generally believed to be both universal in nature and constant in time. It can be contrasted with a mathematical constant, which is a fixed numerical value but does not directly involve any physical measurement.There are many physical constants in...

 
- Physical experiment 
- Physical field 
- Physical information

Physical information

In physics, physical information refers generally to the information that is contained in a physical system. Its usage in quantum mechanics In physics, physical information refers generally to the information that is contained in a physical system. Its usage in quantum mechanics In physics,...

 
- Physical interaction 
- Physical law

Physical law

A physical law or scientific law is "a theoretical principle deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined group or class of phenomena, and expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions be present." Physical laws are typically conclusions...

 
- Physical observation 
- Physical phenomenon 
- Physical quantity

Physical quantity

A physical quantity is a physical property of a phenomenon, body, or substance, that can be quantified by measurement.-Definition of a physical quantity:Formally, the International Vocabulary of Metrology, 3rd edition defines quantity as:...

 
- Physical Science

Physical science

Physical science is an encompassing term for the branches of natural science and science that study non-living systems, in contrast to the life sciences...

 
- Physical space 
- Physical state 
- Physical system

Physical system

In physics, the word system has a technical meaning, namely, it is the portion of the physical universe chosen for analysis. Everything outside the system is known as the environment, which in analysis is ignored except for its effects on the system. The cut between system and the world is a free...

 
- Physical theory 
- Physical unit 
- Physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 
- Physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 
- PhysicsWeb
- Physics basic topics 
- Pierre de Maricourt 
- Pion

Pion

In particle physics, a pion is any of three subatomic particles: , , and . Pions are the lightest mesons and they play an important role in explaining the low-energy properties of the strong nuclear force....

 
- Pionium

Pionium

Pionium is an exotic atom consisting of one and one mesons. It can be created, for instance, by interaction of a proton beam accelerated by a particle accelerator and a target nucleus....

 
- Planck's constant 
- Planck, Max

Max Planck

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS, was a German physicist who actualized the quantum physics, initiating a revolution in natural science and philosophy. He is regarded as the founder of the quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.-Life and career:Planck came...

 
- Planck's law 
- Planck's law of black body radiation

Planck's law of black body radiation

In physics, Planck's law describes the amount of energy emitted by a black body in radiation of a certain wavelength . The law is named after Max Planck, who originally proposed it in 1900. The law was the first to accurately describe black body radiation, and resolved the ultraviolet catastrophe...

 
- Plasma

Plasma (physics)

In physics and chemistry, plasma is a state of matter similar to gas in which a certain portion of the particles are ionized. Heating a gas may ionize its molecules or atoms , thus turning it into a plasma, which contains charged particles: positive ions and negative electrons or ions...

 
- Plasma equilibria and stability 
- Plasma physics 
- Plum pudding model

Plum pudding model

The plum pudding model of the atom by J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron in 1897, was proposed in 1904 before the discovery of the atomic nucleus. In this model, the atom is composed of electrons The plum pudding model of the atom by J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron in 1897, was...

 
- Podolsky, Boris

Boris Podolsky

Boris Yakovlevich Podolsky , was an American physicist of Russian Jewish descent.-Education:In 1896, Boris Podolsky was born into a poor Jewish family in Taganrog, in what was then the Russian Empire, and he moved to the United States in 1913...

 
- Poincaré group

Poincaré group

In physics and mathematics, the Poincaré group, named after Henri Poincaré, is the group of isometries of Minkowski spacetime.-Simple explanation:...

 
- Poincaré, Henri

Henri Poincaré

Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science...

 
- Point group

Point group

In geometry, a point group is a group of geometric symmetries that keep at least one point fixed. Point groups can exist in a Euclidean space with any dimension, and every point group in dimension d is a subgroup of the orthogonal group O...

 
- Poiseuille's law 
- Poiseuille, Jean Louis Marie

Jean Louis Marie Poiseuille

Jean Louis Marie Poiseuille was a French physician and physiologist.Poiseuille was born in Paris, France.From 1815 to 1816 he studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris. He was trained in physics and mathematics. In 1828 he earned his D.Sc...

 
- Poisson, Siméon-Denis 
- Poisson bracket

Poisson bracket

In mathematics and classical mechanics, the Poisson bracket is an important binary operation in Hamiltonian mechanics, playing a central role in Hamilton's equations of motion, which govern the time-evolution of a Hamiltonian dynamical system...

 
- Poisson's equation

Poisson's equation

In mathematics, Poisson's equation is a partial differential equation of elliptic type with broad utility in electrostatics, mechanical engineering and theoretical physics...

 
- Polar coordinates 
- Polariton

Polariton

In physics, polaritons are quasiparticles resulting from strong coupling of electromagnetic waves with an electric or magnetic dipole-carrying excitation. They are an expression of the common quantum phenomenon known as level repulsion, also known as the anti-crossing principle...

 
- Polarization (waves) 
- Polarized light 
- Polymer physics

Polymer physics

Polymer physics is the field of physics that studies polymers, their fluctuations, mechanical properties, as well as the kinetics of reactions involving degradation and polymerisation of polymers and monomers respectively....

 
- Population inversion

Population inversion

In physics, specifically statistical mechanics, a population inversion occurs when a system exists in state with more members in an excited state than in lower energy states...

 
- Positron

Positron

The positron or antielectron is the antiparticle or the antimatter counterpart of the electron. The positron has an electric charge of +1e, a spin of ½, and has the same mass as an electron...

 
- Positronium

Positronium

Positronium is a system consisting of an electron and its anti-particle, a positron, bound together into an "exotic atom". Being unstable, the two particles annihilate each other to produce two gamma ray photons after an average lifetime of 125 ps or three gamma ray photons after 142 ns in...

 
- Potential

Potential

*In linguistics, the potential mood*The mathematical study of potentials is known as potential theory; it is the study of harmonic functions on manifolds...

 
- Potential difference 
- Potential energy

Potential energy

In physics, potential energy is the energy stored in a body or in a system due to its position in a force field or due to its configuration. The SI unit of measure for energy and work is the Joule...

 
- Potential flow

Potential flow

In fluid dynamics, potential flow describes the velocity field as the gradient of a scalar function: the velocity potential. As a result, a potential flow is characterized by an irrotational velocity field, which is a valid approximation for several applications...

 
- Pouillet, Claude

Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet

Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet was a French physicist and a professor of physics at the Sorbonne and member of the French Academy of Science.Pouillet was born in Cusance, Doubs, France....

 
- Powell, Cecil Frank

Cecil Frank Powell

Cecil Frank Powell, FRS was a British physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and for the resulting discovery of the pion , a heavy subatomic particle.Powell was born in Tonbridge, Kent, England, the son of a local...

 
- Power

Power (physics)

In physics, power is the rate at which energy is transferred, used, or transformed. For example, the rate at which a light bulb transforms electrical energy into heat and light is measured in watts—the more wattage, the more power, or equivalently the more electrical energy is used per unit...

 
- Power law

Power law

A power law is a special kind of mathematical relationship between two quantities. When the frequency of an event varies as a power of some attribute of that event , the frequency is said to follow a power law. For instance, the number of cities having a certain population size is found to vary...

 
- Power number

Power number

The power number Np is a commonly-used dimensionless number relating the resistance force to the inertia force.The power-number has different specifications according to the field of application...

 
- Poynting, John Henry

John Henry Poynting

John Henry Poynting was an English physicist. He was a professor of physics at Mason Science College from 1880 until his death....

 
- Poynting-Robertson effect

Poynting-Robertson effect

The Poynting–Robertson effect, also known as Poynting–Robertson drag, named after John Henry Poynting and Howard Percy Robertson, is a process by which solar radiation causes a dust grain in the Solar System to slowly spiral into the sun...

 
- Prandtl number 
- Pressure

Pressure

Pressure is the force per unit area applied in a direction perpendicular to the surface of an object. Gauge pressure is the pressure relative to the local atmospheric or ambient pressure.- Definition :...

 
- Principal quantum number

Principal quantum number

In atomic physics, the principal quantum symbolized as n is the firstof a set of quantum numbers of an atomic orbital. The principal quantum number can only have positive integer values...

 
- Principia Mathematica

Principia Mathematica

The Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913...

 
- Principle of equivalence 
- Principle of least action

Principle of least action

In physics, the principle of least action – or, more accurately, the principle of stationary action – is a variational principle that, when applied to the action of a mechanical system, can be used to obtain the equations of motion for that system...

 
- Principle of locality

Principle of locality

In physics, the principle of locality states that an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings. Experiments have shown that quantum mechanically entangled particles must violate either the principle of locality or the form of philosophical realism known as counterfactual...

 
- Principle of maximum entropy

Principle of maximum entropy

In Bayesian probability, the principle of maximum entropy is a postulate which states that, subject to known constraints , the probability distribution which best represents the current state of knowledge is the one with largest entropy.Let some testable information about a probability distribution...

 
- Principle of relativity

Principle of relativity

In physics, the principle of relativity is the requirement that the equations describing the laws of physics have the same form in all admissible frames of reference....

 
- Prism

Prism (optics)

In optics, a prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that refract light. The exact angles between the surfaces depend on the application. The traditional geometrical shape is that of a triangular prism with a triangular base and rectangular sides, and in colloquial use...

 
- Probability

Probability

Probability is ordinarily used to describe an attitude of mind towards some proposition of whose truth we arenot certain. The proposition of interest is usually of the form "Will a specific event occur?" The attitude of mind is of the form "How certain are we that the event will occur?" The...

 
- Projection operator 
- Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov

Alexander Mikhaylovich Prokhorov was a Russian physicist known for his pioneering research on lasers and masers for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Charles Hard Townes and Nikolay Basov....

 
- Propagation

Wave propagation

Wave propagation is any of the ways in which waves travel.With respect to the direction of the oscillation relative to the propagation direction, we can distinguish between longitudinal wave and transverse waves....

 
- Proper time

Proper time

In relativity, proper time is the elapsed time between two events as measured by a clock that passes through both events. The proper time depends not only on the events but also on the motion of the clock between the events. An accelerated clock will measure a smaller elapsed time between two...

 
- Proton

Proton

The proton is a subatomic particle with the symbol or and a positive electric charge of 1 elementary charge. One or more protons are present in the nucleus of each atom, along with neutrons. The number of protons in each atom is its atomic number....

 
- Proton decay

Proton decay

In particle physics, proton decay is a hypothetical form of radioactive decay in which the proton decays into lighter subatomic particles, such as a neutral pion and a positron...

 
- Prout, William

William Prout

William Prout FRS was an English chemist, physician, and natural theologian. He is remembered today mainly for what is called Prout's hypothesis.-Biography:...

 
- Pseudoscalar

Pseudoscalar

In physics, a pseudoscalar is a quantity that behaves like a scalar, except that it changes sign under a parity inversion such as improper rotations while a true scalar does not.The prototypical example of a pseudoscalar is the scalar triple product...

 
- Pseudovector

Pseudovector

In physics and mathematics, a pseudovector is a quantity that transforms like a vector under a proper rotation, but gains an additional sign flip under an improper rotation such as a reflection. Geometrically it is the opposite, of equal magnitude but in the opposite direction, of its mirror image...

 
- Purcell, Edward Mills

Edward Mills Purcell

Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids. Nuclear magnetic resonance has become widely used to study the molecular structure of pure materials and the...

 

Q

Quadrupole moment 
- Quantum electrodynamics

Quantum electrodynamics

Quantum electrodynamics 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...

 
- Quantization (physics)

Quantization (physics)

In physics, quantization is the process of explaining a classical understanding of physical phenomena in terms of a newer understanding known as "quantum mechanics". It is a procedure for constructing a quantum field theory starting from a classical field theory. This is a generalization of the...

 
- Quantum

Quantum

In physics, a quantum is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction. Behind this, one finds the fundamental notion that a physical property may be "quantized," referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization". This means that the magnitude can take on only certain discrete...

 
- Quantum chaos

Quantum chaos

Quantum chaos is a branch of physics which studies how chaotic classical dynamical systems can be described in terms of quantum theory. The primary question that quantum chaos seeks to answer is, "What is the relationship between quantum mechanics and classical chaos?" The correspondence principle...

 
- Quantum chemistry

Quantum chemistry

Quantum chemistry is a branch of chemistry whose primary focus is the application of quantum mechanics in physical models and experiments of chemical systems...

 
- Quantum chromodynamics

Quantum chromodynamics

In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the strong interaction , a fundamental force describing the interactions of the quarks and gluons making up hadrons . It is the study of the SU Yang–Mills theory of color-charged fermions...

 
- Quantum computer

Quantum computer

A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are different from traditional computers based on transistors...

 
- Quantum cryptography

Quantum cryptography

Quantum key distribution uses quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. It enables two parties to produce a shared random secret key known only to them, which can then be used to encrypt and decrypt messages...

 
- Quantum dots in living cells 
- Quantum electrodynamic 
- Quantum energy level 
- Quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement occurs when electrons, molecules even as large as "buckyballs", photons, etc., interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description , which is...

 
- Quantum field theory

Quantum field theory

Quantum field theory provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parametrized by an infinite number of dynamical degrees of freedom, that is, fields and many-body systems. It is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics and...

 
- Quantum flavordynamics

Quantum flavordynamics

In quantum mechanics, Quantum Flavordynamics is a mathematical model used to describe the interaction of flavored particles through the exchange of intermediate vector bosons . In general it refers to the theory of weak interactions under the standard model...

 
- Quantum fluctuation

Quantum fluctuation

In quantum physics, a quantum fluctuation is the temporary change in the amount of energy in a point in space, arising from Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.According to one formulation of the principle,energy and time can be related by the relation...

 
- Quantum fluid

Quantum fluid

A quantum fluid can refer to a cluster of valence electrons moving together after they undergo fermionic condensation.Under extremely high pressures and low temperatures electrons may condense into a quantum fluid...

 
- Quantum geometrodynamics 
- Quantum gravity

Quantum gravity

Quantum gravity is the field of theoretical physics which attempts to develop scientific models that unify quantum mechanics with general relativity...

 
- Quantum Hall effect 
- Quantum harmonic oscillator

Quantum harmonic oscillator

The quantum harmonic oscillator is the quantum-mechanical analog of the classical harmonic oscillator. Because an arbitrary potential can be approximated as a harmonic potential at the vicinity of a stable equilibrium point, it is one of the most important model systems in quantum mechanics...

 
- Quantum immortality 
- Quantum information

Quantum information

In quantum mechanics, quantum information is physical information that is held in the "state" of a quantum system. The most popular unit of quantum information is the qubit, a two-level quantum system...

 
- Quantum leap  (moved)
- Quantum level

Quantum level

Quantum levels are fixed levels with a logarithmic, descending quantum pattern in the visible spectrum of light that can be observed through a spectrometer while looking at intense flows of electricity through the various halides on the periodic table in a vacuum tube...

 
- Quantum magnetodynamics 
- Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic...

 
- Quantum neutrino field 
- Quantum number

Quantum number

Quantum numbers describe values of conserved quantities in the dynamics of the quantum system. Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of quantum mechanics is the quantization of observable quantities. This is distinguished from classical mechanics where the values can range continuously...

 
- Quantum string theory 
- Quantum suicide

Quantum suicide

In quantum mechanics, quantum suicide is a thought experiment. It was originally published independently by Hans Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988 and was independently developed further by Max Tegmark in 1998...

 
- Quantum superposition

Quantum superposition

Quantum superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. It holds that a physical system exists in all its particular, theoretically possible states simultaneously; but, when measured, it gives a result corresponding to only one of the possible configurations.Mathematically, it...

 
- Quantum tunneling 
- Quark

Quark

A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly...

 
- Quasi-set theory

Quasi-set theory

Quasi-set theory is a formal mathematical theory for dealing with collections of indistinguishable objects, mainly motivated by the assumption that certain objects treated in quantum physics are indistinguishable and don't have individuality.-Motivation:...

 

R

Rabi, Isidor Isaac

Isidor Isaac Rabi

Isidor Isaac Rabi was a Galician-born American physicist and Nobel laureate recognized in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance.-Early years:...

 
- Radiation

Radiation

In physics, radiation is a process in which energetic particles or energetic waves travel through a medium or space. There are two distinct types of radiation; ionizing and non-ionizing...

 
- Radiation of sound 
- Radiation pressure

Radiation pressure

Radiation pressure is the pressure exerted upon any surface exposed to electromagnetic radiation. If absorbed, the pressure is the power flux density divided by the speed of light...

 
- Radioactivity 
- Rainwater, Leo James 
- Raman, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata 
- Raman scattering

Raman scattering

Raman scattering or the Raman effect is the inelastic scattering of a photon. It was discovered by Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman and Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnan in liquids, and by Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam in crystals....

 
- Raman spectroscopy

Raman spectroscopy

Raman spectroscopy is a spectroscopic technique used to study vibrational, rotational, and other low-frequency modes in a system.It relies on inelastic scattering, or Raman scattering, of monochromatic light, usually from a laser in the visible, near infrared, or near ultraviolet range...

 
- Ramsauer-Townsend effect

Ramsauer-Townsend effect

The Ramsauer–Townsend effect, also sometimes called the Ramsauer effect or the Townsend effect, is a physical phenomenon involving the scattering of low-energy electrons by atoms of a noble gas...

 
- Ramsey, Norman 
- Rayleigh scattering

Rayleigh scattering

Rayleigh scattering, named after the British physicist Lord Rayleigh, is the elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light. The particles may be individual atoms or molecules. It can occur when light travels through...

 
- Rayleigh's method of dimensional analysis

Rayleigh's method of dimensional analysis

Rayleigh's method of dimensional analysis is a conceptual tool used in physics, chemistry, and engineering. This form of dimensional analysis expresses a functional relationship of some variables in the form of an exponential equation...

 
- Rayleigh–Taylor instability 
- Rayleigh, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron 
- Reciprocal lattice

Reciprocal lattice

In physics, the reciprocal lattice of a lattice is the lattice in which the Fourier transform of the spatial function of the original lattice is represented. This space is also known as momentum space or less commonly k-space, due to the relationship between the Pontryagin duals momentum and...

 
- Reflection

Reflection (physics)

Reflection is the change in direction of a wavefront at an interface between two differentmedia so that the wavefront returns into the medium from which it originated. Common examples include the reflection of light, sound and water waves...

 
- Reflection coefficient

Reflection coefficient

The reflection coefficient is used in physics and electrical engineering when wave propagation in a medium containing discontinuities is considered. A reflection coefficient describes either the amplitude or the intensity of a reflected wave relative to an incident wave...

 
- Refractive index

Refractive index

In optics the refractive index or index of refraction of a substance or medium is a measure of the speed of light in that medium. It is expressed as a ratio of the speed of light in vacuum relative to that in the considered medium....

 
- Redshift

Redshift

In physics , redshift happens when light seen coming from an object is proportionally increased in wavelength, or shifted to the red end of the spectrum...

 
- Reines, Frederik 
- Relativity

Theory of relativity

The theory of relativity, or simply relativity, encompasses two theories of Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity. However, the word relativity is sometimes used in reference to Galilean invariance....

 
- Relativistic mass 
- Renormalization

Renormalization

In quantum field theory, the statistical mechanics of fields, and the theory of self-similar geometric structures, renormalization is any of a collection of techniques used to treat infinities arising in calculated quantities....

 
- Resistance

Electrical resistance

The electrical resistance of an electrical element is the opposition to the passage of an electric current through that element; the inverse quantity is electrical conductance, the ease at which an electric current passes. Electrical resistance shares some conceptual parallels with the mechanical...

 
- Resolution of the identity 
- Resonance

Resonance

In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate at a greater amplitude at some frequencies than at others. These are known as the system's resonant frequencies...

 
- Rest mass 
- Reynolds, Osborne

Osborne Reynolds

Osborne Reynolds FRS was a prominent innovator in the understanding of fluid dynamics. Separately, his studies of heat transfer between solids and fluids brought improvements in boiler and condenser design.-Life:...

 
- Reynolds number 
- Ricci tensor 
- Richardson, Owen Willans

Owen Willans Richardson

Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson's Law.-Biography:...

 
- Richardson, Robert C.

Robert Coleman Richardson

Robert Coleman Richardson is an American experimental physicist whose area of research includes sub-millikelvin temperature studies of helium-3...

 
- Richardson number Richardson number
- Richter, Burton

Burton Richter

Burton Richter is a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory team led by Samuel Ting. This discovery was part of the so-called November Revolution of particle...

 
- Richtmyer–Meshkov instability 
- Riemann, Bernhard

Bernhard Riemann

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was an influential German mathematician who made lasting contributions to analysis and differential geometry, some of them enabling the later development of general relativity....

 
- Riemannian geometry

Riemannian geometry

Riemannian geometry is the branch of differential geometry that studies Riemannian manifolds, smooth manifolds with a Riemannian metric, i.e. with an inner product on the tangent space at each point which varies smoothly from point to point. This gives, in particular, local notions of angle, length...

 
- Riemannian manifold

Riemannian manifold

In Riemannian geometry and the differential geometry of surfaces, a Riemannian manifold or Riemannian space is a real differentiable manifold M in which each tangent space is equipped with an inner product g, a Riemannian metric, which varies smoothly from point to point...

 
- Ring wave guide 
- Robertson, Howard Percy

Howard Percy Robertson

Howard Percy Robertson was an American mathematician and physicist known for contributions related to physical cosmology and the uncertainty principle...

- Rohrer, Heinrich

Heinrich Rohrer

Heinrich Rohrer is a Swiss physicist who shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd Binnig for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope .-Biography:...

 
- Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad 
- Rosen, Nathan

Nathan Rosen

Nathan Rosen was an American-Israeli physicist noted for his study on the structure of the hydrogen molecule and his work with Albert Einstein and Boris Podolsky on entangled wave functions and the EPR paradox.-Background:Nathan Rosen was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York...

 
- Rotation

Rotation

A rotation is a circular movement of an object around a center of rotation. A three-dimensional object rotates always around an imaginary line called a rotation axis. If the axis is within the body, and passes through its center of mass the body is said to rotate upon itself, or spin. A rotation...

 
- Rotation group

Rotation group

In mechanics and geometry, the rotation group is the group of all rotations about the origin of three-dimensional Euclidean space R3 under the operation of composition. By definition, a rotation about the origin is a linear transformation that preserves length of vectors and preserves orientation ...

 
- Rotation operator
- Rotational invariance

Rotational invariance

In mathematics, a function defined on an inner product space is said to have rotational invariance if its value does not change when arbitrary rotations are applied to its argument...

 
- Rubbia, Carlo

Carlo Rubbia

Carlo Rubbia Knight Grand Cross is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN.-Biography:...

 
- Ruska, Ernst

Ernst Ruska

Ernst August Friedrich Ruska was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in electron optics, including the design of the first electron microscope.Ruska was born in Heidelberg...

 
- Rutherford cross-section 
- Rutherford scattering

Rutherford scattering

In physics, Rutherford scattering is a phenomenon that was explained by Ernest Rutherford in 1911, and led to the development of the Rutherford model of the atom, and eventually to the Bohr model. It is now exploited by the materials analytical technique Rutherford backscattering...

 
- Rutherford, Ernest

Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics...

 
- Rydberg, Johannes

Johannes Rydberg

Johannes Robert Rydberg, , , was a Swedish physicist mainly known for devising the Rydberg formula, in 1888, which is used to predict the wavelengths of photons emitted by changes in the energy level of an electron in a hydrogen atom.The physical constant known as the...

 
- Ryle, Sir Martin 

S

Sackur–Tetrode equation 
- Sakharov, Andrei Dmitrievich

Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...

 
- Salam, Abdus

Abdus Salam

Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk (Urdu: محمد عبد السلام, pronounced , (January 29, 1926– November 21, 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the electroweak unification of the...

 
- Salmeron, Roberto

Roberto Salmeron

Roberto Salmeron , Brazilian electrical engineer and experimental nuclear physicist of international renown, Emeritus Research Director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France ....

- Felix Savart 
- Scalar

Scalar (physics)

In physics, a scalar is a simple physical quantity that is not changed by coordinate system rotations or translations , or by Lorentz transformations or space-time translations . This is in contrast to a vector...

 
- Scalar field

Scalar field

In mathematics and physics, a scalar field associates a scalar value to every point in a space. The scalar may either be a mathematical number, or a physical quantity. Scalar fields are required to be coordinate-independent, meaning that any two observers using the same units will agree on the...

 
- Scanning tunneling microscope

Scanning tunneling microscope

A scanning tunneling microscope is an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer , the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. For an STM, good resolution is considered to be 0.1 nm lateral resolution and...

 
- Scattering

Scattering

Scattering is a general physical process where some forms of radiation, such as light, sound, or moving particles, are forced to deviate from a straight trajectory by one or more localized non-uniformities in the medium through which they pass. In conventional use, this also includes deviation of...

 
- Schawlow, Arthur Leonard

Arthur Leonard Schawlow

Arthur Leonard Schawlow was an American physicist. He is best remembered for his work on lasers, for which he shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn.-Biography:...

 
- Schenberg, Mário

Mário Schenberg

Mário Schenberg, , var. Mário Schönberg, Mario Schonberg, Mário Schoenberg), was a Jewish Brazilian electrical engineer, physicist, art critic and writer.-The Urca process:...

- Schönberg-Chandrasekhar limit

Schönberg-Chandrasekhar limit

In stellar astrophysics, the Schönberg–Chandrasekhar limit gives the maximum mass of a non-fusing, isothermal core which can support an enclosing envelope. The limit is expressed as the ratio of the core mass to the total mass of the core and envelope...

- Schrieffer, John Robert

John Robert Schrieffer

John Robert Schrieffer is an American physicist and, with John Bardeen and Leon N Cooper, recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity.-Biography:...

 
- Schrödinger equation

Schrödinger equation

The Schrödinger equation was formulated in 1926 by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Used in physics , it is an equation that describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes in time....

 
- Schrödinger's cat

Schrödinger's cat

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, usually described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that might be...

 
- Schrödinger, Erwin

Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist and theoretical biologist who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, and is famed for a number of important contributions to physics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933...

 
- Schwartz, Melvin

Melvin Schwartz

Melvin Schwartz was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.He grew up in...

 
- Schwarzschild, Karl

Karl Schwarzschild

Karl Schwarzschild was a German physicist. He is also the father of astrophysicist Martin Schwarzschild.He is best known for providing the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished...

 
- Schwarzschild metric

Schwarzschild metric

In Einstein's theory of general relativity, the Schwarzschild solution describes the gravitational field outside a spherical, uncharged, non-rotating mass such as a star, planet, or black hole. It is also a good approximation to the gravitational field of a slowly rotating body like the Earth or...

 
- Schwarzschild radius

Schwarzschild radius

The Schwarzschild radius is the distance from the center of an object such that, if all the mass of the object were compressed within that sphere, the escape speed from the surface would equal the speed of light...

 
- Schwinger, Julian

Julian Schwinger

Julian Seymour Schwinger was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.Schwinger is recognized as one of the...

 
- Science

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

 
- Science (journal)

Science (journal)

Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....

 
- Scientific method

Scientific method

Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...

 
- Scientific journal

Scientific journal

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, and many more have been published at various points in the past...

 
- Scientific paper 
- Scientific revolution

Scientific revolution

The Scientific Revolution is an era associated primarily with the 16th and 17th centuries during which new ideas and knowledge in physics, astronomy, biology, medicine and chemistry transformed medieval and ancient views of nature and laid the foundations for modern science...

 
- Scientific skepticism

Scientific skepticism

Scientific skepticism is the practice of questioning the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence or reproducibility, as part of a methodological norm pursuing "the extension of certified knowledge". For example, Robert K...

- Scientific units named after people

Scientific units named after people

This is a list of scientific units named after people. For other lists of eponyms see eponym.Note that by convention, the name of the unit is properly written in all-lowercase, but its abbreviation is capitalized.-SI base units:...

- Screened Coulomb potential 
- Second Superstring Revolution 
- Segrè, Emilio Gino 
- Self-adjoint operator

Self-adjoint operator

In mathematics, on a finite-dimensional inner product space, a self-adjoint operator is an operator that is its own adjoint, or, equivalently, one whose matrix is Hermitian, where a Hermitian matrix is one which is equal to its own conjugate transpose...

 
- Semiconductor

Semiconductor

A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...

 
- Semiconductor device fabrication 
- Separability

Separability

In mathematics and in physics, separability may refer to properties of:* Separable differential equations** Separable ordinary differential equation, a class of equations that can be separated into a pair of integrals...

- Separable states

Separable states

In quantum mechanics, separable quantum states are states without quantum entanglement.- Separable pure states :For simplicity, the following assumes all relevant state spaces are finite dimensional...

 
- Shape of the universe

Shape of the Universe

The shape of the universe is a matter of debate in physical cosmology over the local and global geometry of the universe which considers both curvature and topology, though, strictly speaking, it goes beyond both...

 
- Shock wave

Shock wave

A shock wave is a type of propagating disturbance. Like an ordinary wave, it carries energy and can propagate through a medium or in some cases in the absence of a material medium, through a field such as the electromagnetic field...

 
- Shockley, William Bradford 
- Shull, Clifford G. 
- SI base unit

SI base unit

The International System of Units defines seven units of measure as a basic set from which all other SI units are derived. These SI base units and their physical quantities are:* metre for length...

 
- SI derived unit

SI derived unit

The International System of Units specifies a set of seven base units from which all other units of measurement are formed, by products of the powers of base units. These other units are called SI derived units, for example, the SI derived unit of area is square metre , and of density is...

 
- SI prefix

SI prefix

The International System of Units specifies a set of unit prefixes known as SI prefixes or metric prefixes. An SI prefix is a name that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a decadic multiple or fraction of the unit. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to the unit symbol...

 
- Siphon

Siphon

The word siphon is sometimes used to refer to a wide variety of devices that involve the flow of liquids through tubes. But in the English language today, the word siphon usually refers to a tube in an inverted U shape which causes a liquid to flow uphill, above the surface of the reservoir,...

 
- Siegbahn, Kai M. 
- Siegbahn, Manne

Manne Siegbahn

Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn FRS was a Swedish physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924 "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy"....

 
- Simple harmonic motion

Simple harmonic motion

Simple harmonic motion can serve as a mathematical model of a variety of motions, such as the oscillation of a spring. Additionally, other phenomena can be approximated by simple harmonic motion, including the motion of a simple pendulum and molecular vibration....

 
- Relativity of simultaneity

Relativity of simultaneity

In physics, the relativity of simultaneity is the concept that simultaneity–whether two events occur at the same time–is not absolute, but depends on the observer's reference frame. According to the special theory of relativity, it is impossible to say in an absolute sense whether two events occur...

 
- Sine wave

Sine wave

The sine wave or sinusoid is a mathematical function that describes a smooth repetitive oscillation. It occurs often in pure mathematics, as well as physics, signal processing, electrical engineering and many other fields...

 
- Singular-value decomposition 
- Slater determinant

Slater determinant

In quantum mechanics, a Slater determinant is an expression that describes the wavefunction of a multi-fermionic system that satisfies anti-symmetry requirements and consequently the Pauli exclusion principle by changing sign upon exchange of fermions . It is named for its discoverer, John C...

 
- Slope

Slope

In mathematics, the slope or gradient of a line describes its steepness, incline, or grade. A higher slope value indicates a steeper incline....

 
- Snell's law

Snell's law

In optics and physics, Snell's law is a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction, when referring to light or other waves passing through a boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water and glass...

 
- Snell, Willebrord 
- SO(3) 
- Solar cell

Solar cell

A solar cell is a solid state electrical device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect....

 
- Solar neutrino problem

Solar neutrino problem

The solar neutrino problem was a major discrepancy between measurements of the numbers of neutrinos flowing through the Earth and theoretical models of the solar interior, lasting from the mid-1960s to about 2002...

 
- Solar power

Solar power

Solar energy, radiant light and heat from the sun, has been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of ever-evolving technologies. Solar radiation, along with secondary solar-powered resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass, account for most of the available...

 
- Solenoid

Solenoid

A solenoid is a coil wound into a tightly packed helix. In physics, the term solenoid refers to a long, thin loop of wire, often wrapped around a metallic core, which produces a magnetic field when an electric current is passed through it. Solenoids are important because they can create...

 
- Solid

Solid

Solid is one of the three classical states of matter . It is characterized by structural rigidity and resistance to changes of shape or volume. Unlike a liquid, a solid object does not flow to take on the shape of its container, nor does it expand to fill the entire volume available to it like a...

 
- Solid mechanics

Solid mechanics

Solid mechanics is the branch of mechanics, physics, and mathematics that concerns the behavior of solid matter under external actions . It is part of a broader study known as continuum mechanics. One of the most common practical applications of solid mechanics is the Euler-Bernoulli beam equation...

 
- Solid state physics 
- Soliton

Soliton

In mathematics and physics, a soliton is a self-reinforcing solitary wave that maintains its shape while it travels at constant speed. Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium...

 
- Sommerfeld, Arnold

Arnold Sommerfeld

Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and groomed a large number of students for the new era of theoretical physics...

 
- Sound

Sound

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...

 
- Space

Space

Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum...

 
- Space group

Space group

In mathematics and geometry, a space group is a symmetry group, usually for three dimensions, that divides space into discrete repeatable domains.In three dimensions, there are 219 unique types, or counted as 230 if chiral copies are considered distinct...

 
- Space-time 
- Spacetime

Spacetime

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space as being three-dimensional and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort from the spatial dimensions...

 
- Special linear group

Special linear group

In mathematics, the special linear group of degree n over a field F is the set of n×n matrices with determinant 1, with the group operations of ordinary matrix multiplication and matrix inversion....

 
- Special relativity

Special relativity

Special relativity is the physical theory of measurement in an inertial frame of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".It generalizes Galileo's...

 
- Specific gravity

Specific gravity

Specific gravity is the ratio of the density of a substance to the density of a reference substance. Apparent specific gravity is the ratio of the weight of a volume of the substance to the weight of an equal volume of the reference substance. The reference substance is nearly always water for...

 
- Spectral line

Spectral line

A spectral line is a dark or bright line in an otherwise uniform and continuous spectrum, resulting from a deficiency or excess of photons in a narrow frequency range, compared with the nearby frequencies.- Types of line spectra :...

 
- Spectroscope 
- Spectroscopy

Spectroscopy

Spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between matter and radiated energy. Historically, spectroscopy originated through the study of visible light dispersed according to its wavelength, e.g., by a prism. Later the concept was expanded greatly to comprise any interaction with radiative...

 
- Optical spectrum
- Spectrum of a matrix

Spectrum of a matrix

In mathematics, the spectrum of a matrix is the set of its eigenvalues. This notion can be extended to the spectrum of an operator in the infinite-dimensional case.The determinant equals the product of the eigenvalues...

 
- Spectrum of an operator 
- Speed

Speed

In kinematics, the speed of an object is the magnitude of its velocity ; it is thus a scalar quantity. The average speed of an object in an interval of time is the distance traveled by the object divided by the duration of the interval; the instantaneous speed is the limit of the average speed as...

 
- Speed of gravity

Speed of gravity

In the context of classical theories of gravitation, the speed of gravity is the speed at which changes in a gravitational field propagate. This is the speed at which a change in the distribution of energy and momentum of matter results in subsequent alteration, at a distance, of the gravitational...

 
- Speed of light

Speed of light

The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time...

 
- Spherical coordinate system

Spherical coordinate system

In mathematics, a spherical coordinate system is a coordinate system for three-dimensional space where the position of a point is specified by three numbers: the radial distance of that point from a fixed origin, its inclination angle measured from a fixed zenith direction, and the azimuth angle of...

 
- Spherical geometry

Spherical geometry

Spherical geometry is the geometry of the two-dimensional surface of a sphere. It is an example of a geometry which is not Euclidean. Two practical applications of the principles of spherical geometry are to navigation and astronomy....

 
- Spin (physics)

Spin (physics)

In quantum mechanics and particle physics, spin is a fundamental characteristic property of elementary particles, composite particles , and atomic nuclei.It is worth noting that the intrinsic property of subatomic particles called spin and discussed in this article, is related in some small ways,...

 
- Spin density wave

Spin density wave

Spin-density wave and charge-density wave are names for two similar low-energy ordered states of solids. Both these states occur at low temperature in anisotropic, low-dimensional materials or in metals that have high densities of states at the Fermi level N...

 
- Spin glass

Spin glass

A spin glass is a magnet with frustrated interactions, augmented by stochastic disorder, where usually ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic bonds are randomly distributed...

 
- Spin network

Spin network

In physics, a spin network is a type of diagram which can be used to represent states and interactions between particles and fields in quantum mechanics. From a mathematical perspective, the diagrams are a concise way to represent multilinear functions and functions between representations of...

 
- Spin stabilized magnetic levitation

Spin stabilized magnetic levitation

Spin-stabilized magnetic levitation is a phenomenon of magnetic levitation where a magnet is levitated via magnetic forces above another magnet or array of magnets, and stabilised by gyroscopic effect due to a spin that is neither too fast, nor too slow....

 
- Spin wave

Spin wave

Spin waves are propagating disturbances in the ordering of magnetic materials. These low-lying collective excitations occur in magnetic lattices with continuous symmetry. From the equivalent quasiparticle point of view, spin waves are known as magnons, which are boson modes of the spin lattice...

 
- Spin-statistics theorem

Spin-statistics theorem

In quantum mechanics, the spin-statistics theorem relates the spin of a particle to the particle statistics it obeys. The spin of a particle is its intrinsic angular momentum...

 
- Spinor

Spinor

In mathematics and physics, in particular in the theory of the orthogonal groups , spinors are elements of a complex vector space introduced to expand the notion of spatial vector. Unlike tensors, the space of spinors cannot be built up in a unique and natural way from spatial vectors...

 
- Spinor field

Spinor field

In particle physics, a spinor field of order 2s describes a particle of spin s, where s is an integer or half-integer. Therefore, a spinor of order 2s contains as much information as a tensor of order s...

 
- Spontaneous symmetry breaking

Spontaneous symmetry breaking

Spontaneous symmetry breaking is the process by which a system described in a theoretically symmetrical way ends up in an apparently asymmetric state....

 
- Spontaneous magnetization

Spontaneous magnetization

Spontaneous magnetization is the term used to describe the appearance of an ordered spin state at zero applied magnetic field in a ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic material below a critical point called the Curie temperature or .-Overview:...

 
- Standard Model

Standard Model

The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory concerning the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions, which mediate the dynamics of the known subatomic particles. Developed throughout the mid to late 20th century, the current formulation was finalized in the mid 1970s upon...

 
- Stark, Johannes

Johannes Stark

Johannes Stark was a German physicist, and Physics Nobel Prize laureate who was closely involved with the Deutsche Physik movement under the Nazi regime.-Early years:...

 
- Stark effect

Stark effect

The Stark effect is the shifting and splitting of spectral lines of atoms and molecules due to presence of an external static electric field. The amount of splitting and or shifting is called the Stark splitting or Stark shift. In general one distinguishes first- and second-order Stark effects...

 
- Statcoulomb

Statcoulomb

The statcoulomb or franklin or electrostatic unit of charge is the physical unit for electrical charge used in the centimetre-gram-second system of units and Gaussian units. It is a derived unit given by...

 
- Statics

Statics

Statics is the branch of mechanics concerned with the analysis of loads on physical systems in static equilibrium, that is, in a state where the relative positions of subsystems do not vary over time, or where components and structures are at a constant velocity...

 
- Statistical Mechanics

Statistical mechanics

Statistical mechanics or statistical thermodynamicsThe terms statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics are used interchangeably...

 
- Statistical physics

Statistical physics

Statistical physics is the branch of physics that uses methods of probability theory and statistics, and particularly the mathematical tools for dealing with large populations and approximations, in solving physical problems. It can describe a wide variety of fields with an inherently stochastic...

 
- Statistics

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 
- Stefan–Boltzmann constant 
- Stefan–Boltzmann law 
- Stefan electromagnetic equation 
- Stefan flow

Stefan flow

Stefan flow, occasionally called Stefan's flow , is a transport phenomenon concerning the movement of a chemical species by a flowing fluid that is induced to flow by the production or removal of the species at an interface...

 
- Stefan force 
- Stefan, Jožef

Joseph Stefan

Joseph Stefan was a physicist, mathematician, and poet of Slovene mother tongue and Austrian citizenship.- Life and work :...

 
- Stefan, Joseph

Joseph Stefan

Joseph Stefan was a physicist, mathematician, and poet of Slovene mother tongue and Austrian citizenship.- Life and work :...

 
- Steinberger, Jack

Jack Steinberger

Jack Steinberger is a German-American physicist currently residing near Geneva, Switzerland. He co-discovered the muon neutrino, along with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for which they were given the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.-Life:...

 
- Stern, Otto

Otto Stern

Otto Stern was a German physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.-Biography:Stern was born in Sohrau, now Żory in the German Empire's Kingdom of Prussia and studied at Breslau, now Wrocław in Lower Silesia....

 
- Stevin, Simon

Simon Stevin

Simon Stevin was a Flemish mathematician and military engineer. He was active in a great many areas of science and engineering, both theoretical and practical...

 
- Stewart-Walker lemma 
- Stokes, George Gabriel

George Gabriel Stokes

Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet FRS , was an Irish mathematician and physicist, who at Cambridge made important contributions to fluid dynamics , optics, and mathematical physics...

 
- Stokes' law

Stokes' law

In 1851, George Gabriel Stokes derived an expression, now known as Stokes' law, for the frictional force – also called drag force – exerted on spherical objects with very small Reynolds numbers in a continuous viscous fluid...

 
- Stokes parameters

Stokes parameters

The Stokes parameters are a set of values that describe the polarization state of electromagnetic radiation. They were defined by George Gabriel Stokes in 1852, as a mathematically convenient alternative to the more common description of incoherent or partially polarized radiation in terms of its...

 
- Störmer, Horst L. 
- Strange matter

Strange matter

Strange matter is a particular form of quark matter, usually thought of as a "liquid" of up, down, and strange quarks. It is to be contrasted with nuclear matter, which is a liquid of neutrons and protons , and with non-strange quark matter, which is a quark liquid containing only up and down quarks...

 
- Strangeness

Strangeness

In particle physics, strangeness S is a property of particles, expressed as a quantum number, for describing decay of particles in strong and electromagnetic reactions, which occur in a short period of time...

 
- Stress–energy tensor 
- String (physics)

String (physics)

A string is a hypothetical vibrating one-dimensional sub-atomic structure and one of the main objects of study in string theory, a branch of theoretical physics. There are different string theories, many of which are unified by M-theory. A string is an object with a one-dimensional spatial extent,...

 
- String theory

String theory

String theory is an active research framework in particle physics that attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a contender for a theory of everything , a manner of describing the known fundamental forces and matter in a mathematically complete system...

 
- Strnad, Janez

Janez Strnad

Janez Strnad is a Slovene physicist and populariser of natural science.- Life and work :Strnad was born in Ljubljana, Kingdom of Yugoslavia ....

 
- Strong interaction

Strong interaction

In particle physics, the strong interaction is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, the others being electromagnetism, the weak interaction and gravitation. As with the other fundamental interactions, it is a non-contact force...

 
- Strong nuclear force 
- SU(2) 
- SU(3) 
- Subatomic particle

Subatomic particle

In physics or chemistry, subatomic particles are the smaller particles composing nucleons and atoms. There are two types of subatomic particles: elementary particles, which are not made of other particles, and composite particles...

 
- Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is a neutrino observatory located 6,800 feet underground in Vale Inco's Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The detector was designed to detect solar neutrinos through their interactions with a large tank of heavy water. The detector turned on in May 1999,...

 
- Sun

Sun

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...

 
- Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect

Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect

The Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect is the result of high energy electrons distorting the cosmic microwave background radiation through inverse Compton scattering, in which the low energy CMB photons receive energy boost during collision with the high energy cluster electrons...

 
- Super-Kamiokande

Super-Kamiokande

Super-Kamiokande is a neutrino observatory which is under Mount Kamioka near the city of Hida, Gifu Prefecture, Japan...

 
- Superconducting Super Collider

Superconducting Super Collider

The Superconducting Super Collider was a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas that was set to be world's largest and most energetic, surpassing the current record held by the Large Hadron Collider. Its planned ring circumference was with an energy...

 
- Superconductivity

Superconductivity

Superconductivity is a phenomenon of exactly zero electrical resistance occurring in certain materials below a characteristic temperature. It was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes on April 8, 1911 in Leiden. Like ferromagnetism and atomic spectral lines, superconductivity is a quantum...

 
- Superconductor 
- Superfluidity 
- Supergravity

Supergravity

In theoretical physics, supergravity is a field theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity. Together, these imply that, in supergravity, the supersymmetry is a local symmetry...

 
- Superparamagnetism

Superparamagnetism

Superparamagnetism is a form of magnetism, which appears in small ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic nanoparticles. In sufficiently small nanoparticles, magnetization can randomly flip direction under the influence of temperature. The typical time between two flips is called the Néel relaxation time...

 
- Superposition principle

Superposition principle

In physics and systems theory, the superposition principle , also known as superposition property, states that, for all linear systems, the net response at a given place and time caused by two or more stimuli is the sum of the responses which would have been caused by each stimulus individually...

 
- Superstring theory

Superstring theory

Superstring theory is an attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one theory by modelling them as vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings...

 
- Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry

In particle physics, supersymmetry is a symmetry that relates elementary particles of one spin to other particles that differ by half a unit of spin and are known as superpartners...

 
- Surface tension

Surface tension

Surface tension is a property of the surface of a liquid that allows it to resist an external force. It is revealed, for example, in floating of some objects on the surface of water, even though they are denser than water, and in the ability of some insects to run on the water surface...

 
- Symmetric matrix 
- Symmetric tensor 
- Symmetry

Symmetry

Symmetry generally conveys two primary meanings. The first is an imprecise sense of harmonious or aesthetically pleasing proportionality and balance; such that it reflects beauty or perfection...

 
- Synchrotron

Synchrotron

A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator in which the magnetic field and the electric field are carefully synchronised with the travelling particle beam. The proton synchrotron was originally conceived by Sir Marcus Oliphant...

- Synchrotron light

Synchrotron light

A synchrotron light source is a source of electromagnetic radiation produced by a synchrotron, which is artificially produced for scientific and technical purposes by specialized particle accelerators, typically accelerating electrons...

- Synchrotron radiation

Synchrotron radiation

The electromagnetic radiation emitted when charged particles are accelerated radially is called synchrotron radiation. It is produced in synchrotrons using bending magnets, undulators and/or wigglers...

- Szilárd, Leó

Leó Szilárd

Leó Szilárd was an Austro-Hungarian physicist and inventor who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb...

T

T-duality

T-duality

T-duality is a symmetry of quantum field theories with differing classical descriptions, of which the relationship between small and large distances in various string theories is a special case. Discussion of the subject originated in a paper by T. S. Buscher and was further developed by Martin...

 
- T-symmetry

T-symmetry

T Symmetry is the symmetry of physical laws under a time reversal transformation: T: t \mapsto -t.Although in restricted contexts one may find this symmetry, the observable universe itself does not show symmetry under time reversal, primarily due to the second law of thermodynamics.Time asymmetries...

 
- Tachyon

Tachyon

A tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that always moves faster than light. In the language of special relativity, a tachyon would be a particle with space-like four-momentum and imaginary proper time. A tachyon would be constrained to the space-like portion of the energy-momentum graph...

 
- Tamm, Igor Yevgenyevich

Igor Tamm

Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was a Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate who received most prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934.-Biography:Tamm was born in Vladivostok, Russian Empire , in a...

 
- Tau lepton

Tau lepton

The tau , also called the tau lepton, tau particle or tauon, is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with negative electric charge and a spin of . Together with the electron, the muon, and the three neutrinos, it is classified as a lepton...

 
- Taylor series

Taylor series

In mathematics, a Taylor series is a representation of a function as an infinite sum of terms that are calculated from the values of the function's derivatives at a single point....

 
- Taylor, Brook

Brook Taylor

Brook Taylor FRS was an English mathematician who is best known for Taylor's theorem and the Taylor series.- Life and work :...

 
- Taylor, Richard E.

Richard E. Taylor

Richard Edward Taylor, is a Canadian-American professor at Stanford University. In 1990, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have...

 
- Taylor number

Taylor number

In fluid dynamics, the Taylor number is a dimensionless quantity that characterizes the importance of centrifugal "forces" or so-called inertial forces due to rotation of a fluid about an axis, relative to viscous forces. The typical context of the Taylor number is in characterization of the...

 
- Teller, Edward

Edward Teller

Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," even though he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics...

- Temperature

Temperature

Temperature is a physical property of matter that quantitatively expresses the common notions of hot and cold. Objects of low temperature are cold, while various degrees of higher temperatures are referred to as warm or hot...

 
- Tension (mechanics)

Tension (mechanics)

In physics, tension is the magnitude of the pulling force exerted by a string, cable, chain, or similar object on another object. It is the opposite of compression. As tension is the magnitude of a force, it is measured in newtons and is always measured parallel to the string on which it applies...

 
- Tensor

Tensor

Tensors are geometric objects that describe linear relations between vectors, scalars, and other tensors. Elementary examples include the dot product, the cross product, and linear maps. Vectors and scalars themselves are also tensors. A tensor can be represented as a multi-dimensional array of...

 
- Tensor-classical 
- Tensor product

Tensor product

In mathematics, the tensor product, denoted by ⊗, may be applied in different contexts to vectors, matrices, tensors, vector spaces, algebras, topological vector spaces, and modules, among many other structures or objects. In each case the significance of the symbol is the same: the most general...

 
- Tesla

Tesla (unit)

The tesla is the SI derived unit of magnetic field B . One tesla is equal to one weber per square meter, and it was defined in 1960 in honour of the inventor, physicist, and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla...

 
- Tesla coil

Tesla coil

A Tesla coil is a type of resonant transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla around 1891. It is used to produce high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity. Tesla coils produce higher current than the other source of high voltage discharges, electrostatic machines...

 
- Tesla, Nikola

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer...

 
- Theoretical astrophysics 
- Theoretical chemistry

Theoretical chemistry

Theoretical chemistry seeks to provide theories that explain chemical observations. Often, it uses mathematical and computational methods that, at times, require advanced knowledge. Quantum chemistry, the application of quantum mechanics to the understanding of valency, is a major component of...

 
- Theoretical physics

Theoretical physics

Theoretical physics is a branch of physics which employs mathematical models and abstractions of physics to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena...

 
- Theory

Theory

The English word theory was derived from a technical term in Ancient Greek philosophy. The word theoria, , meant "a looking at, viewing, beholding", and referring to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action...

 
- Theory of everything

Theory of everything

A theory of everything is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle....

 
- Theory of invariants 
- Theory of relativity

Theory of relativity

The theory of relativity, or simply relativity, encompasses two theories of Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity. However, the word relativity is sometimes used in reference to Galilean invariance....

 
- Thermal conductance 
- Thermal conductivity

Thermal conductivity

In physics, thermal conductivity, k, is the property of a material's ability to conduct heat. It appears primarily in Fourier's Law for heat conduction....

 
- Thermal neutron 
- Thermodynamic properties 
- Thermodynamic potentials

Thermodynamic potentials

A thermodynamic potential is a scalar function used to represent the thermodynamic state of a system. The concept of thermodynamic potentials was introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1886. Josiah Willard Gibbs in his papers used the term fundamental functions. One main thermodynamic potential that has a...

 
- Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is a physical science that studies the effects on material bodies, and on radiation in regions of space, of transfer of heat and of work done on or by the bodies or radiation...

 
- Thermoelectric effect

Thermoelectric effect

The thermoelectric effect is the direct conversion of temperature differences to electric voltage and vice-versa. A thermoelectric device creates a voltage when there is a different temperature on each side. Conversely, when a voltage is applied to it, it creates a temperature difference...

 
- Thirring, Hans

Hans Thirring

Hans Thirring was an Austrian theoretical physicist, professor, and father of the physicist Walter Thirring....

 
- Thomas precession

Thomas precession

In physics the Thomas precession, named after Llewellyn Thomas, is a special relativistic correction that applies to the spin of an elementary particle or the rotation of a macroscopic gyroscope and relates the angular velocity of the spin of a particle following a curvilinear orbit to the angular...

 
- Thompson, Benjamin

Benjamin Thompson

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford , FRS was an American-born British physicist and inventor whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the 19th century revolution in thermodynamics. He also served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Loyalist forces in America during the American...

 
- Thomson, George Paget

George Paget Thomson

Sir George Paget Thomson, FRS was an English physicist and Nobel laureate in physics recognised for his discovery with Clinton Davisson of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.-Biography:...

 
- Thomson, Joseph John

J. J. Thomson

Sir Joseph John "J. J." Thomson, OM, FRS was a British physicist and Nobel laureate. He is credited for the discovery of the electron and of isotopes, and the invention of the mass spectrometer...

 
- Thomson, William

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin OM, GCVO, PC, PRS, PRSE, was a mathematical physicist and engineer. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging...

 (Lord Kelvin)
- Thought experiment

Thought experiment

A thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment considers some hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences...

 
- Tide

Tide

Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the moon and the sun and the rotation of the Earth....

 
- Tidal acceleration

Tidal acceleration

Tidal acceleration is an effect of the tidal forces between an orbiting natural satellite , and the primary planet that it orbits . The "acceleration" is usually negative, as it causes a gradual slowing and recession of a satellite in a prograde orbit away from the primary, and a corresponding...

 
- Tidal force

Tidal force

The tidal force is a secondary effect of the force of gravity and is responsible for the tides. It arises because the gravitational force per unit mass exerted on one body by a second body is not constant across its diameter, the side nearest to the second being more attracted by it than the side...

 
- Tidal locking

Tidal locking

Tidal locking occurs when the gravitational gradient makes one side of an astronomical body always face another; for example, the same side of the Earth's Moon always faces the Earth. A tidally locked body takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its partner...

 
- Time

Time

Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....

 
- Time dilation

Time dilation

In the theory of relativity, time dilation is an observed difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers either moving relative to each other or differently situated from gravitational masses. An accurate clock at rest with respect to one observer may be measured to tick at...

 
- Time invariance 
- Time travel

Time travel

Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...

 
- Timeline of classical mechanics

Timeline of classical mechanics

-Early history:* 300s BC - Aristotle founds the system of Aristotelian physics* 260 BC - Archimedes mathematically works out the principle of the lever and discovers the principle of buoyancy...

 
- Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics

Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics

Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics*424 BC Aristophanes "lens" is a glass globe filled with water....

 
- Timeline of gravitational physics and relativity

Timeline of gravitational physics and relativity

Timeline of gravitational physics and general relativity* 3rd century BC - Aristarchus of Samos proposes heliocentric model, measures the distance to the moon and its size...

 
- Timeline of nuclear fusion

Timeline of nuclear fusion

Timeline of significant events in the study and use of nuclear fusion:*1929 - Atkinson and Houtermans used the measured masses of low-mass elements and applied Einstein's discovery that E=mc2 to predict that large amounts of energy could be released by fusing small nuclei together .*1932 - Mark...

 
- Timeline of other background radiation fields

Timeline of other background radiation fields

Timeline of other background radiation fields* 1912 - Victor Hess discovers that the ionization of air increases with altitude indicating the existence of cosmic radiation* 1949 - Herbert Friedman detects evidence for extrasolar X-rays...

 
- Timeline of particle physics

Timeline of particle physics

The timeline of particle physics lists the sequence of particle physics theories and discoveries in chronological order. The most modern developments follow the scientific development of the discipline of Particle physics.-19th century:...

 
- Timeline of particle physics technology

Timeline of particle physics technology

Timeline of particle physics technology* 1896 - Charles Wilson discovers that energetic particles produce droplet tracks in supersaturated gases* 1908 - Hans Geiger and Ernest Rutherford invent the Geiger counter...

 
- Timeline of physics 
- Timeline of atomic and subatomic physics 
- Timeline of states of matter and phase transitions

Timeline of states of matter and phase transitions

Timeline of states of matter and phase transitions* 1895 – Pierre Curie discovers that induced magnetization is proportional to magnetic field strength* 1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discloses his research on superconductivity...

 
- Timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes

Timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes

A timeline of events related to thermodynamics.- Before 1800 :* 1650 – Otto von Guericke builds the first vacuum pump* 1660 – Robert Boyle experimentally discovers Boyle's Law, relating the pressure and volume of a gas...

 
- Ting, Samuel Chao Chung 
- Theory of everything

Theory of everything

A theory of everything is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle....

 
- Tokamak

Tokamak

A tokamak is a device using a magnetic field to confine a plasma in the shape of a torus . Achieving a stable plasma equilibrium requires magnetic field lines that move around the torus in a helical shape...

 
- Luttinger liquid

Luttinger liquid

A Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid, more often referred to as simply a Luttinger liquid, is a theoretical model describing interacting electrons in a one-dimensional conductor...

 
- Tomonaga, Sin-Itiro

Sin-Itiro Tomonaga

was a Japanese physicist, influential in the development of quantum electrodynamics, work for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 along with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.-Biography:...

 
- Topological group

Topological group

In mathematics, a topological group is a group G together with a topology on G such that the group's binary operation and the group's inverse function are continuous functions with respect to the topology. A topological group is a mathematical object with both an algebraic structure and a...

 
- Topology of the universe 
- Torque

Torque

Torque, moment or moment of force , is the tendency of a force to rotate an object about an axis, fulcrum, or pivot. Just as a force is a push or a pull, a torque can be thought of as a twist....

 
- Torricelli, Evangelista

Evangelista Torricelli

Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, best known for his invention of the barometer.-Biography:Evangelista Torricelli was born in Faenza, part of the Papal States...

 
- Torsion (mechanics)

Torsion (mechanics)

In solid mechanics, torsion is the twisting of an object due to an applied torque. In sections perpendicular to the torque axis, the resultant shear stress in this section is perpendicular to the radius....

 
- Torsion subgroup

Torsion subgroup

In the theory of abelian groups, the torsion subgroup AT of an abelian group A is the subgroup of A consisting of all elements that have finite order...

 
- Townes, Charles Hard

Charles Hard Townes

Charles Hard Townes is an American Nobel Prize-winning physicist and educator. Townes is known for his work on the theory and application of the maser, on which he got the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics connected with both maser and laser devices. He shared the Nobel...

 
- Transfer function

Transfer function

A transfer function is a mathematical representation, in terms of spatial or temporal frequency, of the relation between the input and output of a linear time-invariant system. With optical imaging devices, for example, it is the Fourier transform of the point spread function i.e...

 
- Transition rule 
- Transistor

Transistor

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...

 
- Translation (physics)

Translation (physics)

In physics, translation is movement that changes the position of an object, as opposed to rotation. For example, according to Whittaker:...

 
- Translational invariance 
- Transpose

Transpose

In linear algebra, the transpose of a matrix A is another matrix AT created by any one of the following equivalent actions:...

 
- Tsui, Daniel C.

Daniel C. Tsui

Daniel Chee Tsui is a Chinese-born American physicist whose areas of research included electrical properties of thin films and microstructures of semiconductors and solid-state physics...

 
- Turbulence

Turbulence

In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is a flow regime characterized by chaotic and stochastic property changes. This includes low momentum diffusion, high momentum convection, and rapid variation of pressure and velocity in space and time...

 
- Turbulent flow 
- Twin paradox

Twin paradox

In physics, the twin paradox is a thought experiment in special relativity, in which a twin makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find he has aged less than his identical twin who stayed on Earth...

 

U

U(1) 
- Ultraviolet catastrophe

Ultraviolet catastrophe

The ultraviolet catastrophe, also called the Rayleigh–Jeans catastrophe, was a prediction of late 19th century/early 20th century classical physics that an ideal black body at thermal equilibrium will emit radiation with infinite power....

 
- Uncertainty principle

Uncertainty principle

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known...

 
- Undulatory theory of light 
- Unicity distance

Unicity distance

In cryptography, unicity distance is the length of an original ciphertext needed to break the cipher by reducing the number of possible spurious keys to zero in a brute force attack. That is, after trying every possible key, there should be just one decipherment that makes sense, i.e...

 
- Unified field theory

Unified field theory

In physics, a unified field theory, occasionally referred to as a uniform field theory, is a type of field theory that allows all that is usually thought of as fundamental forces and elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field. There is no accepted unified field theory, and thus...

 
- Unit cell 
- Unitary group

Unitary group

In mathematics, the unitary group of degree n, denoted U, is the group of n×n unitary matrices, with the group operation that of matrix multiplication. The unitary group is a subgroup of the general linear group GL...

 
- Unitary matrix 
- Unitary operator

Unitary operator

In functional analysis, a branch of mathematics, a unitary operator is a bounded linear operator U : H → H on a Hilbert space H satisfyingU^*U=UU^*=I...

 
- Universal gas equation 
- Unsolved problems in physics

Unsolved problems in physics

This is a list of some of the major unsolved problems in physics. Some of these problems are theoretical, meaning that existing theories seem incapable of explaining a certain observed phenomenon or experimental result...

 

V

Vacuum

Vacuum

In everyday usage, vacuum is a volume of space that is essentially empty of matter, such that its gaseous pressure is much less than atmospheric pressure. The word comes from the Latin term for "empty". A perfect vacuum would be one with no particles in it at all, which is impossible to achieve in...

 
- Vacuum expectation value

Vacuum expectation value

In quantum field theory the vacuum expectation value of an operator is its average, expected value in the vacuum. The vacuum expectation value of an operator O is usually denoted by \langle O\rangle...

- Van de Graaff generator

Van de Graaff generator

A Van de Graaff generator is an electrostatic generator which uses a moving belt to accumulate very high voltages on a hollow metal globe on the top of the stand. It was invented in 1929 by American physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff. The potential differences achieved in modern Van de Graaff...

- van der Meer, Simon

Simon van der Meer

Simon van der Meer was a Dutch particle accelerator physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Carlo Rubbia for contributions to the CERN project which led to the discovery of the W and Z particles, two of the most fundamental constituents of matter.-Biography:One of four...

- van der Waals, Johannes

Johannes Diderik van der Waals

Johannes Diderik van der Waals was a Dutch theoretical physicist and thermodynamicist famous for his work on an equation of state for gases and liquids....

- van der Waals equation

Van der Waals equation

The van der Waals equation is an equation of state for a fluid composed of particles that have a non-zero volume and a pairwise attractive inter-particle force It was derived by Johannes Diderik van der Waals in 1873, who received the Nobel prize in 1910 for "his work on the equation of state for...

- van Vleck, John Hasbrouck

John Hasbrouck van Vleck

John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was an American physicist and mathematician, co-awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics, for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electrons in magnetic solids....

- Variables commonly used in physics
- Vector (geometric)
- Vector calculus
- Vector field

Vector field

In vector calculus, a vector field is an assignmentof a vector to each point in a subset of Euclidean space. A vector field in the plane for instance can be visualized as an arrow, with a given magnitude and direction, attached to each point in the plane...

- Vector space

Vector space

A vector space is a mathematical structure formed by a collection of vectors: objects that may be added together and multiplied by numbers, called scalars in this context. Scalars are often taken to be real numbers, but one may also consider vector spaces with scalar multiplication by complex...

- Vehicle dynamics

Vehicle dynamics

Vehicle dynamics refers to the dynamics of vehicles, here assumed to be ground vehicles. Vehicle dynamics is a part of engineering primarily based on classical mechanics but it may also involve chemistry, solid state physics, electrical engineering, communications, psychology, control theory,...

- Velocity

Velocity

In physics, velocity is speed in a given direction. Speed describes only how fast an object is moving, whereas velocity gives both the speed and direction of the object's motion. To have a constant velocity, an object must have a constant speed and motion in a constant direction. Constant ...

- Veltman, Martinus J. G.

Martinus J. G. Veltman

Martinus Justinus Godefriedus Veltman is a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics with his former student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory.-Biography:...

- Vibrating string

Vibrating string

A vibration in a string is a wave. Usually a vibrating string produces a sound whose frequency in most cases is constant. Therefore, since frequency characterizes the pitch, the sound produced is a constant note....

- Vibration

Oscillation

Oscillation is the repetitive variation, typically in time, of some measure about a central value or between two or more different states. Familiar examples include a swinging pendulum and AC power. The term vibration is sometimes used more narrowly to mean a mechanical oscillation but sometimes...

- Villari effect
- Virial equation of state
- Virtual force
- Virtual particle

Virtual particle

In physics, a virtual particle is a particle that exists for a limited time and space. The energy and momentum of a virtual particle are uncertain according to the uncertainty principle...

- Viscosity

Viscosity

Viscosity is a measure of the resistance of a fluid which is being deformed by either shear or tensile stress. In everyday terms , viscosity is "thickness" or "internal friction". Thus, water is "thin", having a lower viscosity, while honey is "thick", having a higher viscosity...

- Volta, Alessandro

Alessandro Volta

Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Gerolamo Umberto Volta was a Lombard physicist known especially for the invention of the battery in 1800.-Early life and works:...

- von Klitzing, Klaus

Klaus von Klitzing

Klaus von Klitzing is a German physicist known for discovery of the integer quantum Hall Effect, for which he was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics....

- von Weizsäcker, Carl

W

W and Z bosons

W and Z bosons

The W and Z bosons are the elementary particles that mediate the weak interaction; their symbols are , and . The W bosons have a positive and negative electric charge of 1 elementary charge respectively and are each other's antiparticle. The Z boson is electrically neutral and its own...

 
- W boson

W and Z bosons

The W and Z bosons are the elementary particles that mediate the weak interaction; their symbols are , and . The W bosons have a positive and negative electric charge of 1 elementary charge respectively and are each other's antiparticle. The Z boson is electrically neutral and its own...

 
- Wallis, John 
- Walton, Ernest Thomas Sinton 
- Walton, Thomas 
- Ward, John Clive

John Clive Ward

John Clive Ward , was a British-Australian physicist. His most famous creation was the Ward-Takahashi identity, originally known as "Ward Identity" . This celebrated result, in quantum electrodynamics, was inspired by a conjecture of Dyson and was disclosed in a one-half page letter typical of...

 
- Wave

Wave

In physics, a wave is a disturbance that travels through space and time, accompanied by the transfer of energy.Waves travel and the wave motion transfers energy from one point to another, often with no permanent displacement of the particles of the medium—that is, with little or no associated mass...

 
- Wave equation

Wave equation

The wave equation is an important second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves – as they occur in physics – such as sound waves, light waves and water waves. It arises in fields like acoustics, electromagnetics, and fluid dynamics...

 
- Wave–particle duality

Wave–particle duality

Wave–particle duality postulates that all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties. A central concept of quantum mechanics, this duality addresses the inability of classical concepts like "particle" and "wave" to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects...

 
- Wavefunction

Wavefunction

Not to be confused with the related concept of the Wave equationA wave function or wavefunction is a probability amplitude in quantum mechanics describing the quantum state of a particle and how it behaves. Typically, its values are complex numbers and, for a single particle, it is a function of...

 
- Wavefunction collapse

Wavefunction collapse

In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse is the phenomenon in which a wave function—initially in a superposition of several different possible eigenstates—appears to reduce to a single one of those states after interaction with an observer...

 
- Wavelength

Wavelength

In physics, the wavelength of a sinusoidal wave is the spatial period of the wave—the distance over which the wave's shape repeats.It is usually determined by considering the distance between consecutive corresponding points of the same phase, such as crests, troughs, or zero crossings, and is a...

 
- Wavenumber

Wavenumber

In the physical sciences, the wavenumber is a property of a wave, its spatial frequency, that is proportional to the reciprocal of the wavelength. It is also the magnitude of the wave vector...

 
- Weak decay 
- Weak force 
- Weak interaction

Weak interaction

Weak interaction , is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, alongside the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. It is responsible for the radioactive decay of subatomic particles and initiates the process known as hydrogen fusion in stars...

 
- Weak nuclear force 
- weber 
- Weber, Wilhelm

Wilhelm Eduard Weber

Wilhelm Eduard Weber was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph.-Early years:...

 
- Weber, Wilhelm Eduard

Wilhelm Eduard Weber

Wilhelm Eduard Weber was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph.-Early years:...

 
- Weight

Weight

In science and engineering, the weight of an object is the force on the object due to gravity. Its magnitude , often denoted by an italic letter W, is the product of the mass m of the object and the magnitude of the local gravitational acceleration g; thus:...

 
- Weightlessness

Weightlessness

Weightlessness is the condition that exists for an object or person when they experience little or no acceleration except the acceleration that defines their inertial trajectory, or the trajectory of pure free-fall...

 
- Weinberg, Steven

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....

 
- Weisskopf, Victor 
- Weyl, Hermann

Hermann Weyl

Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl was a German mathematician and theoretical physicist. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland and then Princeton, he is associated with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski.His...

 
- Weyl's postulate

Weyl's postulate

In relativistic cosmology, Weyl's postulate stipulates that in a fluid cosmological model, the world lines of the fluid particles, which act as the source of the gravitational field and which are often taken to model galaxies, should be hypersurface orthogonal...

 
- Weyl tensor

Weyl tensor

In differential geometry, the Weyl curvature tensor, named after Hermann Weyl, is a measure of the curvature of spacetime or, more generally, a pseudo-Riemannian manifold. Like the Riemann curvature tensor, the Weyl tensor expresses the tidal force that a body feels when moving along a geodesic...

 
- Wiedemann effect

Wiedemann effect

The twisting of a ferromagnetic rod through which an electric current is flowing when the rod is placed in a longitudinal magnetic field. It was discovered by the German physicist Gustav Wiedemann in 1858...

 
- Wieman, Carl E. 
- Wick product

Wick product

In probability theory, the Wick product\langle X_1,\dots,X_k \rangle\,named after physicist Gian-Carlo Wick, is a sort of product of the random variables, X1, ..., Xk, defined recursively as follows:\langle \rangle = 1\,...

 
- Wick rotation

Wick rotation

In physics, Wick rotation, named after Gian-Carlo Wick, is a method of finding a solution to a mathematical problem in Minkowski space from a solution to a related problem in Euclidean space by means of a transformation that substitutes an imaginary-number variable for a real-number variable...

 
- Wien's displacement law

Wien's displacement law

Wien's displacement law states that the wavelength distribution of thermal radiation from a black body at any temperature has essentially the same shape as the distribution at any other temperature, except that each wavelength is displaced on the graph...

 
- Wien, Wilhelm

Wilhelm Wien

Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien was a German physicist who, in 1893, used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature.He also formulated an...

 
- Wigner, Eugene 
- Wilson, Charles Thomson Rees

Charles Thomson Rees Wilson

Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, CH, FRS was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who received the Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cloud chamber.- Biography:...

 
- Wilson, Kenneth G.

Kenneth G. Wilson

Kenneth Geddes Wilson is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner.As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a Putnam Fellow. He earned his PhD from Caltech in 1961, studying under Murray Gell-Mann....

 
- Wilson, Robert Woodrow

Robert Woodrow Wilson

For the American President, see Woodrow Wilson.Robert Woodrow Wilson is an American astronomer, 1978 Nobel laureate in physics, who with Arno Allan Penzias discovered in 1964 the cosmic microwave background radiation...

 
- Witten, Edward

Edward Witten

Edward Witten is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is currently a professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study....

 
- Woods, Leona

Leona Woods

Leona Woods , later called Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb....

 
- Worldline 

X

X-ray

X-ray

X-radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz and energies in the range 120 eV to 120 keV. They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma...

 
- X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES)

XANES

X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure , also known as Near edge X-ray absorption fine structure is a type of absorption spectroscopy. NEXAFS also at times used the abbreviation EXAFS....

- X-ray crystallography

X-ray crystallography

X-ray crystallography is a method of determining the arrangement of atoms within a crystal, in which a beam of X-rays strikes a crystal and causes the beam of light to spread into many specific directions. From the angles and intensities of these diffracted beams, a crystallographer can produce a...

 
- X-ray diffraction 
- X-ray fluorescence

X-ray fluorescence

X-ray fluorescence is the emission of characteristic "secondary" X-rays from a material that has been excited by bombarding with high-energy X-rays or gamma rays...

 
- X-ray structure 

Y

Yang, Chen Ning 
- Yang–Mills theory 
- Young, Thomas

Thomas Young (scientist)

Thomas Young was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work...

 
- Young's modulus

Young's modulus

Young's modulus is a measure of the stiffness of an elastic material and is a quantity used to characterize materials. It is defined as the ratio of the uniaxial stress over the uniaxial strain in the range of stress in which Hooke's Law holds. In solid mechanics, the slope of the stress-strain...

 
- Yukawa, Hideki

Hideki Yukawa

né , was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate.-Biography:Yukawa was born in Tokyo and grew up in Kyoto. In 1929, after receiving his degree from Kyoto Imperial University, he stayed on as a lecturer for four years. After graduation, he was interested in...

 

Z

Z boson
- Zeeman effect

Zeeman effect

The Zeeman effect is the splitting of a spectral line into several components in the presence of a static magnetic field. It is analogous to the Stark effect, the splitting of a spectral line into several components in the presence of an electric field...

- Zeeman, Pieter

Pieter Zeeman

Pieter Zeeman was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect.-Childhood and youth:...

- Zernike, Frits

Frits Zernike

Frits Zernike was a Dutch physicist and winner of the Nobel prize for physics in 1953 for his invention of the phase contrast microscope, an instrument that permits the study of internal cell structure without the need to stain and thus kill the cells....

- Zero-point energy

Zero-point energy

Zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may have; it is the energy of its ground state. All quantum mechanical systems undergo fluctuations even in their ground state and have an associated zero-point energy, a consequence of their wave-like nature...

- Zitterbewegung motion
- Zone melting

Zone melting

Zone melting is a group of similar methods of purifying crystals, in which a narrow region of a crystal is molten, and this molten zone is moved along the crystal...

- Zweig, George

George Zweig

George Zweig was originally trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman and later turned his attention to neurobiology...

See also

• List of basic physics topics