History
As noted below, the means used to understand the behavior of natural phenomena and their effects evolved from philosophy, progressively replaced by natural philosophy then natural science, to eventually arrive at the modern conception of physics.
Natural philosophy has its origins in Greece during the Archaic period, (650 BCE – 480 BCE), when Pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales refused supernatural, religious or mythological explanations for natural phenomena and proclaimed that every event had a natural cause. They proposed ideas verified by reason and observation and many of their hypotheses proved successful in experiment, for example atomism.
Classical physics became a separate science when early modern Europeans used these experimental and quantitative methods to discover what are now considered to be the laws of physics. Kepler, Galileo and more specifically Newton discovered and unified the different laws of motion. Experimental physics had its debuts with experimentation concerning statics by medieval Muslim physicists like al-Biruni and Alhazen. During the industrial revolution, as energy needs increased, so did research, which led to the discovery of new laws in thermodynamics, chemistry and electromagnetics.
Modern physics started with the works of Max Planck in quantum theory and Einstein in relativity, and continued in quantum mechanics pioneered by Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Paul Dirac.
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“A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
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—William Faulkner (1897–1962)