Beginning Physics, Pt 1

Before we can get to Nuclear physics, we need to start with the basics.

The first people to attempt to investigate what made the world - and all that was in it - tick were the ancient Greeks. Curious men, who had the leisure time to do so, began a systematic gathering of knowledge through human reasoning.

Those who attempted this rationalistic search for understanding, rejecting the aid of intuition, inspiration or revelation, or other non-rational sources of information, were called philosophers (from the Greek for "philo-lover and sophist - wisdom.")

Philosophers came in two broad groups - those who turned within to seek an understanding of human behavior, of ethics and morality, of motivations and responses. The second group were those investigated their surroundings, an investigation of nature, and thus they became called natural philosophers (by English speakers who came long after!).

The modern word that has taken the place of "natural philosophy" - science - did not come into use until well into the nineteenth century. That is why today,the highest university degree one can achieve is a "Doctor of Philosophy."

The word "natural" is from the Latin. The Greek word for "natural" is "physikos."

The term "physics" therefore, is a brief form of natural philosophy, and, in its original meaning, included all of science.

However, as the field of science broadened and deepened, and as the information gathered grew more voluminous, natural philosophers had to specialize, taking one segment or another of scientific endeabour as their chosen field of work. The specialities received names of their own and were often subtracted from the once universal domain of physics.

Thus, mathematics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, and biology, once all considered part of physics, became sciences in their own right.

The term "physics" then came to be used to describe the study of those portions of nature that remained after the other specialties had been subtracted. For that reason the word has come to cover a rather heterogeneous field and is not as easy to define as it might be.

TO be continued...

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Bibliography
Understanding Physics, by Isaac Asimov