The physics of the solid and liquid world — and the largest branch of the field by headcount.
12 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Richard Feynman · 1959
Argues that no law of physics forbids manipulating matter atom by atom, and that the only obstacle to building machines at that scale is that nobody…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Nobel Lecture: The Diffraction of X-rays by Crystals
William Lawrence Bragg · 1922
Shows that a crystal's regular lattice diffracts X-rays at angles that reveal the spacing of its atomic planes, turning crystals into a way of seeing…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Transistor, A Semi-Conductor Triode
John Bardeen & Walter H. Brattain · 1948
Reports the first solid-state amplifying device, using point contacts on a germanium surface to let a small current control a much larger one.
+10 more at this level
12 of 16 works
Richard Feynman
Argues that no law of physics forbids manipulating matter atom by atom, and that the only obstacle to building machines at that scale is that nobody has tried.
8 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
Argues that polymers, liquid crystals and colloids share one underlying physics of weak, disordered interactions and slow, cooperative response, and proposes soft matter as physics's name for that shared behaviour.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Lawrence Bragg
Shows that a crystal's regular lattice diffracts X-rays at angles that reveal the spacing of its atomic planes, turning crystals into a way of seeing atomic structure.
16 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026William B. Shockley
Traces how the effort to build a working transistor forced physicists to develop new theory for minority-carrier injection and surface states at a semiconductor junction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Louis Néel
Extends Weiss's molecular field theory to antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism, predicting that some magnetic materials have their moments cancel in alternating sublattices rather than align.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Bardeen & Walter H. Brattain
Reports the first solid-state amplifying device, using point contacts on a germanium surface to let a small current control a much larger one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Philip W. Anderson
Shows that a large enough degree of random disorder in a crystal lattice can trap an electron's wavefunction entirely, halting diffusion even though every individual site would otherwise allow it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Bardeen
Explains how electrons pair up by exchanging lattice vibrations, and that this pairing, not any single-particle effect, is what lets current flow without resistance.
27 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026John H. Van Vleck
Argues that magnetism in solids cannot be understood classically at all, tracing how quantum mechanics alone explains paramagnetism, diamagnetism and the exchange interactions that a classical electron gas gets wrong.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Klaus von Klitzing
Reports that the Hall resistance of a two-dimensional electron gas jumps in steps fixed only by fundamental constants, independent of the material or its impurities.
22 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Walter Kohn
Argues that a system's ground-state energy and properties are a functional of its electron density alone, replacing the many-body wavefunction with an object of only three variables and founding modern band-structure calculation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Anthony J. Leggett
Recounts how helium-3 atoms, which are fermions and should resist Bose-like condensation, pair up through nuclear-spin fluctuations to become superfluid at a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.