Formal & Natural Sciences
The search for the smallest set of rules that accounts for everything that happens.
11 fields · 113 topics · 147 curated works
Motion, force and energy at human scale — still the template for how physics is done.
Foundations & Overviews · Newtonian Mechanics · Lagrangian Mechanics · Hamiltonian Mechanics · Rigid Body Dynamics
Charge, current, field and light, unified into four equations.
Foundations & Overviews · Electrostatics · Magnetostatics · Maxwell's Equations · Electrodynamics
How macroscopic order emerges from microscopic chaos — and why time has a direction.
Foundations & Overviews · Laws of Thermodynamics · Entropy & the Arrow of Time · Kinetic Theory of Gases · Statistical Ensembles
The rules that govern matter at small scales, and the century-long argument about what they mean.
Foundations & Overviews · Wave Mechanics & the Schrödinger Equation · Hilbert Space Formalism · Spin & Angular Momentum · Perturbation Theory
The catalogue of fundamental constituents and the field theories that describe them.
Foundations & Overviews · Quantum Electrodynamics · Quantum Chromodynamics · Electroweak Theory · The Standard Model
Spacetime as a dynamic object, and the unfinished attempt to quantise it.
Foundations & Overviews · Special Relativity · General Relativity · Black Holes · Gravitational Waves
The physics of the solid and liquid world — and the largest branch of the field by headcount.
Foundations & Overviews · Crystallography & Lattices · Band Theory · Semiconductor Physics · Superconductivity
Light and matter interacting at the scale of individual atoms.
Foundations & Overviews · Atomic Structure · Molecular Spectroscopy · Laser Physics · Quantum Optics
The structure of the nucleus and the energy locked inside it.
Foundations & Overviews · Nuclear Structure · Radioactive Decay · Nuclear Fission · Nuclear Fusion
How physics is actually done — instruments, simulation and error.
Foundations & Overviews · Numerical Simulation · Monte Carlo Methods · Lattice Field Theory · Experimental Design in Physics
How the picture changed, and the arguments that changed it.
Foundations & Overviews · The Scientific Revolution · The Copenhagen Debates · The Einstein-Bohr Debate · The Manhattan Project
No prior grounding assumed.
Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman · 1974
Scientific integrity means bending over backwards to show how you might be wrong — everything else is imitation.
+15 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Richard Feynman · 1964
A full undergraduate physics course rebuilt around physical intuition rather than problem-set mechanics.
+33 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
Albert Einstein · 1905
Special relativity derived from two postulates, dissolving absolute time without introducing a single new force.
+96 more at this level
12 of 147 works
Richard Feynman
Scientific integrity means bending over backwards to show how you might be wrong — everything else is imitation.
Assumes no prior reading at all — it is a commencement address about honesty, not a physics paper
≈4,000 wordslink checked 17 Sept 2026Benjamin Franklin
Reports the kite experiment and lightning-rod work that established electricity as a single fluid moving between charged bodies, founding empirical electrostatics.
about 1.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026John Tyndall
A colleague's tribute to Faraday's working method, arguing that his experimental persistence rather than mathematical training is what let him discover induction and diamagnetism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Louis de Broglie
Argues that matter, like light, has both a wave and a particle character, and that a definite wavelength should be associated with every moving electron.
20 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyC. V. Raman
Reports that light scattered by a molecule sometimes shifts colour by an amount fixed by the molecule's own vibration frequencies, giving a spectroscopic window onto molecular structure independent of infrared absorption.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard 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 2026Steven W. Smith
Builds digital signal processing out of operations on arrays of numbers rather than continuous mathematics, aimed at readers who need working code before they need a proof.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Steven Strogatz
Argues that fireflies flashing in unison, cardiac cells and swaying bridges all obey the same mathematics of coupled oscillators, in which synchrony emerges on its own once coupling crosses a threshold.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles K. Kao
Argues that the light loss in glass fibres was an engineering impurity problem rather than a fundamental limit, and that purifying the glass enough would let light carry signals for kilometres instead of metres.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Don Lincoln (Fermilab)
Walks through the particles and forces of the Standard Model for a general audience, explaining what each piece does and why physicists think something is still missing from it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sixty Symbols
Has working physicists state plainly that the measurement problem is unresolved, and that the theory's predictive success has not settled what it says the world is like.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copy