Why Physics?

The quest to understand the world around us is one of the noblest of mankind's many adventures. By discovering the basic laws of nature, we are satisfying our inherent desire to understand our world and, at the same time, we are contributing toward a better quality of life for all generations to follow. Because physics is the most fundamental of the sciences, it plays the central role in these efforts. Whether we look to Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman in the 20th century, Isaac Newton in the 17th century or back to Archimedes in the third century BC, physicists have always been the ones to ask the difficult questions and to find the unexpected and challenging answers.

Physicists have always taken the whole of nature as their laboratory. By trying to understand their observations in terms of the most basic ideas, physicists have been led by their creativity and powers of reasoning to uncover fundamental but unexpected theories of nature. Questions about the speed of light led Einstein to develop his theories of relativity. Questions arising from earlier failures to understand data from thermal radiation experiments led Max Planck to propose the first step toward the theory of quantum mechanics. Questions arising from the interaction of light with electrons led Feynman to construct a picture of these interactions which underpins most of our ideas about elementary particles.

It is hard to describe to a newcomer the thrill of doing physics. For some, the thrill comes from being among the first to observe a new phenomenon, such as the physicists who first saw high-temperature superconductivity in 1987. For others, it is the sudden realization that they have finally hit upon a theory that explains data which has been perplexing scientists for years. Imagine Neils Bohr's excitement when his theory of the hydrogen atom exactly predicted the unexplained spectral data which had been accumulating for years. Imagine the exhilaration of an Einstein or a Feynman in realizing that they had opened completely new vistas in our understanding of the natural world.

Even if your answers do not become as famous as those of Einstein, or Bohr, or Planck, as a working physicist, you will face difficult questions and you will experience the thrill of finding the unexpected and challenging answers through your creativity, training, and powers of reasoning just like Einstein or Bohr or Feynman.