History of Physics

Physics is a branch of science that developed out of philosophy, and was thus referred to as natural philosophy until the late 19th century - a term describing a field of study concerned with "the workings of nature". Currently, physics is traditionally defined as the study of matter, energy, and the relation between them. Physics is, in some senses, the oldest and most basic pure science; its discoveries find applications throughout the natural sciences, since matter and energy are the basic constituents of the natural world. The other sciences are generally more limited in their scope and may be considered branches that have split off from physics to become sciences in their own right. Physics today may be divided loosely into classical physics and modern physics.

Ancient Greece

The move towards a rational understanding of nature began at least since the Archaic period in Greece (650 – 480 BC) with the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The philosopher Thales (7th and 6 centuries BC), dubbed "the Father of Science" for refusing to accept various supernatural, religious or mythological explanations for natural phenomena, proclaimed that every event had a natural cause. Thales also made advancements in 580 BC by suggesting that water is the basic element, experimenting with magnets and attraction to rubbed amber, and formulating the first cosmologies. Anaximander, famous for his proto-evolutionary theory, disputed the ideas of Thales and proposed that rather than water, a substance called apeiron was the building block of all matter. Heraclitus (around 500 BC) proposed that the only basic law governing the universe was the principal of change and that nothing remains in the same state indefinitely. This observation made him one of the first scholars in ancient physics to address the role of time in the universe, one of the most important concepts even in the modern history of physics. The early physicist Leucippus (first half of the 5th century BC) adamantly opposed the idea of direct divine intervention in the universe, instead proposing that natural phenomena had a natural cause. Leucippus and his student, Democritus, were the first to develop the theory of atomism – the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms.

Muslim scientists

During the period of time known as the Dark Ages (5th – 15th century), Muslim scholars and scientists progressed science and technology while Europe was in cultural decline and poverty. The scientific research of the Islamic scientists is often overlooked due to the conflict of the Crusades and "it's possible, too, that many scholars in the Renaissance later played down or even disguised their connection to the Middle East for both political and religious reasons." The Islamic Abbasid caliphs gathered many classic works of antiquity and had them translated into Arabic within the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, Iraq. Islamic philosophers such as Al-Kindi (Alkindus), Al-Farabi (Alpharabius), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) reinterpreted Greek thought in the context of their religion. Ibn Sina (980 – 1037), known by the Latin name Avicenna, was a medical researcher from Bukhara, Uzbekistan responsible for important contributions to the disciplines of physics, optics, philosophy and medicine. He is most famous for writing The Canon of Medicine, a text used to teach student doctors in Europe until the 1600s.
                                                                                                                                                 ^{[The above passage from wikipedia.org]}