Read the text and decide whether the following statements are true o false.

1. The scope of physics is clearly defined.

2. Physical laws rely on observation and experiment.

3. The subject of physics is very broad.

4. Physics is interrelated with other sciences.

5. Physicists collect all the necessary data and conduct the experiments before forming a working hypothesis.

6. Most physical findings can be directly applied to improve quality of human life.

7. The approach of a physicist is to ignore many aspects of a phenomenon in order to arrive to a generalization.

 

                            Theoretical and Applied Physics

  Physics is often defined as the science of matter and energy and of the relationship between them. As a science physics is rooted in and grounded in observation and experiment. And the validity of its laws must stand the test of continuing comparison with quantitative results of observation and experiment.

The domain of physics includes matter in all its forms − solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, molecules, atoms and the particles out of which atoms are made. It also includes energy in all its forms − mechanical energy, electromagnetic energy, nuclear energy − and manifestations of these basic kinds of energy in the form of heat, sound, light, gravitation and chemical energy. This is what we mean when we say that physics is the science of matter and energy. Still, such a definition does not clearly distinguish physics from other disciplines since chemistry is also a science which deals with molecules and atoms, and electrical engineering is concerned with production, transmission and control of electromagnetic energy. How then can we arrive at a clearer picture of the scope of physics?

First, physics is the oldest and the most basic of the sciences, since it attempts to study and explain the different kinds of particles and radiations which make up the universe. Over the course of history other sciences branched off from physics to become the sciences in their own right. Nevertheless, the findings of physics are still often used to elucidate the findings in other sciences.

A CAT (computerized axial tomography) scanner is used for producing 3-D X-ray image of the interior of the human body. For the work in developing the CAT scanner the American physicist A. Cormack received a share of Noble Prize for physiology and medicine.

Physics is one of so-called hard sciences, not because it is difficult, but because it is based on hard, quantitative data and makes predictions in quantitative (i.e. numerical) form. These predictions can then be checked against measurements made in the laboratory. The so-called soft sciences include disciplines like psychology and sociology in which human behavior plays a crucial role and in which the precision that is characteristic of physics does not play a major role. The physicists are able to extract quantitative data from nature only by focusing on the purely physical and quantitative aspects of a problem to the exclusion of other considerations. This fundamental in some ways oversimplified approach does not take into account the interaction of physical processes with the economy, political events, or the quality of human life, but concentrates on matter and energy and their physical interrelationships. This is both the secret of great success physics enjoyed and the reason its applicability to real life problems involving human being and other living creatures is limited.

Once a reasonable amount of experimental data has been collected in a physics research laboratory, physicists try to develop a theory to correlate and explain these data. But occasionally one gets a man like Enrico Fermi, the Italian genius, who rose to fame in 1927 as a theoretician and surprised us all by breathtaking results of his experiments with neutrons and finally by engineering the first nuclear reactor. On December 2 1942, he started the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction initiated by man and thus became the Prometheus of the Atomic Age.

  Physics today is divided into many special fields, themselves subdivided manifold. The principal of these are acoustics, electricity and magnetism, mechanics, nuclear physics, optics, quantum mechanics, relativity and thermodynamics.

 

 

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