ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

History of physics

Physics is the study of how things work in the world. People have been fascinated by the rules that govern how things move since ancient times.

Long, long ago, people looked at the sun and the moon and wondered how they moved in the sky. They wondered why things would stay still if they weren’t being pushed, and why things that were pushed would keep moving in a straight line until they hit something.

One of the earliest and most famous physicists was Isaac Newton. He is the guy who discovered gravity! He saw that an apple fell from a tree to the ground, and wondered why it was that apples and everything else fell straight down instead of moving sideways or upwards.

Newton came up with three laws that explain how things move. His laws are still used to this day to help explain how everything from baseballs to rockets move in the world around us!

As time passed, physicists kept discovering new things. They figured out that matter was made up of tiny particles called atoms. They figured out that light is actually made up of waves, and that it can behave like both a wave and a particle at the same time.

In the early 20th century, a smart guy named Albert Einstein had some really crazy ideas. He thought that time and space were actually part of the same thing, and that they could be curved and stretched like a rubber sheet. He also said that energy and mass were the same thing!

Today, physicists are still busy discovering new things about the world. They study everything from subatomic particles to the biggest objects in the universe. Physics helps us understand how everything works, from the tiniest atoms to the largest stars!