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Research in Physics  Starting from scratch: Science is, at its core, the study of reproducible phenomena. The essential scientific activity is an experiment designed to test a theoretical prediction. Some theoretical argument predicts that if certain laboratory variables a,b,...n are held at particular values, then one other seemingly unrelated laboratory variable Q will always (reproducibly) have a unique value that the theory specifies in terms of the controlled variables a,b,...n. If the experimenter succeeds in holding all the parameters the theory requires constant, then if the measured value of Q is as predicted, within experimental uncertainty (an essential concept in science!), then "theory is consistent with experiment". If, on the other hand, if the measured Q disagrees with the prediction, even allowing for experimental uncertainty, then the theory is wrong. While many commentators seek to justify scientific research as "the pursuit of absolute truth", or words to that effect, the above paragraph says no such thing. It says that scientific research is the pursuit of predictive power. A really successful theory is one that correctly predicts new phenomena that nobody thought to look for before the prediction was made. Examples:
A scientific discovery has practical application when engineers use a theory's verified prediction to control our environment in some way: every time you create the prerequisites described by the theory (e.g., the appropriate layers of doped silicon on top of each other), you are guaranteed to get the verified result (a working transistor). The scientific research established how to reproduce a particular phenomenon (transistors are reproduced millions of times on each integrated circuit chip in every PC). Science is now a big enough endeavor that it is now generally divided into fields:
The grab-bag nature of the definition of Physics means that it has many, widely-varied sub-fields. Proceeding from the smallest scale of examination to the largest:
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