The Story of Physics

The author of the story of a science must be guided by the constraints and demands imposed on him by the definition of "science" itself. A science is more than a body of knowledge expounded in original papers and collected in books; it is the active pursuit of this knowledge by a dedicated group of people ( scientists) who are devoted to this '' great adventure'' by an inner drive that they cannot deny. Since physics as an intellectual activity is the search for the fundamentallaws of nature, it is the basic science from which all others are derived; no phenomena in the universe are foreign to the physicist. But the physicist goes beyond the mere knowledge of facts because bis ultimate concem is deducing from these facts basic laws that enable him to correlate what appear to be disparate phenomena and to predict future events. An excellent current example of this concem is the astrophysicist' s description of the evolution of stars (for example, the sun) from their present states to their ultimate demise as white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. The astrophysicist performs this task by applying the known physical laws to stellar interiors to dis- cover their dynamic processes.