Physics

What Is Physics?

Physics is a branch of science that deals with energy and matter and how they relate to each other. Physics students study subjects such as thermodynamics, differential equations, electricity and magnetism, and quantum mechanics.

The Best Colleges and Universities for Physics Degrees

To view the entire list of top physics schools, including schools offering online degrees and a breakdown of the best physics colleges and universities in your state, visit our look at the Best Colleges and Universities for Physics Degrees.

We have a comprehensive resource that can help you to identify what to study in college. We have a comprehensive guide to some of the most popular college majors and programs.

For a dynamic, real-time listing of the most influential physics schools in the world, use our Custom College Ranking.

Physics Degrees

What Will I Study as a Physics Major?

As a physics major, you’ll study topics like differential equations, thermodynamics, atomic physics, and more.

What Can I Do With a Degree in Physics?

Graduates with a degree in physics can pursue a career as a data scientist, nuclear technicians, optical engineer, or aerospace engineer, among others.

If you’re ready to earn your degree at one of the most prestigious schools in the world, get started with a look at the Most Influential Schools in Physics

If you’d like to learn more, check out our extensive list of resources for physics students, graduates, and professionals...

How To Get a Degree in Physics

• Find out How to Major in Physics
• Find out what you can do with a Master’s Degree in Physics

Who are the most influential physicists of all time?

Physics is recognized as an expansive educational discipline, one touching on countless areas of life. This extremely nuanced and complex area of study has been shaped by the influence of pioneers in the field of physics. Below, you will find some of the most influential physicists of all time.

1. Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time. Einstein is known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics.
2. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology and government.
3. Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author who is widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and most influential scientists of all time.
4. Werner Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, this matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. He is known for the uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the creation of quantum mechanics”.
5. Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model.
6. Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.
7. Paul Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century.Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter.
8. Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist and the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the “architect of the nuclear age” and the “architect of the atomic bomb”. He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical physics and experimental physics.
9. Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday .
10. James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish mathematician and scientist responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation describing electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon for the first time. Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism have been called the “second great unification in physics” where the first one had been realised by Isaac Newton.

Who Are the Current Top Physicists?

The following are the top physicists in the field today according to our machine-powered Influence Rankings, which are drawn from a numerical score of academic achievements, merits, and citations across Wikipedia/data, Crossref, and an ever-growing body of data.

• Steven Weinberg ’s research focus in physics is in theoretical particle physics, where he has studied the high energy behavior of quantum field theory and gravity. Weinberg is world famous for proposing a model of unification for electromagnetism and the model of nuclear weak forces.
• Roger Penrose is an innovator in the field of mathematical physics, and is now widely regarded as among the greatest living mathematical physicists.
• Lee Smolin is best known for his foundational contributions to both loop quantum gravity and deformed special relativity. He has contributed to cosmology through the proposal of cosmological natural selection, and has authored four books exploring some of his philosophical concerns in physics.
• Kip Thorne is a world renowned physicist who worked closely with the late Stephen Hawking, and was also a friend of Carl Sagan. Thorne focuses on relativistic astrophysics and gravitation physics. One of his theories has reached the mainstream and influenced pop culture: that wormholes can theoretically be used for time travel!
• Leonard Susskind is considered an expert in many areas of physics, including quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology, Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory. In 1995, he was the first physicist to precisely define the string theory concept for physics.
• David Gross is known for his discovery of asymptotic freedom with his former graduate student, Frank Wilczek. This led also to a formulation of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of strong nuclear forces. He has also done important work on string theory, notably the so-called heterotic string—a hybrid of a superstring and a bosonic string.
• Edward Witten coined the term “topological quantum field theory,” which led to insights into the topology of space-time (in physics) and also helped pure mathematics, by helping to illuminate ideas in the mathematical theory of knots and 3-manifolds. Amazingly, Witten has also done work on supersymmetry and something known as Morse theory, core areas in particle physics that require deep mathematical understanding.
• Gerard 't Hooft ’s work focuses on black holes, quantum gravity, and other fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. He has done important work on holographic theory, for instance, a view inspired by string theory and thought to be a component of a theory of quantum gravity.
• Carlo Rovelli is a prominent figure in quantum and theoretical physics. In particular, he is recognized as a co-founder of the loop quantum gravity theory, along with Lee Smolin and Abhay Ashtekar .
• Lisa Randall has made fundamental contributions to a number of areas of central importance in particle physics, including a contribution to the so-called Randall-Sundrum model. Randall also studies cosmology, with issues such as the nature of dark matter, cosmological inflation, and the cosmology of dimensions, all topics that contribute to our basic understanding of the physics of the universe.

Learn more about other influential physicists.

Interviews with Top Physicists

• Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell discusses women in STEM, and much more in our interview, How to be a pioneering woman in STEM.
• Dr. Mikhail Shifman discusses quarks, a “down-to-earth” approach to theoretical physics, and experimental attempts to prove supersymmetry in our interview, Is Supersymmetry all that Super?
• Dr. Nancy Forde discusses her fascinating research into collagen, and much more in our interview, We Should be Melting..
• Dr. Nancy Forde discusses college choice, the finer points of choosing a major, and diversity in coursework in our interview, What makes a biophysicist?
• Dr. Joseph Incandela discusses quarks, supersymmetry (or lack thereof), and much more in our interview, What is Next for Supersymmetry and Dark Matter?
• Dr. Gerard ’t Hooft discusses theoretical and quantum physics, the influence of family, and much more in our interview, What is Quantum Mechanics, really?

Great Books About Physics

The following are the most influential books in the field of physics today according to our backstage Ranking Analytics tool, which calculates the influence of various sources in both academics and popular culture using a numerical scoring of citations across Wikipedia/data, Crossref, and an ever-growing body of data.

1. The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics by Leonard Susskind is a much-needed book fills a gap between popular physics books that rely on metaphor to get their points across, on the one hand, and actual physics textbooks that use real mathematics, on the other. As such, it is a semi-popular book accessible to the motivated general reader, although it is aimed primarily at the undergraduate physics student who wants an overview of the subject based on the mathematical formalisms that constitute the heart of the discipline.
2. A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram is an effort to present and document the author’s work on developing a new computational language based on cellular automata for the study of complex systems. His key claim is that physics must make the transition from traditional mathematics to computation-based formalisms if it hopes to bring complex systems into its purview.
3. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark lays out the author’s reasons for adhering to the idea that representations of physical reality should be turned on its head. Tegmark believes that the abstract mathematical structure specifying the universe—which human beings do not invent, but discover—generates the physical world, not the other way around.
4. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene is a valuable study of the concepts of space and time and the roles they play both in theoretical physics and in our everyday, phenomenological experience.
5. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss is both an exposition of fundamental cosmology and a putative refutation of one of the most important of the traditional “proofs” of the existence of God. This proof poses the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It points out that the existence of any physical object is inherently contingent (non-necessary), meaning that so far as its own nature is concerned, it might just as well not exist.
6. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking recounts the history of the universe from the big bang up through the formation of stars and ultimately black holes, with glances at wormholes, time travel, and other speculative topics along the way.
7. The Quantum Universeby Tony Hey and Patrick Walters is a serious and sophisticated introduction to the basics of quantum mechanics that is extremely well written and user-friendly. Making use of a popular-science approach that shapes the development of quantum theory in a narrative fashion, including interesting incidents and portraits of many of the individual scientists involved in that history, this book is an attractive alternative to a traditional physics textbook.
8. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene is a brilliantly written book that details efforts by the author and others to develop a unified theory of gravitation and the quantum realm. These theories are known by various names: string theory, M-theory, and others. This is Greene’s first book and the one that put him on the map as one of the foremost contemporary popularizers of fundamental physics
9. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin focuses on the concept of time, arguing—against mainstream physics opinion—that time is real in the sense that our phenomenological experience of the passage of time corresponds to physical reality.
10. Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel by Michio Kaku is a scientifically serious but accessible and entertaining exploration of what one might call “future technology.” Each chapter follows a similar pattern: beginning with a discussion of a current technology, Kaku explains how it might be adapted in order to make the abstract possibility of a given future technology into reality. Topics include invisibility, teleportation, time travel, extraterrestrials, parallel universes, and others.

Learn about other influential physics books.