Important Discoveries in Physics

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Ideas in the subject of Physics are never absolute; it is a forever-changing topic. We think we have discovered everything there is to know about it, and then we find out something new that changes everything. That is one of the reasons physics is so interesting to learn about – there will always be something new. There are many very important discoveries in Physics. This paper will describe some of the discoveries. These discoveries are prevalent throughout history and in our daily lives.

One of the oldest, but nonetheless important, discoveries in physics is The Law of Falling Bodies. Discovered by Galileo Galilei, it remains a fundamental part of physics even today. It states that all objects that are falling, no matter mass, height, or any other determinant, will remain at a constant acceleration (only when disregarding air resistance). This is important because it allows a person to always know the acceleration when determining an unknown about a moving object, e.g. when determining velocity.

The Law of Falling Bodies was also very important at the time of its discovery because it disproved Aristotle, who everyone believed to be true for almost 2000 years. Aristotle said that an object with a greater mass would fall faster than an object with a lesser mass, which is not true.

In the 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton concluded that “that every object in the universe with mass exerts gravitational attraction on each other.” Principally, this means that an object that has a mass with have a gravitational force between said object and every other object in the universe. This is explains how we, humans, stay standing on earth, not floating in the air. The earth has mass and each person has mass. Therefore, there is a force between ea...

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.../NumRel/GenRelativity.html>.

Jupiter Scientific, "A Century of Physics," , 1999.

“Meissner Effect for Superconductors," .

NASA, Newton's Third Law Applied to Aerodynamics, .

“Newton's Three Laws of Motion," .

Oracle, "What Is Quantum Physics?" .

Quora, "Physics: What Is a Quantum Leap?" .

Scienceray, "Greatest Discoveries in the Field of Physics," , 03 Sept. 2008.

Wikipedia, "Mass-energy Equivalence,"

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