Physics is the branch of science that deals with the fundamental principles of STEM: space, time, energy and matter. It seeks to understand the fundamental laws that govern the universe and explain the interactions between particles, forces, and the physical properties of matter.

The main branches of physics include mechanics, gravitation, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, optics, atomic and chemical physics, condensed-matter physics, nuclear physics, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and relativistic mechanics.

The following scientists had some of the most important contributions in the development of physics sorted historically.

1. Galileo Galilei
2. Isaac Newton
3. Sadi Carnot
4. Robert Mayer
5. James Joule
6. Hermann Helmholtz
7. William Thomson
8. Rudolf Clausius
9. Willard Gibbs
10. Walther Nernst
11. Michael Faraday
12. James Clerk Maxwell
13. Ludwig Boltzmann
14. Albert Einstein
15. Max Planck
16. Niels Bohr
17. Wolfgang Pauli
18. Werner Heisenberg
19. Erwin Schrödinger
20. Louis de Broglie
21. Marie Curie
22. Ernst Rutherford
23. Lise Meitner
24. Enrico Fermi
25. Paul Dirac
26. Richard Feynman
27. Murray Gell-Mann
28. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
29. Stephen Hawking