Physics is the subject about how things move, fall, heat up and give off light. A ball timed rolling down a ramp, a diagram of a lens bending a beam, a formula for speed chalked on the board.
Physics takes a singular verb: physics is my best subject, never physics are. Someone who does it for a living is a physicist, and the adjective is physical, though physical also means bodily, which catches people out. The physics of something means the rules underneath it: the physics of a bouncing ball, the physics of flight, and players complain that a game's physics feel wrong. Keep it apart from physique, which is the shape of a person's body, and from physic, an old word for medicine.
1nounphysicsThe science of matter, energy, force and motion, and of how the universe behaves.
“She dropped chemistry after a year and kept physics.”
2nounphysicalThe physical rules that govern how one particular thing behaves.
“The physics of a spinning coin are harder than they look.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
physics is a science.
Physics goes back to Greek phusis, origin or nature, and phusikos, natural. Latin turned that into physica, the study of nature, which reached English through Old French fisike. In French the word covered natural science and the art of healing at once, and English split the two: the healing half became physic, an old name for medicine, and physics kept nature.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰuH-
Ancient Greek
φυσική
Latin
physica — study of nature
Old French
fisike — natural science, art of healing
Middle English
phisik
English, today
physics
Built from
1580s; from physic (see also -ics), from Middle English phisik, from Old French fisike (“natural science, art of healing”), from Latin physica (“study of nature”), from Ancient Greek φυσική, feminine singular of φυσικός (“natural; physical”), from Ancient Greek φύσις (“origin; nature, property”), from Ancient Greek φύω (“produce; bear; grow”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European bʰuH- (“to appear, become, rise up”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA