Experimental physics

Although experimental and theoretical physics are concerned with different aspects of nature, they both share the same goal of understanding it and have a symbiotic relationship.

[1] As a distinct field, experimental physics was established in early modern Europe, during what is known as the Scientific Revolution, by physicists such as Galileo Galilei, Christiaan Huygens, Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal and Sir Isaac Newton.

In the early 17th century, Galileo made extensive use of experimentation to validate physical theories, which is the key idea in the modern scientific method.

Experimental physics is considered to have reached a high point with the publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 by Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727).

Observations in the 17th and eighteenth century by scientists such as Boyle, Stephen Gray, and Benjamin Franklin created a foundation for later work.

In 1864 James Clerk Maxwell presented to the Royal Society a set of equations that described this relationship between electricity and magnetism.

Starting with astronomy, the principles of natural philosophy crystallized into fundamental laws of physics which were enunciated and improved in the succeeding centuries.