ABSTRACT
Historically, natural philosophy meant the study of nature in all its forms, but following its great expansion in the nineteenth century, it was broken down into different disciplines such as astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology, which were themselves to be further subdivided. The creation of the new natural philosophy was one of the greatest of human intellectual achievements. Natural philosophy tended to become a term associated with physics, and some universities, notably in Scotland, retained that name in preference to physics. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were three clues as to the inadequacy of classical physics, one of which was rather subtle and two others which were assigned to the mysterious nature of the atom. The paper marking the start of the new physics, which was also the pioneering paper in quantum mechanics, was published in 1900 by Max Planck, the great German scientist after whom the prestigious German research institutes are named.
