ABSTRACT
Physics (physique [French], physicae [Latin], or physik [German]) became widely used in its modern sense (that is, excluding the life sciences, geology, and chemistry) during the second half of the eighteenth century. As late as 1879, however, the major English-language textbook that covered what we call physics was Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin [1824-1907]) and Peter Guthrie Tait’s (1831-1901) Treatise on Natural Philosophy, and university courses in Britain and America were still labeled courses in natural philosophy. Hence, this discussion of the religious elements in, and the implications of, physics begins about the middle of the eighteenth century and counts as physicists many figures who identified themselves as natural philosophers.
