BS-PHYS - Physics Major (B.S.)

Physics is the study of energy, matter, and the interactions that govern their behavior. It is a wide-ranging and fundamental field of inquiry that links together all of the physical sciences. Research in physics addresses questions as seemingly diverse as how atoms are put together, how galaxies form and evolve, and why some balls bounce better than others. Although the everyday world with which we are familiar differs enormously in scale from the atomic and galactic domains, all of these examples share common unifying principles, such as the conservation of mass-energy, that the physicist seeks to uncover and understand. These basic principles and their most significant applications form the focus of an undergraduate program in physics.

Physics is also an interdisciplinary science, providing the theoretical underpinnings for the concepts and technologies fundamental to major fields such as chemistry, biology, medicine, electronics, and geology, and to the applied fields of optics, nanotechnology, computer science, and engineering. Lasers, MRI, and high-speed computing are but a few of the technological advances made possible by the applications of the principles of physics. An education in physics provides students with a solid understanding of basic modern science and trains them to solve complex problems. This training prepares undergraduate majors in physics for a wide variety of careers, many of which take them well outside the boundaries of what is traditionally considered “physics.”