Physics is how the universe works.

People have been curious about why things happen and what things are made of for a very long time. For a while we would see something, ask questions about it, come up with some theories and argue about who was right.

Over time the process moved towards seeing something, asking questions about it, coming up with a theory and then running an experiment to see if that theory was wrong. If it wasn't wrong, we were on the right track towards understanding something new.

We've made a lot of progress in the last few hundred years. It turns out that all of the complex stuff that we see around us follows a short list of rules (physical laws). The rules are pretty simple compared to the complexity of the universe and anyone can learn them.

The physical laws and concepts covered in this course fall under the branch of physics called classical mechanics or Newtonian mechanics. These laws explain the motion of objects, ranging from atoms to galaxies. Other branches cover things like electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

Every now and then someone will notice something that can't be explained by our current theories, so new theories and experiments have to be created. As we've dug deeper into physics, some of the laws and theories covered in this course have been "updated" by people like Einstein and his theories of relativity. But for most things in the universe, classical mechanics still has us covered.

There's still a lot of stuff left to figure out. Although we can explain almost anything at the atomic scale and above, things get weird as we explore smaller and smaller pieces of the universe in the field of quantum mechanics. We're still not sure if or when we'll reach a point where we have theories that explain everything in the universe, but it's a pretty interesting journey.

To get us thinking about physics, here are a few videos that you can watch for fun (these are not required). The first two videos are narrated by Richard Feynman, a renowned theoretical physicist who was known for his ability to explain complex things in fun and simple ways.