This Handbook traces the history of physics, bringing together chapters on major advances in the field from the seventeenth century to the present day. It is organized into four sections, following a broadly chronological structure. Part I explores the place of reason, mathematics, and experiment in the age of what we know as the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The contributions of Galileo, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton are central to this section, as is the multiplicity of paths to the common goal of understanding. Some of these paths reflected the turn to Thomas Kuhn’s category of ‘Baconian’ sciences — newer, more empirical investigations focused on heat, electricity, magnetism, optics, and chemistry. Part II looks at the ‘long’ eighteenth century — a period that covers developments relating to the physics of imponderable fluids, mechanics, electricity, and magnetism. Part III is broadly concerned with the nineteenth century and covers topics ranging from optics and thermal physics to thermodynamics, electromagnetism and field physics, electrodynamics, the evolution of the instrument-making industry between 1850 and 1930, and the applications of physics in medicine and metrology. Part IV takes us into the age of ‘modern physics’ and considers canonical landmarks such as the discovery of the photoelectric effect in 1887, Max Planck’s work on the quanta of radiation, Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity of 1905, and the elaboration of the various facets of quantum physics between 1900 and 1930.