By the end of the Enlightenment, experimental physics had come to mean the use of a quantitative, experimental method to discover the laws governing the inorganic world. The original meaning of the term physics, however, had been quite different; and as a result the word continued to be used ambiguously throughout the eighteenth century. The discipline of physics had originally been created by Aristotle, and it had nothing to do with experiment or quantitative measure, nor was it limited to the inorganic world. Aristotle's Physics treated form, substance, cause, accident, place, time, necessity, and motion through a priori arguments that could then be used to explain the phenomena of the world, both organic and inorganic. In fact Aristotle was more successful in his description of the animal world (also part of physics) than he was in his writings on cosmology or terrestrial motion.

Experiment was almost unknown in antiquity. An experimental tradition did begin in Western Europe during the Renaissance, but it was called “natural magic,” not physics. There was also a tradition of applied mathematics, but it was not physics either. It was called “mixed mathematics.” During the seventeenth century, physics, as part of speculative philosophy, continued to be taught in the schools in Latin, whereas mathematics, a practical subject with mostly military applications, was taught in the vernacular. Descartes, for example, graduated from college with the impression that mathematics was useful only in the mechanical arts.