Preparing for a patient MRI scan.

The same goes for lasers and MRI scans -- even figuring out how nerves communicate and unravelling the structure of DNA (and therefore how genes work and the whole science of biotechnology) was done by, or alongside, physicists.

To say that physics is all around us is very true -- and not just because of gravity. But, as Professor John Storey from the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales points out, most people don't realise that without physics, we wouldn't have everyday items such as fridges, TVs and microwaves. "It's taken for granted," he said.

"I see those reality TV shows where people are out in the bush pretending it's 1850 or something as advertisements for physics, because it's how they're living and what they're doing without that shows how much physics has done for us."

There's a lot of fuss being made about physics in 2005 because the United Nations has declared it the International Year of Physics. They've done this both in recognition of the contribution physics makes to our lives and in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Einstein's 'miraculous year'.

Many physicists reckon this attention has come not a moment too soon. Dr Gerry Haddad, Chief of CSIRO Industrial Physics, said in Australasian Science magazine: "Physics in Australia has been in bad shape for as long as I can remember. What's scary is that it's getting worse."

He points out that in Australia, fewer people than ever are studying physics. The number of school students who choose to do it in year eleven and twelve has been declining since 1976 and has virtually halved since 1980. And the proportion of university graduates with physics qualifications has fallen through the floor.

Why does it matter? Dr Lou Vance of ANSTO Materials and Engineering Science said: "It matters because physics and chemistry -- which are really two sides of the same coin -- are the building blocks of all science. If you don't understand them, you won't make any progress on the others.

"If all the physicists dropped off the world tomorrow, all advances would slow to nothing," he said.

John thinks the threat is even greater. "If physics stopped tomorrow, we'd go back to the stone age," he said. "Sure, the books will still be there, but you need people who are able to interpret them - that's the difference between information and knowledge."

Fun facts about the evolution of physics:

• Einstein's 'miraculous year': In 1905, Einstein published that most famous of all equations, E=mc², in a scientific article introducing the world to relativity. He once flippantly described relativity by saying: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it feels like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour." That same year he also demonstrated that atoms exist and that light can travel like a wave and behave like a particle (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1921)
• Electricity: It was Michael Faraday, perhaps the world's greatest experimental scientist, who took electricity from being a curiosity to a practical technology. In 1831, he discovered that when a magnet is moved inside a coil of copper wire, a tiny electric current flows through the wire - the principle behind an electric motor
• Silicon chips: Evolving from Einstein's work on light in 1905 were semiconductors. As the name implies, these are materials that conduct electric current somewhere between metals and insulators. It's also easy to control the flow of current in them. Semiconductor physics led, in 1947, to the invention of the transistor. Transistors are what drive silicon chips -- there are over 50 million of them on current microprocessors
• The World Wide Web: Before 1994, not many people had heard of the web. It evolved at CERN, a large physics research establishment in Switzerland. Thousands of scientists from all over the world go there, each bringing their own computer. It's hard to imagine now, but there were once many different types of computer, way more than just Mac or PC, each with their own programs and data storage formats Back then, it was no mean feat to get a file from one computer to another so, where they could, the physicists linked small networks of computers together to make internets. The important step was developing protocols for accessing data (HTTP and URLs) and a single language specially designed to transmit information quickly (html).