Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first physicists were priests and astronomers watching the stars from the rooftops of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt before the year 3000 BCE. Civilizations like the Sumerians and the Indus Valley people developed predictive knowledge of the Sun, Moon, and stars while treating celestial bodies as gods that demanded worship.
The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century marked the moment when physics became a separate science driven by the use of experimental and quantitative methods. Johannes Kepler determined the laws governing the motion of planetary bodies between 1609 and 1619 while Galileo Galilei pioneered the use of the telescope for observational astronomy.
CERN announced the detection of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson on the 12th of July 2012. This discovery confirmed all fundamental particles predicted by the standard model and revealed that ordinary notions of space, time, matter, and energy were no longer valid at the atomic and subatomic levels.
Physics relies on mathematics as a compact and exact language to describe the order in nature, a connection noted and advocated by Pythagoras, Plato, Galileo, and Newton. Galileo famously stated that the universe is written in the mathematical language and that without the symbols of triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word of it.
Aristotle's physics framework failed because he did not rely on experimental verification of his deduced statements and believed that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. His laws of motion suggested that the speed of an object depended inversely on the density of the medium it was falling through, which was fundamentally incorrect.
Modern physics continues to grapple with the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy which make up the majority of the universe yet remain invisible to direct observation. The Large Hadron Collider has found the Higgs boson but future research aims to prove or disprove supersymmetry which extends the Standard Model of particle physics.