Sometimes I'm surprised to see that well-educated people, even people who have a university diploma, know almost nothing about science and, in particular, about physics. I'm not saying about the theories, but about how they know little concerning the subject of each branch of science. I heared more than once the question "You're a physicist? And what do you do?".

I'm really scared to see people who use physics almost every second of their lives asking me that. To answer it, I'm writing in this page where you can find the work of physicists in everyday things.

Electromagnetism

This is the most obvious and most ignored contribution of physics. People use electricity since they wake up and turn on the light till the time they go to sleep and set the alarm of their clock. Electricity is the base of almost all devices used by man and is weird that people ignore that this is due to physics.

One of the most common contributions of this branch is in communications: in 1886, Hertz produced and detected radio waves for the first time by experiments based on Maxwell equations. At that time, there was no applications for them, but now they are the base of our communications systems.

Microwaves are electromagnetic waves just like visible light, but with a different frequency. The microwave oven was invented after an accident where a scientist were working with an apparatus that produced that kind of wave and noted that a bar of chocolate inside his pocket melted.

Magnetism is the base of our information storage deviced nowadays. Floppy disks and HDs have magnetic memories where the information is stored aligning tiny cristals with a magnetic field.

Quantum Mechanics

All electronic devices today have transistors. Transistors are products of QM. If you open an electronic device in your house you will probably find a transistor with the shape as depicted in the picture below.

Source: http://www.ops.dti.ne.jp/~coredump

Lasers are another product of QM and they would not exist without it. CDs, laser pointers, industrial devices to cut and engrave and eye surgeries are just some of their applications.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance is another device that is only possible thanks to QM. It's utility was recognized with the Nobel Prize to its creators.

Afterword

There are a lot more useful things that use physics and I will add more in this text with time. The list probably has no end, but I will keep it growing so I can show it to the people who asks me instead of repeating it everytime I go to a party.