Physics is, by far, the simplest science.
I probably have said it too much and it can raise eyebrows. It may not seem that way as we have a reasonably deep understanding and the required knowledge can seem esoteric, but that complexity isn't central and misses the point. What is astonishing is that you can often make seemingly absurd simplifications - spherical bodies, frictionless surfaces, planets that behave as if they were points - and get not only a pretty good answer, but a deep understanding of what is really going on - a hint of how Nature really works.
Galileo Galilei was said to have dropped balls of similar size, but different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pizza and summarized that they fell at the same rate. In fact he probably never did the experiment. Instead he rolled balls down inclined planes showing their acceleration depended on the angle of the plane rather than their mass. He suggested a very high angle (vertical) was equivalent to balls of different weights falling at the same rate. The acceleration from gravity was more important than friction against the plane and air resistance. Assuming you understood air resistance and friction against the plane you could add these effects later and get a better answer. His insight is probably the most important idea in physics.
This realization that physics was fundamentally simple brought together ideas from a variety of sources and led to an idea that went beyond revolutionizing physics to revolutionizing how we think about our place in the Universe - the conversation of momentum as articulated in Newtonian physics.
Before Newton and Galileo Aristotle's physics was grounded on natures and causes. Whenever something moved there had to be a mover. When it stopped it was because the mover gave up. There were four elements- air, fire, water and earth. Earth and water's nature was moving down, air and fire went up. All transformations had some underlying cause. Push a cup on your desk and it moves. Stop pushing and it stops. The conservation of momentum would say give it a push and it starts moving until opposed. In fact friction opposes its motion. For many of the things people did the Aristotle's model was fine - in fact we often think about the world that way. But look more closely and it fails to predict what's going on.
It would be natural at this point to talk about Newton and the marriage of math to physics as it started to become a science. I'll skip that and move to someone you may or may not be aware of - Laplace.
Pierre-Simon Laplace came about a century after Newton. Newton was deeply religious, but his God was not as interventionist as earlier thinking required. God created Heaven and Earth and started everything moving. Then, thanks to the conversation of momentum, simple things like the motion of the planets went on without any intervention. He noted there might be some problems every once and awhile that would demand attention, but God could kick back and do other things.
Laplace was probably the first person to understand Newtonian physics at a deep level - certainly much deeper than Newton. As he advanced the math and physics he had a remarkable insight. He knew how to answer the question "what determines what happens next?" The answer appears to be more philosophy than physics, but it's deeply rooted in the later. It's also simple - "the state of the universe precisely now."
Many see this as a contradiction to free will, but it applies to systems simple enough that we have enough information about them. That happens to include a lot of fundamental physics. Biology and sociology are far too complex for us to deal with exactly. Classical physics is, at its core, non-teleological. What happens is not determined by final goals or causes. In fact we don't have to know about the past either - just the now. The fly in the ointment is you have to know a lot of information. All the relevant information for every point in the Universe. This led to the idea of fields being important - information attached to every point - which is at the foundation of modern physics.
This insight is often called the conservative of information. Words are loaded and easily misused out of context and this is a very specialized. It's the exact state of everything at a given instant of time. Conservation implies the information that exists is exactly what is needed to determine the next moment allowing you to move ahead in time.
The conservation of momentum and information are deep ideas with an enormous impact on how we think about Nature and all of physics, not to mention the technological byproducts that have changed how we live. All of this was set in motion by understanding physics - the study of matter and motion - can be stripped down to a bare simplicity if you're sufficiently clever.
This way of thinking - stripping down to simple enough - is part of the playfulness of the sport. The approach can be useful in some other areas, but only if you have a handle on local limitations.