But a thing that has remained constant from Classical Athens until maybe 150 years ago is that everyone involved understood that physics was a branch of philos

But a thing that has remained constant from Classical Athens until maybe 150 years ago is that everyone involved understood that physics was a branch of philosophy. Some of them favored one theory of physics, some favored another, but nobody argued that the other schools of thought on the matter weren't philosophical; they merely disagreed with their philosophical conclusions. Plato and his Academy didn't, as far as anybody knows, consider Aristotle to be a non-philosopher; he presumably considered him ti be mistaken. Even today, if you become formally recognized for your contributions to physics, the recognition comes in the form of naming you a "doctor of philosophy" and calling your work "academic". There's a current fad for using an incoherent definition of "philosophy" that arbitrarily excludes fields of philosophy such as physics, but hopefully it will end in another century or two.