What IS Physics?

Not to long ago I found myself in the following situation:

A group of graduate students visit one of the national laboratories and were asked during the introductory briefing what was physics. A long silence continued...

Sure, we all study and work with physics, sometimes 24 hours a day. But when encountered with this simple question, I must confess I was stunned.

We could try to define physics, just like the dictionary does. Physics is the science, dicipline, etc; that studies ... what? According to Wikipedia, physics "is the science concerned with the discovery and understanding of the fundamental laws which govern matter, energy, space, and time." From this we could think that the most elemental things are matter, energy, space and time (four concepts that were unified in pairs by Einstein in the theory of relativity). All this might be enough to define physics, but I am more interested today in other aspects.

There is a famous interview to R.P. Feynman where he tells the story of a physicist making a flower ugly. I could see how people who do not like (or understand) physics think that all the equations, symmetries and principles governing the growth, life and death of a flower is ugly. But to somebody who understand them, (like Feynman) it all seems highly beautiful. So the question here is more one relative points of view; either I like the physical framework of the flower, or develop a poetical decription. The thing is, these two approaches are equivalent, because they describe the same idea. This is a hand-waved argument, since we cannot be sure wether the poet is talking about a physical flower, or one that he/she made up ideally. So this leads us to the next point, the accuracy of physics.

AHHH! This post sucks. It sounds to philosophial. I cannot take it anymore. I will do something worthwile with my time, like reading a book on some good physics.