Wikipedia:
Timeline of scientific discoveries
The timeline below shows the date of publication of major scientific theories and discoveries, along with the discoverer. In many cases, the discovery spanned several years.
BC
- 17th century BC - Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa: first known Babylonian astronomical observations
- 360s BC - Eudoxus of Cnidus: first Greek planetary models
- 350s BC - Heraclides: rotation of Earth:
- 3rd century BC - Eratosthenes: Measured the size of the earth, distance to the sun and to the moon.
2nd century
- 150s Ptolemy: produced the geocentric model of the solar system
9th century
11th century
- 1000s - Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen): beginning of the
modern
scientific method and modern optics, foundations of telescopic astronomy, invention of camera obscura and pinhole camera, discovery of principle of least time and first law of motion, general formula for integral calculus
13th century
- 1220-1235 - Robert
Grosseteste: rudimentals of the
scientific method (see also: Roger Bacon)
14th century
- Before 1327 - William of Ockham: Occam's Razor
16th century
- 1543 - Copernicus: heliocentrism
- 1543 - Vesalius: pioneering research into human anatomy
- 1552 - Michael Servetus: early research into pulmonary circulation
- 1570s - Tycho Brahe: detailed astronomical observations
- 1600 - William Gilbert: Earth's magnetic field
17th century
- 1609 - Johannes Kepler: first two laws of planetary motion
- 1610 - Galileo Galilei: Sidereus Nuncius: telescopic observations
- 1614 - John Napier: use of logarithms for calculation [1]
- 1628 - William Harvey: Blood circulation
- 1637 - René Descartes:
Scientific method - 1643 - Evangelista Torricelli invents the mercury barometer
- 1662 - Robert Boyle: Boyle's law of ideal gas [2]
- 1665 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first peer reviewed scientific journal published.
- 1669 - Nicholas Steno: Proposes that fossils are organic remains embedded in layers of sediment, basis of stratigraphy
- 1675 - Leibniz, Newton: infinitesimal calculus
- 1676 - Ole Rømer: first measurement of the speed of light
- 1687 - Newton: Laws of motion, law of universal gravitation, basis for classical physics
18th century
- 1714 - Gabriel Fahrenheit invents the mercury thermometer
- 1745 - Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist first capacitor, the Leyden jar
- 1750 - Joseph Black: describes latent heat
- 1751 - Benjamin Franklin: Lightning is electrical
- 1778 - Antoine Lavoisier (and Joseph Priestley): discovery of oxygen leading to end of Phlogiston theory
- 1785 - William Withering: publishes the first definitive account of the use of foxglove (digitalis) for treating dropsy
- 1787 - Jacques Charles: Charles' law of ideal gas
- 1789 - Lavoisier: law of conservation of mass, basis for
chemistry , and the beginning of modern chemistry - 1796 - Georges Cuvier: Establishes extinction as a fact
- 1799 - William Smith: Publishes geologic map of England, first geologic map ever, first applicaton of stratigraphy
19th century
- 1800 - Alessandro Volta described the electric battery
- 1802 - Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: teleological evolution
- 1805 - John Dalton (scientist): Atomic Theory in (
Chemistry ) - 1824 - Carnot: described the Carnot cycle, the idealized heat engine
- 1827 - Georg Ohm: Ohm's law (Electricity)
- 1827 - Amedeo Avogadro: Avogadro's law (Gas laws)
- 1828 - Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea, destroying vitalism
- 1833 - Anselme Payen isolates first enzyme, diastase
- 1838 - Matthias Schleiden: all plants are made of cells
- 1843 - James Prescott Joule: Law of Conservation of energy (First law of thermodynamics), also 1847 - Helmholtz, Conservation of energy
- 1846 - William Morton: discovery of anesthesia
- 1848 - Lord Kelvin: absolute zero of temperature
- 1858 - Rudolf Virchow: cells can only arise from pre-existing cells
- 1859 - Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace: Theory of evolution by natural selection
- 1865 - Gregor Mendel: Mendel's laws of inheritance, basis for genetics
- 1869 - Dmitri Mendeleev: Periodic table
- 1873 - James Clerk Maxwell: Theory of electromagnetism
- 1875 - William Crookes invented the Crookes tube and studied cathode rays
- 1876 - Josiah Willard Gibbs founded chemical thermodynamics, the phase rule
- 1877 - Ludwig Boltzmann: Statistical definition of entropy
- 1887 - Albert Michelson and Edward Morley: lack of evidence for the aether
- 1895 - Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers x-rays
- 1896 - Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity
- 1897 - J.J. Thomson discovers the electron in cathode rays
20th century
- 1900 - Max Planck: Planck's law of black body radiation, basis for quantum theory
- 1905 - Albert Einstein: special theory of relativity, explanation of Brownian motion, and photoelectric effect
- 1906 - Walther Nernst: Third law of thermodynamics
- 1912 - Alfred Wegener: Continental drift
- 1912 - Max von Laue : x-ray diffraction
- 1913 - Henry Moseley: defined atomic number
- 1913 - Niels Bohr: Model of the atom
- 1915 - Albert Einstein: general theory of relativity - also David Hilbert
- 1915 - Karl Schwarzschild: discovery of the Schwarzschild radius leading to the identification of black holes
- 1918 - Emmy Noether: Noether's theorem - conditions under which the conservation laws are valid
- 1924 - Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle
- 1925 - Erwin Schrödinger: Schrödinger equation (Quantum mechanics)
- 1927 - Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty principle (Quantum mechanics)
- 1927 - Georges Lemaître: Theory of the Big Bang
- 1928 - Paul Dirac: Dirac equation (Quantum mechanics)
- 1929 - Edwin Hubble: Hubble's law of the expanding universe
- 1929 - Lars Onsager's reciprocal relations: also called Fourth law of thermodynamics
- 1943 - Oswald Avery proves that DNA is the genetic material of the chromosome
- 1947 - William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invent the first transistor
- 1948 - Claude Elwood Shannon: 'A mathematical theory of communication' a seminal paper in Information theory.
- 1951 - George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa
- 1953 - Crick and Watson: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology
- 1964 - Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig: postulate quarks leading to the standard model
- 1964 - Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson: detection of CMBR providing experimental evidence for the Big Bang
- 1965 - Richard Feynman: Quantum electrodynamics
- 1965 - Leonard Hayflick: normal cells divide only a certain number of times: the Hayflick limit
- 1967 - Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discover first pulsar
- 1984 - Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction, a key discovery in molecular biology
- 1995 - Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz definitively observe the first extrasolar planet around a main sequence star
- 1997 - Roslin Institute: Dolly the sheep was cloned.
21st century
- 2001 - The first draft of the human genome is completed.
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