By Tim Lambert
Early Science
494-434 BC Empedocles lives. He says the world is made of 4 elements, earth, fire, water, and air.
384-322 BC Aristotle lives. Many of his ideas are wrong but they dominate science for the next 2,000 years.
276-194 BC Eratosthenes lives. He measures the circumference of the Earth.
c 150 BC Aglaonike, a woman astronomer lives
130-210 AD The doctor Galen lives. His ideas about the human body dominated medicine for the next 1,500 years.
c 150 AD Ptolemy writes his book Almagest which states that the Sun and other planets orbit the Earth
1543 Copernicus publishes his theory that the Earth orbits the Sun
1572 Tycho Brahe observes a supernova
Science in the 17th century
1600 William Gilbert shows that the Earth is a magnet
1604 Johannes Kepler publishes a book on optics
1609 Kepler publishes 2 laws of planetary motion. Galileo observes the Heavens with a telescope
1619 Kepler publishes a 3rd law of planetary motion
1628 William Harvey publishes his discovery of how blood circulates around the body
1632 Galileo publishes Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
1634 Galileo publishes a book about mechanics called Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences
1643 Evangelista Torricelli invents the barometer
1650 Otto von Guericke invents an air pump
1658 Jan Swammerdann observes red blood corpuscles
1661 Robert Boyle publishes The Skeptical Chemist. Marcello Malpighi discovers capillaries
1662 The Royal Society is given a charter by Charles II
1665 Robert Hooke describes cells
1687 Isaac Newton publishes Principia Mathematica
Science in the 18th century
1704 Isaac Newton publishes a book about optics
1743-1794 French chemist Antoine Lavoisier lives
1746 Petrus van Musschenbroek invents the leyden jar
1751 Axel Cronstedt discovers nickel
1752 Thomas Francois Dalibard proves lightning is a form of electricity
1758 Carl Linnaeus publishes his work Systema Naturae classifying living things
1766 Henry Cavendish isolates hydrogen
1772 Daniel Rutherford discovers nitrogen
1774 Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen
1781 William Herschel discovers Uranus
1784 John Goodricke discovers variable stars
1785 James Hutton publishes Theory of the Earth
1798 Henry Cavendish measures the density of the Earth
Science in the 19th century
1800 Alessandro Volta invents the battery
1801 The first asteroid is discovered
1808 John Dalton publishes his atomic theory
1828 Friedrich Wohler produces urea
1830 Charles Lyell publishes Principles of Geology
1831 Michael Faraday invents the dynamo
1842 The word dinosaur is coined
1846 Neptune is discovered
1847 Axel Herman von Helmholtz formulates the law of the Conservation of Energy
1859 The Origin of Species is published by Charles Darwin
1866 Gregor Mendel discovers the law of hereditary
1873 James Clerk Maxwell shows that light is an electromagnetic wave
1895 X-rays are discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen
1896 Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity
1897 Joseph Thomson discovers the electron
1898 Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discover radium and polonium. Morris Travers and William Ramsay discover xenon.
Science in the 20th century
1900 Max Planck proposes the quantum theory
1905 Einstein publishes his theory of Special Relativity
1910 Ernest Rutherford discovers the atomic nucleus
1915 Einstein publishes his General Theory of Relativity
1926 Arthur Eddington suggests that stars are powered by nuclear fusion
1927 Werner Heisenberg publishes his uncertainty principle
1928 Alexander Fleming invents penicillin
1930 Pluto is discovered
1932 James Chadwick discovers the neutron
1937 The first radio telescope is built
1953 Francis Crick and James Watson discover the structure of DNA
1960 The laser is invented
1963 Quasars are discovered
1964 Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig suggest that quarks exist
1967 Pulsars are discovered
1990 The Hubble Space Telescope is launched
1995 The first exoplanet is discovered
