Timeline of scientific discoveries

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The timeline below shows the date of publication of major scientific theories and discoveries, along with the discoverer. In many cases, the discoveries spanned several years.

Pre-History

• 400,000 years ago - Fire is discovered among early humans.

3rd century BC

• Eratosthenes: calculated the size of the earth and its distance to the sun and to the moon

2nd century BC

• 150s BC – Seleucus of Seleucia: discovery of tides being caused by the moon

2nd century

• 150s Ptolemy: produced the geocentric model of the solar system.

8th century

• Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber): beginning of chemistry and experimental method; discovery of hydrochloric, sulfuric, nitric and acetic acids; discovery of soda, potash and pure alcohol (ethanol); the discovery that aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, could dissolve metals such as gold; and discovery of liquefaction, purification by crystallisation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation, filtration and sublimation

9th century

• Al-Kindi (Alkindus): refutation of the theory of the transmutation of metals; and the concept of relativity

10th century

• Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes): refutation of Aristotelian classical elements and Galenic humorism; and discovery of measles and smallpox, and kerosene and distilled petroleum
• Ibn Sahl: Snell's law of refraction

11th century

• 1021 – Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics
• 1020s – Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine
• 1054 – Various Early Astronomers: Observe supernova (modern designation SN 1054), later correlated to the Crab Nebula.
• Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī: beginning of Islamic astronomy and Islamic science#Mechanics

12th century

• 1121 – Al-Khazini: variation of gravitation and gravitational potential energy at a distance; the decrease of air density with altitude
• Ibn Bajjah (Avempace): discovery of reaction (precursor to Newton's third law of motion)
• Hibat Allah Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdaadi (Nathanel): relationship between force and acceleration (a vague foreshadowing of a fundamental law of classical mechanics and a precursor to Newton's second law of motion)
• Averroes: relationship between force, work and kinetic energy

13th century

• 1220–1235 – Robert Grosseteste: rudimentals of the scientific method (see also: Roger Bacon)
• 1242 – Ibn al-Nafis: pulmonary circulation and circulatory system
• Theodoric of Freiberg: correct explanation of rainbow phenomenon
• William of Saint-Cloud: pioneering use of camera obscura to view solar eclipses

14th century

• Before 1327 – William of Ockham: Occam's Razor
• Oxford Calculators: the mean speed theorem
• Jean Buridan: theory of impetus
• Nicole Oresme: discovery of the curvature of light through atmospheric refraction

15th century

• 1494 - Luca Pacioli: first codification of the Double-entry bookkeeping system, which slowly developed in previous centuries

16th century

• 1543 – Copernicus: heliocentric model
• 1543 – Vesalius: pioneering research into human anatomy
• 1552 – Michael Servetus: early research in Europe 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
• 1628 – William Harvey: Blood circulation
• 1643 – Evangelista Torricelli invents the mercury barometer
• 1662 – Robert Boyle: Boyle's law of ideal gas
• 1665 – Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first peer reviewed scientific journal published.
• 1668 – Francesco Redi: disproved idea of spontaneous generation
• 1669 – Nicholas Steno: Proposes that fossils are organic remains embedded in layers of sediment, basis of stratigraphy
• 1669 – Jan Swammerdam: Species breed true
• 1675 – Leibniz, Newton: Infinitesimal calculus
• 1675 – Anton van Leeuwenhoek: Observes Microorganisms by Microscope
• 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

• 1745 – Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist first capacitor, the Leyden jar
• 1750 – Joseph Black: describes latent heat
• 1751 – Benjamin Franklin: Lightning is electrical
• 1761 - Mikhail Lomonosov: discovery of the atmosphere of Venus
• 1771 – Charles Messier: Publishes catalogue of astronomical objects (Messier Objects) now known to include galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae.
• 1778 – Antoine Lavoisier (and Joseph Priestley): discovery of oxygen leading to end of Phlogiston theory
• 1781 – William Herschel announces discovery of Uranus, expanding the known boundaries of the solar system for the first time in modern history
• 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 – Antoine Lavoisier: law of conservation of mass, basis for chemistry, and the beginning of modern chemistry
• 1796 – Georges Cuvier: Establishes extinction as a fact

19th century

• 1800 – Alessandro Volta: discovers electrochemical series and invents the battery
• 1802 – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: teleological evolution
• 1805 – John Dalton: 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
• 1830 - Nikolai Lobachevsky created Non-Euclidean geometry
• 1831 – Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction
• 1833 – Anselme Payen isolates first enzyme, diastase
• 1838 – Matthias Schleiden: all plants are made of cells
• 1838 – Friedrich Bessel: first successful measure of stellar parallax (to star 61 Cygni)
• 1842 – Christian Doppler: Doppler effect
• 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
• 1846 – Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest: discovery of Neptune
• 1848 – Lord Kelvin: absolute zero of biddy
• 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
• 1865 – Rudolf Clausius: Definition of Entropy
• 1869 – Dmitri Mendeleev: Periodic table
• 1871 – Lord Rayleigh: Diffuse sky radiation (Rayleigh scattering) explains why sky appears blue
• 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
• 1898 - J.J. Thomson proposed the Plum pudding model of an atom
• 1900 – Max Planck: Planck's law of black body radiation, basis for quantum theory

20th century

• 1905 – Albert Einstein: theory of special relativity, explanation of Brownian motion, and photoelectric effect
• 1906 – Walther Nernst: Third law of thermodynamics
• 1909 – Fritz Haber: Haber Process and also the Oil drop experiment by Robert Andrews Millikan to determine the charge on an electron
• 1911 – Ernest Rutherford: Atomic nucleus
• 1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: Superconductivity
• 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: theory of general 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
• 1920 – Arthur Eddington: Stellar nucleosynthesis
• 1924 – Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle
• 1924 – Edwin Hubble: the discovery that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies
• 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, a potential fourth law of thermodynamics
• 1934 – James Chadwick: Discovery of the neutron
• 1934 – Clive McCay: Calorie Restriction extends the maximum lifespan of another species Calorie_restriction#Research_history
• 1938 – Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann: Nuclear fission
• 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.
• 1948 – Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson: Quantum electrodynamics
• 1951 – George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa
• 1952 – Jonas Salk: developed and tested first polio vaccine
• 1953 – Crick and Watson: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology
• 1963 – Lawrence Morley, Fred Vine, and Drummond Matthews: Paleomagnetic stripes in ocean crust as evidence of plate tectonics (Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis).
• 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 – 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. Andrew Wiles proves Fermats Last Theorem
• 1986 – Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz: Discovery of High-temperature superconductivity
• 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.
• 1997 – CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab: Top quark.
• 1998 – Gerson Goldhaber and Saul Perlmutter observed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

21st century

• 2001 – The first draft of the human genome is completed.
• 2001 - Telesurgery was found by Jacques Marescaux
• 2001 - Self Healing Materials by Keneth Matsumura
• 2007 - James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin reported that they had reprogrammed regular skin cells to behave just like embryonic stem cells.
• 2010 – J. Craig Venter Institute creates the first synthetic bacterial cell.

External links

• Science Timeline