c. 624 BC | Birth of Thales of Miletus: traditionally 'the first physicist'. |
384 BC | Birth of Aristotle: author of Physics. |
1543 | Nicolaus Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium. |
1600 | William Gilbert's De Magnete describing the behaviour of magnets. |
1609 | Johannes Kepler's first and second laws published in Astronomia Nova. |
1632 | Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World published. |
1638 | Galileo's work on motion described in his Discorsi. |
1687 | Newton's laws of motion and gravitation published in his Principia. |
1704 | Newton's work on light and spectra described in his Opticks. |
1729 | Stephen Gray discovers electrical conduction. |
1736 | Leonhard Euler introduces differential equations into mechanics. |
1755 | Euler lays the foundations of fluid mechanics. |
1784 | Pierre Laplace introduces concept of electric potential. |
1785 | Charles Coulomb announces his law of electrostatics. |
1799 | Pierre Laplace's Méchanique Céleste (Volume 1). |
1801 | Thomas Young demonstrates the wave nature of light. |
1803 | John Dalton proposes his atomic theory of matter. |
1820 | Hans Oersted demonstrates electromagnetism. |
1821 | Michael Faraday demonstrates the principle of the electric motor. |
1825 | Sadi Carnot lays the foundations of thermodynamics. |
1843 | James Joule determines the mechanical equivalent of heat. |
1847 | Hermann von Helmholtz formulates conservation of energy. |
1848 | Lord Kelvin proposes the absolute temperature scale. |
1849 | Armand Fizeau makes first accurate measurement of the speed of light. |
1850 | Rudolf Clausius introduces entropy. |
1859 | James Clerk Maxwell develops the kinetic theory of gases. |
1865 | Maxwell's Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. |
1871 | Dmitry Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. |
1877 | Ludwig Boltzmann introduces statistical interpretation of entropy. |
1882 | Albert Michelson measures the speed of light. |
1887 | Michelson-Morley experiment fails to detect the ether. |
1887 | Heinrich Hertz discovers photoelectric effect. |
1888 | Heinrich Hertz demonstrates the existence of radio waves. |
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1895 | Wilhelm Röntgen discovers X-rays. |
1896 | Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity. |
1897 | J. J. Thomson discovers the electron. |
1900 | Max Planck introduces the quantum. |
1905 | Einstein publishes papers on special relativity, Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. |
1911 | Ernest Rutherford announces discovery of the atomic nucleus. |
1911 | Victor Hess discovers cosmic rays. |
1913 | Niels Bohr's quantum theory of the atom. |
1916 | Einstein's general theory of relativity. |
1924 | Bose-Einstein statistics introduced. |
1925 | Heisenberg introduces quantum mechanics (matrix form). |
1925 | Wolfgang Pauli announces the exclusion principle. |
1926 | Schrödinger introduces wave mechanics. |
1926 | Bom's probability interpretation of quantum mechanics. |
1926 | Fermi-Dirac statistics introduced. |
1926 | Heisenberg formulates the uncertainty principle. |
1928 | The Dirac equation describes relativistic electrons and leads to an understanding of spin and the prediction of antiparticles. |
1929 | Edwin Hubble discovers the expansion of the Universe. |
1932 | James Chadwick discovers the neutron. |
1932 | Carl Anderson discovers the positron. |
1934 | Fermi introduces the weak interaction. |
1935 | Hideki Yukawa lays the foundation of the strong interaction. |
1939 | Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner discover nuclear fission. |
1948 | John Bardeen, William Brattain and William Shockley produce the transistor. |
1948 | Feynman introduces his diagrams for quantum electrodynamics. |
1948 | George Gamow proposes the basis of Big Bang theory. |
1964 | Murray Gell-Mann introduces quarks. |
1965 | Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover cosmic microwave background radiation. |
1967 | Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers first pulsar (a neutron star). |
1968 | Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow develop unified theory of electroweak interaction. |
1972 | Fritsch, Gell-Mann and Bardeen develop quantum chromodynamics. |
1977 | Klaus von Klitzing discovers the quantum Hall effect. |
1980 | Alan Guth proposes an inflationary early Universe. |
1981 | Green and Schwarz introduce superstring theory. |
1982 | Alain Aspect conducts experiment demonstrating non-local aspects of quantum physics. |
1986 | Bednorz and Mueller discover high-temperature superconductivity. |
1991 | CERN confirms the existence of three generations of fundamental particles. |
1995 | Witten and Townsend develop M-Theory. |
1995 | Cornell, Wieman and Anderson discover Bose-Einstein condensate of atomic gas. |