Physics+timeline

Physics Timeline Top 10 (or so) things you should know about every century

Most of the events were taken from [] [|Pre-1600]

[|1600s]

[|1700s]

[|1800s]

[|1900s]

 Pre-1600

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 * 3rd century BC - Aristarchus proposes a heliocentric model
 * ~150 Ptolemy publishes //Almagest//
 * 1054 Chinese and American Indian astronomers observe the Crab supernova explosion
 * 1100s First known written description of the use of lodestone as a compass
 * 1512 Nicholas Copernicus first states his heliocentric theory in //Commentariolus//
 * 1543 Nicholas Copernicus publishes //De Revolutionibus de Orbium Coelestium// //(On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)//
 * 1572 Tycho Brahe observes the supernova that appears in Cassiopeia
 * 1577 Tycho Brahe uses parallax to prove that comets are distant entities and not atmospheric phenomena
 * 1589 Galileo Galilei uses balls rolling on inclined planes to show that different weights fall with the same constant acceleration
 * 1609 Johannes Kepler states his first two empirical laws of planetary motion
 * 1609 Galileo Galilei builds his first telescope
 * 1613 Galileo Galilei uses sunspots to demonstrate the rotation of the sun
 * 1619 Johannes Kepler states his third empirical law of planetary motion
 * 1621 Willebrord Snell states his law of refraction
 * 1656 Christian Huygens builds the first highly accurate pendulum clock
 * 1665 Isaac Newton deduces the inverse-square gravitational force law from the acceleration of the moon
 * 1665 Isaac Newton invents his calculus
 * 1668 John Wallis suggests the law of conservation of momentum
 * 1673 Christian Huygens publishes his discovery that ac=v2/R
 * 1675 Ole Romer uses the orbital mechanics of Jupiter's moons to estimate the speed of light
 * 1678 Christian Huygens states his principle of wavefront sources
 * 1684 Isaac Newton proves that planets moving under an inverse-square force law will obey Kepler's laws
 * 1687 Isaac Newton publishes his //Principia Mathematica//
 * 1705 Edmond Halley predicts the periodicity of Halley's comet
 * 1752 Benjamin Franklin shows that lightning is electricity
 * 1767 Joseph Priestly proposes an electrical inverse-square law
 * 1781 William Herschel discovers Uranus
 * 1783 John Michell suggests that some objects might be so massive that not even light could escape
 * 1785 Charles Coulomb introduces the inverse-square law of electrostatics
 * 1798 Henry Cavendish measures the gravitational constant and determines the mass of the Earth
 * 1798 Count Rumford has the idea that heat is a form of energy
 * 1800 Alessandro Volta announces his invention of the electric battery
 * 1801 Thomas Young demonstrates the wave nature of light and the principle of interference
 * 1820 Hans Oersted notices that a current in a wire can deflect a compass needle providing the first concrete evidence of the connection between electricity and magnetism
 * 1820 Within a week after Oersted's discovery reached France, Ampere discovers that two parallel electic currents will exert forces on each other
 * 1821 Michael Faraday builds an electricity-powered motor
 * 1824 Sadi Carnot analyzes heat engines
 * 1826 Simon Ohm states his law of electrical resistance
 * 1827 Robert Brown discovers the Brownian motion
 * 1831 Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction
 * 1848 Lord Kelvin discovers the absolute zero point of temperature
 * 1849 Joule publishes results from his series of experiments (including the paddlewheel experiment) which show that heat is a form of energy
 * 1850 Fizeau and Foucault measure the speed of light in water and find that it is slower than in air, in support of the wave model of light
 * 1859 Maxwell works out the mathematics of the distribution of velocities of the molecules of a gas
 * 1864 James Maxwell publishes his papers on a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field
 * 1873 James Maxwell states that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon
 * 1874 Lord Kelvin formally states the second law of thermodynamics
 * 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley do not detect the ether drift
 * 1887 Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect
 * 1888 Heinrich Hertz discovers radio waves
 * 1896 Antoine Becquerel discovers the radioactivity of uranium
 * 1897 Joseph Thomson discovers the electron
 * 1899 Ernest Rutheford discovers that uranium radiation is composed of positively charged alpha particles and negatively charged beta particles
 * 1900 Max Planck states his radiation law and Planck's constant
 * 1905 Albert Einstein completes his theory of special relativity
 * 1913 Niels Bohr presents his first quantum model of the atom
 * 1913 Robert Millikan measures the fundamental unit of charge
 * 1915 Albert Einstein completes his theory of general relativity
 * 1927 Werner Heisenberg states the quantum uncertainty principle
 * 1929 Edwin Hubble discovers the expansion of the universe
 * 1932 James Chadwick discovers the neutron
 * 1932 Carl Anderson discovers the positron
 * 1933 Wolfgang Pauli proposes the existence of neutrinos to account for an apparent violation of energy conservation in certain nuclear reactions
 * 1958 Charles Townes invents the laser
 * 1963 Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig propose the quark/aces model
 * 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the 3K background radiation