Physics Timeline

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

Most of the events were taken from http://www.montgomerybell.com/~clarkb/events.htm

Pre-1600

1600s

1700s

1800s

1900s

Pre-1600

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



1600s

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 a c =v 2 /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





1700s

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

1800s

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





1900s