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Sir Francis Bacon publishes The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, which contains a description of what would later be known as the scientific method.
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Antoine Lavoisier publishes Méthode de nomenclature chimique, the first modern system of chemical nomenclature
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William Prout classifies biomolecules into their modern groupings: carbohydrates, proteins and lipids
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Svante Arrhenius develops ion theory to explain conductivity in electrolytes
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Ernest Rutherford discovers the source of radioactivity as decaying atoms; coins terms for various types of radiation
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Mikhail Semyonovich Tsvet invents chromatography, an important analytic technique.[
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Frederick Soddy proposes the concept of isotopes, that elements with the same chemical properties may have differing atomic weights
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Gilbert N. Lewis and Merle Randall publish Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, first modern treatise on chemical thermodynamics
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Linus Pauling publishes Pauling's rules, which are key principles for the use of X-ray crystallography to deduce molecular structure
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Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson identify neptunium, the lightest and first synthesized transuranium element, found in the products of uranium fission. McMillan would found a lab at Berkeley that would be involved in the discovery of many new elements and isotopes
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Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman produce the first Bose–Einstein condensate, a substance that displays quantum mechanical properties on the macroscopic scale.[