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