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Nicolaus Copernicus states the sun as the center of the Solar System with other bodies revolving around it.
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Galileo Galilei drops balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa with different masses and watches them fall at the same rate.
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Thanks to some new measurements by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler was able to make three claims about planterary motion: 1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse and the sun is at one of the foci. 2. A line segment from between the sun and planet sweeps out equal areas. 3.The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Click Here for more information.
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Newton publishes Principia Mechanica, which proposes that an inverse square force law links to elliptical orbits; in addition, Newton included his Laws of Motion and Gravitation.
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Charles-Augustin de Coulomb finds that an electrostatic attraction relates in full analogy with Newtonian gravity, which led to Coulomb's Law.
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Wilhelm Killing works on n-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry and Lie algebras; these concepts eventually construct the Killing vector, which is applied in differential geometry, quantum gauge field theory, supergravity. and string theory.
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Minkowski establishes the idea of a spacetime continuum.
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Albert Einstein establishes his Theory of Relativity, stating that all laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames, and the speed of light is constant in all frames.
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Theodore Kaluza and Oskar Klein found that electromagnetism could be derived from gravity if a fourth dimension exists.
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Heisenberg's research sparks some of the items that would eventually become crucial components of string theory
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Theorists: Gabriele Veneziano, Pierre Ramond, Andre Neveu, John Schwarz, Joel Scherk, etc.
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Shing-Tung Yau discovers Calabi-Yau space, which is a manifold used in analyzing mirror symetry.
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Michael Green and John Schwarz discover that the combination of string theory and supersymmetry yields an excitation spectrum that has equal numbers of fermions and bosons, revealing that string theory can be supersymmetric. The resulting objects are called superstrings.
