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Period: Feb 15, 1564 to
Galileo Galilei
Made breakthroughs in astronomy by obversing Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. Devised a military compass. Created a thermometer. First to use a refracting telescope to observe the stars. Created a microscope. Conducted work on pendulums, discovered that the acceleration due to gravity was independent of mass and wrote about inertia. -
Period: Jun 13, 1580 to
Willebrord Snellius
Developed Snell's law - describes refraction
n1(sinθ1)=n2(sinθ2) -
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Blaise Pascal
Important contributions in the study of fluids - pressure. Created hydaulics - hydraulic press and the syringe. Clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum. -
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Christiaan Huygens
Proposed a wave theory of light, now known as Huygen's Principle - describres refraction, diffraction etc.
Was the first to use pendulums in clocks.
Discovered Saturn's ring and its moon Titan. -
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Robert Hooke
Discovered Hooke's law of elasticity - F=kX - force is proportional to the extension of a spring. -
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Isaac Newton
3 Laws of Motion - three physical laws that set the foundations for classical mechanics.
Law of Universal Gravitation - States that any two bodies of mass attract to each other based on the formula F=Gm1m2/r^2
Created the first functioning reflecting telescope.
Established calculus. -
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Benjamin Franklin
Proved lightning was electrical, kite experiment. Identified positive and negative charge and discovered the conservation fo charge. -
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Leonhard Euler
Euler–Bernoulli beam equation - a conrnerstone of engineering.
Applied his work in calculus to classical mathematics and astronomy - determined with great accuracy the orbits of various celestial bodies including comets.
Made important contributions to optics, disagreed with Newton's theory of light and helped Christian Huygen's wave theory of light to become the dominant theory.
Worked in fluid dynamics creating equations for inviscid flows.
Euler's number is named after him. -
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Henry Cavendish
First to measure the Universal Gravitational constant, measured the density of the Earth. Expressed a version of Ohm's law before anyone else. -
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Charles Augustin de Coulomb
Developed Coulomb's law - describes the electrostatic interaction between electrically charged particles.
F=(r21/|r21|)*ke*q1*q2/(r2-r1)^2
Did some important work on friction - F=μR
The SI unit of charge was named after him. -
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Alessandro Volta
Created the first battery using zinc and copper wires and saline solutions which is considered to be one of the most important breakthroughs of all time in physics. The volt is named after him. Also made discoveries in electrostatics, meteorology and pneumatics. -
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Thomas Young
Established the wave theory of light through the use of the double-slit experiment to show that light experienced interference.
Developed Young's modulus - relates stress to strain.
Founded physiological optics. -
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Georg Ohm
Found Ohm's law, the relationship between the potential difference across a conductor and the current. -
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Michael Faraday
Made contributions to electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Created the basic foundation for the concept of electromagnetic fields. Discovered magnetic fields could effect light.
Maxwell took his experiements and created equations for them.
Created the electric motor and the transformer. -
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Christian Doppler
Experimented with sound waves.
Derived an expression for the apparent change in wavelength of a wave due to relative motion between the source and observer. Used this to explain the colour of stars. -
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James Prescott Joule
Studied heat and found its mechanical equivalent. Led to the law of conservation of energy and the first law of thermodynamics. The unit for energy is named after him.
Joule's First law - Q=I^2 * R -
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James Clerk Maxwell
Maxwell's Equations - Set the foundations for - Classical electrodynamics, classical optics and electric circuits. He set out a basic form of these equations then other mathematicians and physicists completed the equations.
Contributed to kinetic theory, Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
His contributions to physics are said to be on the same level as Einstein and Newton. -
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Ernst Mach
Mach number and the study of sound waves.
Mach's principle helped Einstein develop his theory of General Relativity. Supersonic motion and shock waves. -
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Ludwig Boltzmann
Devloped statistical mechanics and applied it to the kinetic theory of gases. Explained how atoms and molecules determined the physical properties of matter. -
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Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Pioneered refrigeration, liquified helium and discovered superconductivity using this technique. -
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Nikola Tesla
Discovered alternating current, won the war of currents as it now dominates the distribution of electricity due to its lower costs.
Was one of the first to experiment with x-rays.
Invented an AC induction motor. -
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Max Planck
Developed Quantum theory, revolutionised our understanding of atomic structures. Black-body radiation laws. E=hf - related energy and the frequency of a photon. Planck's constant is now hugely important in quantum physics and is used for units such as Planck length and mass. Helped Einstein get his work on special relativity recognised in Germany. -
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Marie Curie
Theory of radioactivity. Techniques to isolate radioactive isotopes. Discovered radioactivity of thorium. Co-discovered radium and polonium with her husband Pierre. -
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Ernest Rutherford
Founded much of nuclear physics. Discovered half-life. Differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. Theorized that atoms have a small nucleus that contained charge. First split an atom and discovered protonsa and then helped to discover the neutron. -
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Albert Einstein
Special and General theories of relativity, mass-energy equivilence, explained the photoelectric effect ,founded relativistic cosmology, prediction of the deflection of light by gravity and gravitational lensing.
Fluctuation dissipation theorem - explained many previous phenomenom and theories in physics such as wave-particle duality.
The Zero-point energy concept and the quantum theory of a monatomic gas were another few examples of his scientific works, of which he made over 300. -
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Erwin Schrödinger
Developed many fundamental ideas in quantum theory. These formed the basis of wave mechanics - Schrödinger equation - describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time, Newton's second law but for quantum mechanics. -
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Louis de Broglie
Wave-particle duality - de Broglie equation. Related momentum and wavelength using Planck's constant. Albert Einstein first explained the wave-particle duality of light, but the de Broglie hypothesised that any particle also has wave-particle duality. -
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Enrico Fermi
Helped create the first nuclear reactor. His experiements led up to the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Linked beta decay and the weak interaction - hypothesised the neutrino. Worked on the Manhattan Project. Conducted important work in particle physics, especially related to pions and muons. -
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Werner Heisenberg
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. You cannot know both the location and momentum of a particle accurately. To know it's location you must superpose many sine waves, but that relates to adding many momentums so the more accurately you know the location the less you kow the momentum. To find the momentum you need one continuous sine waves, but then you have no idea of its location. Useful for quantum cryptography as measuring a quantum system alters it significantly, making it hard to decypher. -
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Richard Feynman
Pictoral representations for the behaviour of subatomic particles, Feynman Diagrams. Worked on the Manhattan project. Superfluidity of supercooled helium. Quantum electrodynamics - path intergral formula -
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Owen Chamberlain
Discovered anti-protons through proton-proton scattering experiments. Used anti-protons to produce anti-neutrons Worked on the Manhattan project. Used polarised anti-protons to study spin. -
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Stephen Hawking
Work with general relativity and black holes, Hawking radiation. Combined relativity and quantum mechanics to help explain the universe. -
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Manhattan Project
Project to develop the first atomic weapons. Developed Fat Man and Little Boy and these were used in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, respectively. -
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USA Spaceflight Missions
Project Mercury - Brought an American into space, not the first time however.
Project Gemini - Aimed to develop techniques which allowed for the Apollo program, involved the 8 day flight required for a mission to the moon.
Apollo Program - Mission to put a man on the moon, achieved on 20th June 1969. -
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Large Hadron Collider
From 1998-2008 the large hadron collider was constructed. It began operation on 10th November 2008. Its aim was to allow physicists to prove or disprove predictions involved with particle physics. The HIggs Boson was discovered on 4th July 2012, which was one of the LHC's main aims.