Fundamental building blocks.
The beginning of science: 600 BCE-1400 CE : Eclipses of the sun can be predicted / Thales of Miletus --
Now hear the fourfold roots of everything / Empedocles --
Measuring the circumference of earth / Eratosthenes --
The human is related to the lower beings / Al-Tusi --
A floating object displaces its own volume in liquid / Archimedes --
The sun is like fire, the moon is like water / Zhang Heng --
Light travels in straight lines into our eyes / Alhazen
Scientific revolution: 1400-1700 : At the center of everything is the sun /
The orbit of every planet is an ellipse / Johannes Kepler --
A falling body accelerates uniformly / Galileo Galilei --
The globe of the earth is a magnet / William Gilbert --
Not by arguing but by trying / Francis Bacon --
Touching the spring of the air / Robert Boyle --
Is light a particle or a wave? / Christiaan Huygens --
The first observation of a transit of Venus / Jeremiah Horrocks --
Organisms develop in a series of steps / Jan Swammerdam --
All living things are composed of cells / Robert Hooke --
Layers of rock form on top of one another / Nicolas Steno --
Microscopic observations of animalcules / Antonie van Leeuwenhoek --
Measuring the speed of light / Ole Rømer --
One species never springs for the seed of another / John Ray --
Gravity affects everything in the universe / Isaac Newton
Expanding horizons: 1700-1800 : Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds /
The heat that disappears in the conversion of water into vapor is not lost / Joseph Black --
Inflammable air / Henry Cavendish --
Winds, as they come nearer the equator, become more easterly / George Hadley --
A strong current comes out of the Gulf of Florida / Benjamin Franklin --
Dephlogisticated air / Joseph Priestley --
In nature, nothing is lost, everything changes / Antoine Lavoisier --
The mass of a plant comes from the air / Jan Ingenhousz --
Discovering new planets / William Herschel --
The diminution of the velocity of light / John Mitchell --
Setting the electric fluid in motion / Alessandro Volta --
No vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end / James Hutton --
The attraction of mountains / Nevil Maskelyne --
The mystery of nature in the structure and fertilization of flowers / Christian Sprengel --
Elements always combine in the same way / Joseph Proust
A century of progress: 1800-1900 : The experiments may be repeated with great ease when the sun shines /
Ascertaining the relative weights of ultimate particles / John Dalton --
The chemical effects produced by electricity / Humphry Davy --
Mapping the rocks of a nation / William Smith --
She knows to what tribe the bones belong / Mary Anning --
The inheritance of acquired characteristics / Jean-Baptiste Lamarck --
Every chemical compound has two parts / Jön Jakob Berzelius --
The electric conflict in not restricted to the conducting wire / Hans Christian Ølsted --
One day, sir, you may tax it / Michael Faraday --
Heat penetrates every substance in the universe / Joseph Fourier --
The artificial production of organic substances / Friedrich Wöhler --
Winds never blow in a straight line / Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis --
On the colored light of binary stars / Christian Doppler --
The glacier was God's great plow / Louis Agassiz --
Nature can be represented as one great whole / Alexander von Humboldt --
Light travels more slowly in water than in air / Léon Foucault --
Living force may be converted into heat / James Joule --
Statistical analysis of molecular movement / Ludwig Boltzmann --
Plastic is not what I meant to invent / Leo Baekeland --
I have called this principle natural selection / Charles Darwin --
Forecasting the weather / Robert FitzRoy --
Omne vivum ex vivo: all life from life / Louis Pasteur --
One of the snakes grabbed its own tail / August Kekulé --
The definitely expressed average proportion of three to one / Gregor Mendel --
An evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs / Thomas Henry Huxley --
An apparent periodicity of properties / Dmitri Mendeleev --
Light and magnetism are affectations of the same substance / James Clerk Maxwell --
Rays were coming from the tube / Wilhelm Röntgen --
Seeing into the earth / Richard Dixon Oldham --
Radiation is atomic property of the elements / Marie Curie --
A contagious living fluid / Martinus Beijerinck
A paradigm shift: 1900-1945 : Quanta are discrete packets of energy / Max Planck --
Now I know what the atom looks like / Ernest Rutherford --
Gravity is a distortion in the space-time continuum / Albert Einstein --
Earth's drifting continents are giant pieces in an ever-changing jigsaw / Alfred Wegener --
Chromosomes play a role in heredity / Thomas Hunt Morgan --
Particles have wavelike properties / Erwin Schrödinger --
Uncertainty is inevitable / Werner Heisenberg --
The universe is big ... and getting bigger / Edwin Hubble --
The radius of space began at zero / Georges Lemaître --
Every particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart / Paul Dirac --
There is an upper limit beyond which a collapsing stellar core becomes unstable / Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar --
Life itself is a process of obtaining knowledge / Konrad Lorenz --
95 percent of the universe is missing / Fritz Zwicky --
A universal computing machine / Alan Turing --
The nature of the chemical bond / Linus Pauling --
An awesome power is locked inside the nucleus of an atom / J. Robert Oppenheimer
Fundamental building blocks: 1945-present : We are made of stardust /
Jumping genes / Barbara McClintock --
The strange theory of light and matter / Richard Feynman --
Life is not a miracle / Harold Urey and Stanley Miller --
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) / James Watson and Francis Clark --
Everything that can happen happens / Hugh Everett III --
A perfect game of tic-tac-toc / Donald Michie --
The unity of fundamental forces / Sheldon Glashow --
We are the cause of global warming / Charles Keeling --
The butterfly effect / Edward Lorenz --
A vacuum is not exactly nothing / Peter Higgs --
Symbiosis is everywhere / Lynn Margulis --
Quarks come in threes / Murray Gell-Mann
A theory of everything? /
Black holes evaporate / Stephen Hawking --
Earth and all its life forms make up a single living organism called Gaia / James Lovelock --
A cloud is made of billows upon billows / Benoît Mandelbrot --
A quantum model of computing / Yuri Manin --
Genes can move from species to species / Michael Syvanen --
The soccer ball can withstand a lot of pressure / Harry Kroto --
Insert genes into humans to cure diseases / William French Anderson --
Designing new life forms on a computer screen / Craig Venter --
A new law of nature / Ian Wilmut --
Worlds beyond the solar system / Geoffrey Marcy --