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This timeline lists significant discoveries in physics and the laws of nature, including experimental discoveries, theoretical proposals that were confirmed experimentally, and theories that have significantly influenced current thinking in modern physics. Such discoveries are often a multi-step, multi-person process.
Sir Isaac Newton (/ ˈ nj uː t ən /; 4 January [O.S. 25 December] 1643 – 31 March [O.S. 20 March] 1727) [a] was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author. [5] Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. [6]
1983: Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction, a key discovery in molecular biology; 1986: Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz: Discovery of High-temperature superconductivity; 1988: Bart van Wees and colleagues at TU Delft and Philips Research discovered the quantized conductance in a two-dimensional electron gas.
The conceptual differences between physics theories discussed in the 19th century and those that were most historically prominent in the first decades of the 20th century lead to a characterization of the earlier sciences as "classical physics" while the work based on quantum and relativity theories became known as "modern physics".
The 19th-century philosopher of science William Whewell qualified this statement, saying that, "it was by such a use of hypotheses, that both Newton himself and Kepler, on whose discoveries those of Newton were based, made their discoveries". Whewell stated:
Unification of theories about observable fundamental phenomena of nature is one of the primary goals of physics. [1] [2] [3] The two great unifications to date are Isaac Newton’s unification of gravity and astronomy, and James Clerk Maxwell’s unification of electromagnetism; the latter has been further unified with the concept of electroweak interaction.
Planck's expressions were in principle equivalent to those used by Lorentz in 1899. [82] Based on the work of Planck, the concept of relativistic mass was developed by Gilbert Newton Lewis and Richard C. Tolman (1908, 1909) by defining mass as the ratio of momentum to velocity. So the older definition of longitudinal and transverse mass, in ...
1671: Newton–Raphson method – Isaac Newton (Newton's work was written in 1669 and 1671, but not published until 1736) [27] and Joseph Raphson (1690). 1696: Brachistochrone problem solved by Johann Bernoulli, Jakob Bernoulli, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Guillaume de l'Hôpital, and Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. The problem ...