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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".
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.
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 ...
Around the same time, Newton's contemporaries Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens, and later Augustin-Jean Fresnel, mathematically refined the wave viewpoint, showing that if light traveled at different speeds in different media, refraction could be easily explained as the medium-dependent propagation of light waves.
Based on the principle of relativity, Henri Poincaré (1905, 1906), Hermann Minkowski (1908), and Arnold Sommerfeld (1910) tried to modify Newton's theory and to establish a Lorentz invariant gravitational law, in which the speed of gravity is that of light. As in Lorentz's model, the value for the perihelion advance of Mercury was much too low.