The fundamentals of physics, from first principles
The story of how we figured out the universe.
A timeline of the discoveries that built physics, each one explained so a curious person can actually follow it. Every technical term is defined where it appears.
The Timeline of Physics
17 of 39 written. The rest are on their way.
| Year | Who | The discovery |
|---|---|---|
| c. 1500 BCE | Vedic hymns | Early cosmology: order, fire, and the structure of the heavens soon |
| c. 1200 BCE | Zoroaster | A cosmos built on the opposition of light and dark soon |
| c. 600 BCE | Thales of Miletus | Rubbed amber attracts, and lodestone pulls iron soon |
| c. 530 BCE | Pythagoras | Musical harmony comes from simple ratios of vibrating strings soon |
| c. 450 BCE | Empedocles | Light is something that travels soon |
| c. 430 BCE | Democritus | All matter is made of indivisible atoms soon |
| c. 350 BCE | Aristotle | The first systematic Physics: motion, the elements, and the cosmos soon |
| c. 300 BCE | Euclid | The geometry of light rays and vision soon |
| c. 250 BCE | Archimedes | Buoyancy, levers, and the science of floating and balance soon |
| c. 240 BCE | Eratosthenes | Measured the size of the Earth from shadows soon |
| c. 77 CE | Pliny the Elder | Natural History: the ancient world catalogues nature soon |
| c. 150 CE | Ptolemy | Optics, refraction, and a mathematical model of the sky soon |
| c. 1021 | Ibn al-Haytham | The Book of Optics: how light and vision really work, by experiment soon |
| c. 1240 | Grosseteste and Bacon | Lenses, the rainbow, and the case for experiment soon |
| c. 1350 | Buridan and Oresme | Impetus: the seed of inertia and momentum soon |
| 1543 | Nicolaus Copernicus | The Sun, not the Earth, at the centre soon |
| 1600 | William Gilbert | The Earth itself is a magnet soon |
| 1609 | Johannes Kepler | The planets move in ellipses, by precise laws soon |
| 1610 | Galileo Galilei | Falling bodies, moons of Jupiter, and motion made measurable soon |
| 1621 | Willebrord Snell | The exact law of how light bends soon |
| 1643 | Evangelista Torricelli | The barometer, and the reality of the vacuum soon |
| 1648 | Blaise Pascal | Air has weight, and pressure falls with altitude soon |
| 1676 | Ole Rømer | Light has a finite, measurable speed |
| 1687 | Isaac Newton | One law of gravity for apples, moons, and planets |
| 1801 | Thomas Young | Light behaves as a wave |
| 1820 | Hans Christian Ørsted | An electric current bends a compass needle |
| 1820s | André-Marie Ampère | The force between two electric currents |
| 1822 | Joseph Fourier | Any signal is a sum of simple waves |
| 1824 | Sadi Carnot | The hard limit on every heat engine |
| 1831 | Michael Faraday | A changing magnetic field makes electricity |
| 1845 | James Joule | Heat and motion are the same currency: energy |
| 1865 | James Clerk Maxwell | Light is an electromagnetic wave |
| 1887 | Heinrich Hertz | Maxwell's waves, produced and caught in the lab |
| 1898 | Marie Curie | Radioactivity comes from inside the atom |
| 1900 | Max Planck | Energy comes in discrete packets |
| 1909 | Robert Millikan | The charge of a single electron, measured |
| 1911 | Ernest Rutherford | The atom has a tiny, dense nucleus |
| 1931 | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | A mass limit for white dwarf stars |
| today | Helioseismology | Reading the Sun's interior from its surface vibrations |