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Period: Feb 15, 1564 to
Motion- Galileo Galilei
He opposed Aristotle’s observation by stating that “No force is needed to keep an object moving” but if resistive forces are removed an object will move forever. He also stated that light and heavy objects fall at the same rate. He was the first person to approach problem through experimentation. He made instruments that gave accurate and reliable data. -
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Sir Isaac Newton
He founded that white light was really a combination of other colours he put this to the test by going through a series of prism based experiments. He made designed many gadgets such as the water clock water wheels, sundials, pendulum clock, thermometers, microscopes, telescopes and a working model of the windmill. -
Huygens Wave THeory
Huygens’s wave theory
1. Huygens suggested that light was a wave since it could be reflected and refracted. One problem was that light travels in straight lines and produced sharp shadows which meant it did not diffract. -
Conduction- Stephen Gray
in 1730, Stephen Gray found that a current could be transferred over fairly long distances by some materials but not others. Thus he discovered conductors and non-conductors and at the time it was referred to as electric fluid. -
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Allesandro Volta- Voltaic Pile/Battery
He discovered and invented the “voltaic pile”. This permitted the production of a steady flow of current for an extended period of time. -
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Count Rumford
He observed heat and made guns and cannons whichgenerated immense heat for the Baravian army. His study of heat was a great contribution. -
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Thomas Young
He was able to show that light did in fact exhibit interference with his double slit experiment. -
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Hans Christian Ørsted
while performing a demonstration experiment before a small group of students a noticed that a compass needle deflected when it was in an area of a wire carrying an electric current. -
Atom - Dalton
1803 Dalton (England) put forward a concept of an atom was generally accepted. -
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James Joule
Joule’s experiments indicated that mechanical energy was converted to heat energy. This experiment helped in establishing the Principle of conservation of energy which states energy cannot be created nor destroyed but converted from one to another. -
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Leon Foucault
He succeeded in showing by experiment that, as Huygens’swave theory predicted, light traveled faster in air than in water, one of theestablished predictions of the wave theory. -
Brownian Motion
while using using a microscope to study suspension of pollen grains in water. Brownian motion: random moving of particles suspended in a fluid (a liquid or a gas) resulting from their collision by the fast-moving atoms or molecules in the gas or liquid. -
Magnetic Field- Michael Faraday
He showed that under certain conditions, light waves passing through a material medium were affected by a magnetic field. By this time it was known that there was some connection between magnetism and electricity. -
Electromagnetic waves- James Clerk Maxwell
He put forward a mathematical theory suggesting that an oscillating electric current should be capable of radiating energy in the form of waves. He called these waves electromagnetic waves. Maxwell’s equation led to the conclusion that these waves if they existed travelled at the speed of light -
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Albert Einstein- Electricity
In the early twentieth century an experimentshowing what is called the “photoelectric effect” threw a new twist to thenature of light and other electromagnetic waves. The new twist was identifiedand explained by none other than Einstein. Einstein invented electricity. -
Heinrich Hertz
He proved Maxwell’s theory via a series of experiments and also discovered that the newly found waves behaved exactly like light but with ah much shorter wave length at this time -
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Niels Bohr Atomic Theory
Bohr's greatest contribution to modern physics was the atomic model. The Bohr model shows the atom as a small, positively charged nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. -
J.J Thompson
He discovered something smaller than an atom, a particle with a minuscule mass and a negative charge. -
Gold Foil Experiment
He found the positive nucleus in the atom that was surrounded by negative electrons. This was done through his well-known gold foil experiment. -
The Neutron
The neutron was discovered by James Chadwick
