History of Physics

  • 2000 BCE

    Babylonians collected information of planets and stars

    Babylonian astronomy was the study or recording of celestial objects during early history Mesopotamia.
  • 4 BCE

    Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, describes a geocentric universe

    The Greek philosopher Aristotle, established a geocentric universe in which the fixed, spherical Earth is at the centre, surrounded by concentric celestial spheres of planets and stars.
  • 2 BCE

    Hipparchus was the first who measured the precession of the equinoxes

    He did this by noting the precise locations stars rose and set during equinoxes – the twice yearly dates when night length and day length are exactly 12 hours.
  • 5

    The Indian astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata described the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun and its axis (heliocentric view)

    The mathematical part of the Aryabhatiya covers arithmetic, algebra, plane trigonometry, and spherical trigonometry. It also contains continued fractions, quadratic equations, sums-of-power series, and a table of sines.
  • 17

    Sir Isaac Newton, the English mathematician, astronomer, and physicist propounded Laws of Motions and Universal Law of Gravitation

    Newton’s law of gravitation, any particle of matter in the universe attracts any other with a force varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them.
  • Emanuel Swedenborg first suggested parts of the nebular hypothesis

    Swedenborg proposed that the sun had developed a dense surface layer that was forced outward by the centrifugal force of its rotation, into the equatorial plane of the solar rotation.
  • Max Planck introduced formula for Black Body radiation

    Max Planck heuristically derived a formula for the observed spectrum by assuming that a hypothetical electrically charged oscillator in a cavity that contained black-body radiation could only change its energy in a minimal increment, E, that was proportional to the frequency of its associated electromagnetic wave.
  • Georges Lemaître proposed Big Bang theory

    According to the Big Bang theory, the expansion of the observable universe began with the explosion of a single particle at a definite point in time.
  • Edwin Hubble explained the expanding nature of universe (known as Hubble’s Law)

    Edwin Hubble proved that there is a direct relationship between the speeds of distant galaxies and their distances from Earth.
  • Black Hole Entropy

    Black Hole Entropy is the amount of entropy that must be assigned to a black hole in order for it to comply with the laws of thermodynamics as they are interpreted by observers external to that black hole.
  • Theory of cosmic inflation

    Cosmological inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe.