Physics History Timeline

  • Period: 465 BCE to 400 BCE

    Leucippus

    Was the first Greek to develop the theory of atomism , the idea that everything was composed of various, indivisible and imperishable elements he named atoms.
  • Period: 460 BCE to 370 BCE

    Democritus

    He was a Greek philosopher, he developed the first theory for the cosmos that told that the universe was nothing but tiny atoms churning in chaos, until they collided together to form larger units.
  • Period: 384 BCE to 322 BCE

    Aristotle

    He’s best known for the laws of motion he established, in which an object at a natural state will rest unless pushed by someone. There are 2 types of movement established by these laws of motion, natural motion is that where a movement occurs by natural means or aggressive motion where an object is forced by an external drive to move.
  • Period: 1473 to 1543

    Nicolaus Copernicus

    He proposed the theory of Heliocentrism, which says that the sun is at rest at the center of the universe and that the earth revolves around it annually.
  • Period: 1564 to

    Galileo Galilei

    His most important achievement was greatly enhancing the power of the telescope up to a magnification of 9 times, this allowed him to discover that the moon had mountains and to observe Jupiter's natural satellites for the first time.
  • Period: to

    Isaac Newton

    His greatest contribution to physics is the theory of universal gravity, it states that bodies with mass attract each other with a force that varies directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them.
  • Period: to

    Nikola Tesla

    Best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system, it provides electricity for homes and buildings. He also pioneered the field of radio communication.
  • Period: to

    Marie Curie

    She discovered polonium and radium, championed the use of radiation in medicine and fundamentally changed our understanding of radioactivity.
  • Period: to

    Albert Einstein

    Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, the basic idea is that instead of being an invisible force that attracts objects to one another, gravity is a curving or warping of space. The more massive an object, the more it warps the space around it.
  • Period: to

    Erik Verlinde

    He introduced a theory of entropic gravity. In this theory, gravity exists because of a difference in concentration of information in the empty space between two masses and its surroundings; he also extrapolates this to general relativity and quantum mechanics.