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600 BCE
Hominids Appear
About 6 million years ago life began to form and exist. -
276 BCE
Eratosthenes (276-194)
Eratosthenes was a Greek polymath known for calculating the radius of the Earth using the Sun's rays. He used a well in Egypt where everyday at noon the sun would shine directly on the water and nothing else. He used a pole's shadow next to the well, the sun, trigonometry, and geometry to calculate the Earth's radius. -
Period: 6 BCE to
Small scale
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100
Claudius Ptolemy (100 AD.- 165 AD)
Claudius Ptolemy was a greek astronomer and mathematician who discovered the Earth was the center of the universe (geocentric view) -
1473
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
Nicolaus Copernicus created the heliocentric idea where the Sun was the center of the universe and all of the other planets revolved around it annually. -
1521
Johannes Kepler (27 December 1521-15 November 1631)
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer and mathematician. He is known for his three laws of planetary motion which proved mathematically that the planets moved in an elliptical orbit. -
1546
Tycho Brahe (14 December 1546-24 October 1601)
Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer and writer known for his accurate astronomical and planetary observations. His observations helped Kepler prove mathematically the planets moved in an elliptical orbit. -
1561
Francis Bacon (22 January 1561-9 April 1626)
Francis Bacon was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Lord Chancellor of England. He rejected Aristotle and believed that science should only be based on experiments. -
1564
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Galileo is an Italian astronomer who improved the telescope and was able to spot Jupiter's 4 moons. -
Rene Descartes (31 March 1596-11 February 1650)
Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician who questioned everything. He questioned existence and came up with his theory "Cogito ergo sum" which translates to "I think therefore I am". He believed you exist and you could just be a mind with no body. As long as you had thoughts you existed. Descartes believed that everything should be questioned until proven mathematically and he is responsible for analytical geometry. -
John Locke (29 August 1632-28 October 1708)
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician who we were all born as a blank slate which ties to Thomas Jefferson's statement "All men are created equal". This theory caused conflict and made the people think "Why do I need a king to tell me what to do? I have a good education can't I make decisions?" Locke is known as the "Father of Liberalism" -
Galileo
Galileo Galilei was imprisoned by the Roman Catholic church for publishing his ideas and saying that they were just characters saying it. He was forced to wear the 'sinners gown', crawl on the floor, and kiss the pope's feet while admitting he was wrong. -
Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
Isaac Newton is an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician who created the three laws of motion. He made everyone rejet Aristotle and made them stop believing that he was the man who knew everything. He described the universe as a huge clock in which God was the clockmaker. He brought everything together to create the scientific method and published his laws of motion along with the use of prisms. -
Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907
Mendeleev is known for creating a way to organize the elements by discovering a pattern that occured periodically. We know this as the periodic table of elements. -
Marie Curie (1867-1934)
Marie Curie was a Polish and French physicist and chemist who discovered the radioactive elements radium and polonium. -
Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921)
Henrietta Leavitt was an american astronomer and she discovered a correlation between period and luminosity. She saw that you could tell how far away a star was based on its brightness. -
Alfred Wegener (1 November 1880-November 1930)
Alfred Wegener was a German geophysicist, researcher, and meteorologists known for his theory of continental drift. Although he wasn't the first one to bring up the idea he discovered it by looking at a map and seeing the continents connect like one big puzzle. His idea was rejected because Wegener wasn't able to explain why the continents were like this. -
Edwin Hubble (1889-1953)
Edwin Hubble, an american astronomer, discovered that the universe was expanding and there were galaxies that were further beyond ours. -
Harry Hammond Hess (24 May 1906-25 August 1969)
Harry Hess was a geologist known for proving the theory of continental drift. Hess discovered that on the seafloor there were hundred of flat top mountains covering it and volcanoes pushing the continents apart.
