A brief chronological listing of some of the most important discoveries in cosmology, astronomy

and physics, from ancient Babylon, India and Greece, right up to the 20th Century. Learn how
some of the essential concepts and laws of modern physics which are mentioned in this website
(and the earlier ideas out of which they grew) developed in a historical context. For a slightly
different perspective, also see the section on Cosmological Theories Through History.
For convenience I have split it into sections:

Ancient World (20th Century B.C. - 4th Century A.D.)

Medieval and Renaissance World (5th Century A.D. - 16th Century)

Early Modern World (17th Century - 19th Century)

Modern World (20th Century)

ANCIENT WORLD

20th -16th Century B.C. - Ancient Babylonian tablets show knowledge of the distinction
between the moving planets and the fixed stars, and the recognition that the movement
of planets are regular and periodic.

15th - 12th Century B.C. - The Hindu Rigveda of ancient India describes the origin of
theuniverse in which a cosmic egg or Brahmanda, containing the Sun, Moon, planets
and the whole universe, expands out of a single concentrated point before subsequently
collapsing again, reminiscent of the much later Big Bang and oscillating
universe theories.

5th Century B.C. - The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras becomes arguably the first to
formulate a kind of molecular theory of matter, and to regard the physical universe as
subject to the rule of rationality or reason.

5th Century B.C. - The Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus found the school
of Atomism, which holds that the universe is composed of very small, indivisible and
indestructible building blocks known as atoms, which then form different combinations
and shapes in an infinite void.

4th Century B.C. - The Greek philosopher Aristotle

describes a geocentric universe in which the fixed,
spherical Earth is at the centre, surrounded by
concentric celestial spheres of planets and stars.
Although he portrays the universe as finite in size, he
stresses that it exists unchanged and static
throughout eternity.

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Geocentric universe of
Aristotle and Ptolemy

4th Century B.C. - The Greek philosopher Heraclides

proposes that the apparent daily motion of
the stars is created by the rotation of the Earth on its axis once a day, and that the Sun
annually circles a central Earth, while the other planets orbit the Sun (a geocentric model
with heliocentric aspects).

3rd Century B.C. - The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece assert a kind of
island universe in which a finite cosmos is surrounded by an infinite void (similar in
principle to a galaxy).

3rd Century B.C. - The Greek mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes proved that
the Earth was round, and made a remarkably accurate calculation of its circumference
and its tilt (as well as devising a system of latitude and longitude, and, possibly,
estimating the distance of the Earth from the Sun).

3rd Century B.C. - The Greek astronomer and mathematician Aristarchus of Samos is
the first to present an explicit argument for a heliocentric model of the Solar System,
placing the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the known universe. He describes the
Earth as rotating daily on its axis and revolving annually about the Sun in a circular orbit,
along with a sphere of fixedstars.

2nd Century B.C. - The Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Nicea makes the first
measurement of the precession of the equinoxes, and compiles the first star catalogue
(in which he proposes our modern system of apparent magnitudes). He also improves
on the Solar System model of Apollonius of Perga, in which an eccentric circle carries
around a smaller circle (an epicycle), which in turn carries around a planet.

2nd Century B.C. - The Hellenistic astronomer and philosopher Seleucus of Seleucia
supports Aristarchus heliocentric theory, and links the tides to the influence of the Moon.

2nd Century A.D. - The Roman-Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy

(Claudius Ptolemaeus) describes a geocentric model, largely based on Aristotelian
ideas, in which the planets and the rest of the universe orbit about a stationary Earth in
circular epicycles, which becomes the scientific orthodoxy for nearly two millennia
(essentially until Copernicus in the 16th Century). He also details the complex motions of
the stars and planetary paths using equants, allowing astronomers to predict the
positions of the planets.

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE WORLD

5th Century A.D. - The Indian astonomer and mathematician Aryabhata proposes that
the Earth turns on its own axis, and describes elliptical orbits around the Sun, which
some have interpreted as heliocentrism.

6th Century A.D. - The Christian philosopher John Philoponus of Alexandria argues
against the ancient Greek notion of an infinite past, and is perhaps the first commentator
to argue that theuniverse is finite in time and therefore had a beginning.

7th Century - The Indian astronomer Brahmagupta, a follower of the heliocentric theory
of the Solar System earlier developed by Aryabhata, recognizes gravity as a force of
attraction in his "The Opening of the Universe" of 628, in which he describes a force of
attraction between the Sun and the Earth.

9th Century - The Muslim astronomer Ja'far ibn Muhammad Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi
developes a planetary model which some have interpreted as heliocentric model.

9th - 11th Century - Early Muslim and Jewish theologians such as Al-Kindi, Saadia Gaon
and Al-Ghazali offer logical arguments supporting a finite universe.

11th Century - The Arab polymath Alhazen (also known as Ibn al-Haytham) becomes the
first to apply the scientific method to astronomy.

11th Century - The Persian astronomer Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni describes the
Earth'sgravitation as the attraction of all things towards the centre of the Earth, and
hypothesizes that the Earth turns daily on its axis and annually around the Sun.

11th Century - The Persian polymath Omar Khayyam demonstrates that the universe is
not moving around Earth, but that the Earth revolves on its axis, bringing into view
different starconstellations throughout the night and day. He also calculated the solar
year as 365.24219858156 days (correct to six decimal places).

14th Century - The Arab astronomer and engineer Ibn al-Shatir (of the Iranian Maragha
school of astronomy) refines and improves the accuracy of the geocentric Ptolemaic
model and develops the first accurate model of lunar motion.

15th Century - The Turkish/Persian astronomer and mathematician Ali Qushji rejects the
Aristotelian notion of a stationary Earth in favour of a rotating Earth.

15th Century - Somayaji Nilakantha of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics
in southern India develops a computational system for a partially heliocentric planetary
model in which Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn orbit the Sun, which in turn
orbits the Earth.

1543 - The Polish astronomer and polymath Nicolaus

Copernicus (adapting the geocentric Maragha model
of Ibn al-Shatir to meet the requirements of the
ancient heliocentric universe of Aristarchus),
proposes that the Earth rotates on its axis once daily
and travels around the Sun once a year, and
demonstrates that the motions of celestial objects
can be explained without putting the Earth at rest in
the centre of the universe. HisCopernican

Principle (that the Earth is not in a central, specially

favoured position) and its implications (that celestial bodies obey physical laws identical
to those on Earth) first establishes cosmology as a science rather than a branch of
metaphysics, and marks a shift away from anthropocentrism.

1576 - The English astronomer Thomas Digges popularizes Copernicus ideas and also
extends them by positing the existence of a multitude of stars extending to infinity, rather
than Copernicus narrow band of fixedstars.

1584 - The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno takes the Copernican Principle a stage
further by suggesting that even the Solar System is not the centre of the universe, but
rather a relatively insignificant star system among an infinite multitude of others.

1587 - The Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe develops a kind of hybrid of
the Ptolemaic and Copernican models, a geo-heliocentric system similar to that of
Somayaji Nilakantha, now known as the Tychonic system. This involves a static Earth at
the centre of the universe, around which revolve the Sun and the Moon, with the other
five planets revolving around the Sun.

EARLY MODERN WORLD

1605 - The German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler establishes his
three Laws of Planetary Motion, mathematical laws that describe the motion of planets in
the Solar System, including the ground-breaking idea that the planets follow elliptical, not
circular, paths around the Sun. Newton later used them to deduce his own Laws of
Motion and his Law of Universal Gravitation.

1610 - The Italian mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei develops an astronomical
telescope powerful enough to indentify moons orbiting Jupiter, sunspots on the Sun and
the different phases of Mercury, all of which are instrumental in convincing the scientific
community of the day that the heliocentric Copernican model of the Solar System is
superior to the geocentric Ptolemiac model.

1632 - Galileo Galilei first describes the Principle of Relativity, the idea that the
fundamental laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames and that, purely by
observing the outcome of mechanical experiments, one cannot distinguish a state of rest
from a state of constant velocity.

1633 - The French philosopher Ren Descartes outlines a model of a static,

infinite universemade up of tiny corpuscles of matter, a viewpoint not dissimilar to
ancient Greek atomism. Descartes universe shares many elements of Sir Isaac

Newtons later model, although Descartes vacuum of space is not empty but composed
of huge swirling whirlpools of ethereal or fine matter, producing what would later be
called gravitational effects.

1638 - Galileo Galilei demonstrates that unequal weights would fall with the same finite
speed in a vacuum, and that their time of descent is independent of their mass. Thus,
freely falling bodies, heavy or light, have the same constant acceleration, due to the
force of gravity.

1675 - The English physicist Sir Isaac Newton argues that light is composed of particles,
which are refracted by acceleration toward a denser medium, and posits the existence of
aether to transmit forces between the particles.

1687 - Sir Isaac Newton publishes his Principia, which describes an infinite, steady
state, static, universe, in which matter on the large scale is uniformly distributed. In the
work, he establishes the three Laws of Motion (a
body persists its state of rest or of uniform motion
unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force;
force equals mass times acceleration; and to every
action there is an equal and opposite reaction) and
theLaw of Universal Gravitation (that every particle in
theuniverse attracts every other particle according to

an inverse-square formula) that were not to be improved upon for more than two
hundred years. He is credited with introducing the idea that the motion of objects in the
heavens (such as planets, the Sun and the Moon) can be described by the same set of
physical laws as the motion of objects on the ground (like cannon balls and falling
apples).

1734 - The Swedish scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg proposes a

hierarchicaluniverse, still generally based on a Newtonian static universe, but
with matter clustered on ever larger scales of hierarchy, endlessly being recycled. This
idea of a hierarchical universeand the nebular hypothesis were developed further
(independently) by Thomas Wright (1750) and Immanuel Kant (1775).

1761 - The Swiss physicist Johann Heinrich Lambert supports Wright and Kants
hierarchicaluniverse and nebular hypothesis, and also hypothesizes that the stars near
the Sun are part of a group which travel together through the Milky Way, and that there
are many such groupings or star systems throughout the galaxy.

1783 - The amateur British astronomer John Michell proposes the theoretical idea of an
object massive enough that its gravity would prevent even light from escaping (which
has since become known as a black hole). He realizes that such an object would not be
directly visible, but could be identified by the motions of a companion star if it was part of
a binary system. A similar idea was independently proposed by the Frenchman PierreSimon Laplace in 1795.

1789 - The French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier definitively states the Law of
Conservation of Mass (although others had previously expressed similar ideas, including
the ancient Greek Epicurus, the medieval Persian Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and the 18th
Century scientists Mikhail Lomonosov, Joseph Black, Henry Cavendish and Jean Rey),
and identifies (albeit slightly incorrectly)
23 elements which he claims can not be broken
down into simpler substances.

1803 - The English scientist Thomas Young

demonstrates, in his famous double-slit experiment,
theinterference of light and concludes that light is a
wave, not a particle as Sir Isaac Newton had ruled.

1805 - The English chemist John Dalton develops his atomic theory, proposing that each
chemical element is composed of atoms of a single unique type, and that, though they
are both immutable and indestructible, they can combine to form more complex
structures.

1839 - The English scientist Michael Faraday concludes from his work
on electromagnetism that, contrary to scientific opinion of the time, the divisions between
the various kinds of electricity are illusory. He also establishes that magnetism can affect
rays of light, and that there is an underlying relationship between the two phenomena.

1861 - The French scientist Louis Pasteurs experiments show that organisms such as
bacteria and fungi do not appear of their own accord in sterile nutrient-rich media,
suggesting that the long-held acceptance of the spontaneous generation of life from nonliving matter may be incorrect.

1864 - The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell demonstrates

that electric and magnetic fields travel through space in the form of waves at the
constant speed of light and that electricity, magnetism and even light are all
manifestations of electromagnetism. He collected together laws originally derived by Carl
Friedrich Gauss, Michael Faraday and Andr-Marie Ampre into a unified and consistent
theory (often known as Maxwells Equations).

1896 - The French physicist Henri Becquerel discovers that certain kinds of matter emit
radiation of their own accord (radioactivity).

1897 - The British physicist J. J. Thomson discovers the electron, the first known subatomic particle.

MODERN WORLD

1900 - The German physicist Max Planck suggests, while describing his law of black
bodyradiation, that light may be emitted in discrete frequencies or quanta, and
establishes the value of the Planck constant to describe the sizes of these quanta. This
is often regarded as marking the birth of quantum physics.

1905 - The German physicist Albert Einstein shows how the photoelectric effect is
caused by absorption of quanta of light (or photons), an important step in understanding
the quantum nature of light and electrons, and a strong influence on the formation of the
concept of wave-particle duality in quantum theory.

1905 - Albert Einstein publishes his Special Theory of Relativity, in which he generalizes
Galileo's Principle of Relativity (that all uniform motion is relative, and that there is no
absolute and well-defined state of rest) from mechanics to all the laws of physics, and
incorporates the principle that the speed of light is the same for all inertial
observers regardless of the state of motion of the source.

1905 - In a separate paper, Albert Einstein derives the concept of mass-energy

equivalence(that any mass has an associated energy) and his famous E = mc2 equation.

1907 - The German mathematician Hermann Minkowski realizes that Einsteins Special
Theory of Relativity can be best understood in a four-dimensional space, which he calls
space-time and in which time and space are not separate entities but intermingled in a
four-dimensionalspace.

1911 - The New Zealand chemist Ernest Rutherford interprets the 1909 experiments of
Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, establishing for the first time the planetary model of
the atom, where a central nucleus is circled by a number of tiny electrons like planets
around a sun.

1915 - The German physicist Karl Schwarzschild provides the first exact solution
to Einsteins field equations of general relativity (even before Einstein publishes the
theory) for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which leads to the
Schwarzschild radius which defines the size of the event horizon of a nonrotating black hole.

1916 - Albert Einstein publishes his General Theory

of Relativity, in which he unifies special relativity and
Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, and
describesgravity as a property of the curvature of
four-dimensionalspace-time. Objects (including
planets, like the Earth, for instance) fly freely under
their own inertia through warped space-time,
following curved paths because this is the shortest

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possible path in warped space.

1916 - The Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm examinesSchwarzschilds solution

to Einsteins field equations and points out that the equations theoretically allow for some
kind of invisible connection between two distinct regions of space-time (later to become
known as a wormhole).

1917 - Albert Einstein publishes a paper introducing the cosmological constant into
the General Theory of Relativity in an attempt to model the behaviour of the
entire universe, an idea he later called his greatest blunder but which, in the light of
recent discoveries, is beginning to look remarkably prescient.

1919 - Ernest Rutherford is credited with the discovery of the proton when he notices the
signatures of hydrogen nuclei when alpha particles are shot into nitrogen gas. In these
experiments, he also became the first person to transmute oneelement into another
(nitrogen into oxygen) through a deliberate man-made nuclear reaction.

1919 - The English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington uses his measurements of an eclipse
to confirm the deflection of starlight by the gravity of the Sun as predicted in Albert
EinsteinsGeneral Theory of Relativity.

1919 - The German mathematician Theodor Kaluza proposes the addition of a

fifth dimensionto the General Theory of Relativity, a precursor to much later superstring
theory attempts to combine general relativity and quantum theory. The Swedish physicist
Oskar Klein independently proposes a similar idea in 1926.

1922 - The Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin hypothesizes that life on Earth began
in a primeval soup of matter and water between 3.9 and 3.5 billion years ago, as
chemical reactions produced small organic molecules from substances present in the
atmosphere, which were then organized by chance into the more complex
organic molecules that are the basis of life.

1922 - The Russian cosmologist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann discovers

theexpanding universe solution to Einsteins general relativity field equations. The
solution for auniverse with positive curvature (spherical space) results in
the universe expanding for a time and then contracting due to the pull of its gravity, in a
perpetual cycle of Big Bang followed byBig Crunch now known as the oscillating
universe theory.

1925 - The American astronomer Edwin Hubble proves conclusively that nebulae such
as the Andromeda Nebula are much too distant to be part of the Milky Way and are in

fact entiregalaxies outside our own, thus settling the Great Debate about the nature of
spiral nebulae and the size of the universe.

1925 - The Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang

Pauli establishes an important quantum
mechanical principle known as the Pauli exclusion
principle, which states that no two identical fermions
(such as electrons) may occupy the same quantum
state simultaneously.

1926 - The German physicist Werner

Heisenbergformulates his uncertainty principle, that
the values of certain pairs of variables cannot both be
known exactly (i.e. the more precisely one variable is
known, the less precisely the other can be known), a
central concept inquantum physics.

1926 - The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrdingerpublishes what is now known as the
Schrdinger Equation, a central and revolutionary achievement inquantum physics.
Later, in 1935, he proposes the famous Schrdinger's Cat thought experiment or
paradox concerning quantum superposition,decoherence and entanglement.

1927 - The Belgian Roman Catholic priest and physicistGeorges Lematre proposes
(even before Hubbles corroborating evidence) that the universe is expanding, followed
in 1931 by the first definitive version of what has become known as the Big Bang theory
of the origin of the universe.

1928 - The British physicist Paul Dirac provides a description of the spin of elementary
particles such aselectrons which is consistent with both the principles ofquantum
mechanics and the Special Theory of Relativity, and predicts the existence of antimatter.

1929 - Edwin Hubble definitively shows that all thegalaxies in the universe are moving
away from us, according to a formula which has become known asHubbles Law,
showing that the universe is not in fact static, but expanding.

1932 - The English physicist James Chadwick discovers the neutron; the American
physicist Carl Anderson identifies the positron (the anti-electronwhich had been
predicted by Paul Dirac a few years earlier); and the British physicist John Cockcroft and
the Irish physicist Ernest Walton succeed in transmuting lithium into helium and other
chemical elements using high energy protons, popularly referred to as splitting
theatom.

1934 - The Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky and the German-American Walter
Baade coin the term supernova and hypothesize (correctly) that they are the transition
of normalstars into neutron stars, as well as the origin of cosmic rays. Zwicky also uses
the virial theorem to deduce the existence of unseen matter (what is now called dark
matter) in theuniverse, as well as the effect of gravitational lensing.

1935 - Albert Einstein and the Israeli physicist Nathan Rosen achieve a solution
to Einsteins field equations known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge (also known as a
Lorentzian wormhole or a Schwarzschild wormhole).

1935 - The Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar establishes

the Chandrasekhar limit of about 1.4 solar masses, above which a star must continue
to collapse into a neutron star rather than settling down into a white dwarf.

1939 - The discovery of nuclear fission results from the Berlin experiments of Otto Hahn,
Lise Meitner, Fritz Strassmann and Otto Frisch.

1948 - The English astronomer Fred Hoyle and the

Austrians Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi propose
a non-standard cosmology (i.e. one opposed to the
standard Big Bang model) known as the steady state
universe. This theory describes a universe that has
no beginning and no end, and that expands
continuously, but in which new matter is constantly
created and inserted as it expands in order to
maintain a constantdensity, so that its overall look does not change over time.

1953 - The experiments of the American biochemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey
(known as the Miller-Urey experiments) demonstrate the feasibility of producing basic
organic monomers such as amino acids from a highly reduced mixture of gases, in an
attempt to back up Alexander Oparins hypotheses on the origins of lifeon Earth.

1963 - The New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr discovers a solution

to Einsteins general relativity field equations which describes a spinning black hole, and
argues that these are likely to be common objects throughout the universe.

1965 - The American astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the
existence ofcosmic microwave background radiation, considered by most to be the best
evidence for theBig Bang model of the universe (and effectively disproving Hoyle et
als steady state universetheory).

1966 - The Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov outlines the three conditions necessary
for the observed matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe to be possible, and
hypothesizes aboutsingularities linking parallel universes.

1969 - The Murchison meteorite falls on Australia, revealing significant quantities of

organic compounds and amino acids (the basis of early life on Earth) which originated in
outer space.

1970 - The English physicist Stephen Hawking provides, along with Roger Penrose,
theorems regarding singularities in space-time, indicating that singularities and black
holes are actually a fairly generic feature of general relativity. He also predicts that black
holes should in theory emit radiation (known today as Hawking radiation) until they
eventually exhaust their energyand evaporate.

1980 - The American physicist Alan Guth proposes a model of the universe based on
the Big Bang, but incorporating a short, early period of exponential cosmic inflation in
order to solve the horizon and flatness problems of the standard Big Bang model.

1980 - The invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope, by the German Gerd
Binnig and the Swiss Heinrich Rohrer, shows visually for the first time that matter is
composed of spherical atoms stacked row on row.

1983 - The Russian-American physicist Andrei Linde

develops Guths cosmic inflation idea further with his
chaotic inflation (or eternal inflation) theory, which
sees our universe as just one of many
bubble universes that have developed as part of
a multiverse.

1984-6 - A series of important discoveries in string

theory leads to the first superstring revolution, and it
is first realized that string theory might be capable of describing all elementary
particles as well as the interactions between them.

1995 - The American theoretical physicist Edward Witten and others develop M-theory,
and spark a flurry of new research in string theory, sometimes called the
second superstring revolution.

1998 - Observations of distant Type 1a supernovas, both by the American astrophysicist

Saul Perlmutter and by the Australians Nick Suntzeff and Brian Schmidt, indicate that
they are actually further away from the Earth than expected, suggesting an accelerating
expansion of the universe.

2002 - The American physicist Paul Steinhardt and South African-British physicist Neil
Turok propose another variation of the inflating universe known as the cyclic model,
developed using state-of-the-art M-theory,superstring theory and brane cosmology,
which involves an inflating universe expanding and contracting in cycles.

Making Things (Meso)

Present-day mainstream computers are essentially two-dimensional. They are based on chips
that must be produced under exacting clean room conditions since any fault can be fatal to their
operation. If they are damaged, their loss of function is permanent.
Human brains differ in all those respects: they are three-dimensional, they are produced in
messy, loosely-controlled conditions, and they can work around faults or injuries. There are
strong incentives to achieve those features in systems that retain the density, speed, and
scalability of semiconductor technology, and there is no clear barrier to doing so. Thus, capable
three-dimensional, fault-tolerant, self-repairing computers will be developed in the next 100
years. In engineering those features, we will also learn lessons relevant to neurobiology.
In a similar vein, we may aspire to make body-like machines as well as brain-like computers.
We will develop self-assembling, self-reproducing, and autonomously creative machines. Their
design will adapt both ideas and physical modules from the biological world.
Making Things (Macro)
Combining those ideas, we will enable bootstrap engineering: Machines, starting from crude raw
materialsand with minimal human supervisionwill build other sophisticated machines. This
strategy can support exponentially ambitious projects, such as the conversion of vast deserts
into titanic computers (as imagined by Olaf Stapledon) and gigantic energy collectors (as
imagined by Freeman Dyson).
Freeman Dyson famously imagined Dyson spheres, whereby all or most of the energy of a
star would be captured by a surrounding shell or a cloud of interceptors, for use by an advanced
technological civilization. While that remains a distant prospect, the capture and use of a
substantial part of solar energy impinging on Earth may be a necessity for human civilization as
we wean ourselves from carbon fuels.
Fortunately, it seems eminently feasible that, within 100 years, we will channel a substantial
fraction of the suns ambient energy to our own purposes.