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A Brief History of Western Science

  • Period: Jan 1, 1564 to

    Classical Physics

    While discoveries about the nature of the physical world were being made long before these men, this is the beginning of the era in which the mathetmatically based physics we are familiar with today came into prominance.
  • The Earth recieves a demotion and the Sun a promotion.

    The Earth recieves a demotion and the Sun a promotion.
    Heliocentrism was a concept concieved much earlier than this period, but the work of Galileo is particularly noteworthy in the advancement of it. With his novel use of telescopes he was capable of acquiring new observations that refined and reinforced the notion that we weren't at the center of the universe. Galileo was also inarguably one of father's of modern science.
  • Falling Apples, Newton and Natural Law

    Falling Apples, Newton and Natural Law
    Newton solidified himself as one of the great intellectuals of history when he disappeared, only to return having developed a new form of mathematics and formulas that utilized it to explain the motions of matter.
  • The Birth of Modern Chemistry

    The Birth of Modern Chemistry
    While Alchemy was waning in popularity prior to this point, the death blow is likely to be the publication of Antoine Lavoisier's "Elements of Chemistry" in this year.
  • Biology Evolves

    Biology Evolves
    With the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" biology, and the sciences as a whole were revolutionized. The principle of natural selection had demonstrated to the world that complexity could arise out of smaller parts by simple logic, expanding the application of the physical sciences.
  • Period: to

    Modern Physics

  • Discovery of Radioactivity

    Discovery of Radioactivity
    The initial discovery of the release of energy from within matter. This had the consequence of spurring the idea that the atom was constitued by smaller pieces.
  • Things get strange... and stranger.

    Things get strange... and stranger.
    Max planck, together with Einstein, presented within the time frame of two decades some of the most upside down physics concepts ever. First with the birth of Quantum Theory and it's subsequent developement into the theory we know today. Then in 1906, the publishing of Einsteins papers on relativity. Physics was no longer the semi intuitive field of physical explanation, it was infact quite far outside of intuition now.