saphria_eragon
What topics would be included on a paper titled A History of Physics?
My teacher did not state what was supposed in it. So give me some ideas of where to look.
What "grade" level? Jr high, High, college.....?
Here's a place to look for ideas......(but it only goes to the 1960's)
http://physics.eou.edu/history/timeline.htmlIt has the following:
Pre-1600
3rd century BC - Aristarchus proposes a heliocentric model
~150 Ptolemy publishes Almagest
1054 Chinese and American Indian astronomers observe the Crab supernova explosion
1100s First known written description of the use of lodestone as a compass
1512 Nicholas Copernicus first states his heliocentric theory in Commentariolus
1543 Nicholas Copernicus publishes De Revolutionibus de Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)
1572 Tycho Brahe observes the supernova that appears in Cassiopeia
1577 Tycho Brahe uses parallax to prove that comets are distant entities and not atmospheric phenomena
1589 Galileo Galilei uses balls rolling on inclined planes to show that different weights fall with the same constant acceleration
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1600s
1609 Johannes Kepler states his first two empirical laws of planetary motion
1609 Galileo Galilei builds his first telescope
1613 Galileo Galilei uses sunspots to demonstrate the rotation of the sun
1619 Johannes Kepler states his third empirical law of planetary motion
1621 Willebrord Snell states his law of refraction
1656 Christian Huygens builds the first highly accurate pendulum clock
1665 Isaac Newton deduces the inverse-square gravitational force law from the acceleration of the moon
1665 Isaac Newton invents his calculus
1668 John Wallis suggests the law of conservation of momentum
1673 Christian Huygens publishes his discovery that ac=v2/R
1675 Ole Romer uses the orbital mechanics of Jupiter's moons to estimate the speed of light
1678 Christian Huygens states his principle of wavefront sources
1684 Isaac Newton proves that planets moving under an inverse-square force law will obey Kepler's laws
1687 Isaac Newton publishes his Principia Mathematica
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1700s
1705 Edmond Halley predicts the periodicity of Halley's comet
1752 Benjamin Franklin shows that lightning is electricity
1767 Joseph Priestly proposes an electrical inverse-square law
1781 William Herschel discovers Uranus
1783 John Michell suggests that some objects might be so massive that not even light could escape
1785 Charles Coulomb introduces the inverse-square law of electrostatics
1798 Henry Cavendish measures the gravitational constant and determines the mass of the Earth
1798 Count Rumford has the idea that heat is a form of energy
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1800s
1800 Alessandro Volta announces his invention of the electric battery
1801 Thomas Young demonstrates the wave nature of light and the principle of interference
1820 Hans Oersted notices that a current in a wire can deflect a compass needle providing the first concrete evidence of the connection between electricity and magnetism
1820 Within a week after Oersted's discovery reached France, Ampere discovers that two parallel electic currents will exert forces on each other
1821 Michael Faraday builds an electricity-powered motor
1824 Sadi Carnot analyzes heat engines
1826 Simon Ohm states his law of electrical resistance
1827 Robert Brown discovers the Brownian motion
1831 Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction
1848 Lord Kelvin discovers the absolute zero point of temperature
1849 Joule publishes results from his series of experiments (including the paddlewheel experiment) which show that heat is a form of energy
1850 Fizeau and Foucault measure the speed of light in water and find that it is slower than in air, in support of the wave model of light
1859 Maxwell works out the mathematics of the distribution of velocities of the molecules of a gas
1864 James Maxwell publishes his papers on a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field
1873 James Maxwell states that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon
1874 Lord Kelvin formally states the second law of thermodynamics
1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley do not detect the ether drift
1887 Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect
1888 Heinrich Hertz discovers radio waves
1896 Antoine Becquerel discovers the radioactivity of uranium
1897 Joseph Thomson discovers the electron
1899 Ernest Rutheford discovers that uranium radiation is composed of positively charged alpha particles and negatively charged beta particles
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1900s
1900 Max Planck states his radiation law and Planck's constant
1905 Albert Einstein completes his theory of special relativity
1913 Niels Bohr presents his first quantum model of the atom
1913 Robert Millikan measures the fundamental unit of charge
1915 Albert Einstein completes his theory of general relativity
1927 Werner Heisenberg states the quantum uncertainty principle
1929 Edwin Hubble discovers the expansion of the universe
1932 James Chadwick discovers the neutron
1932 Carl Anderson discovers the positron
1933 Wolfgang Pauli proposes the existence of neutrinos to account for an apparent violation of energy conservation in certain nuclear reactions
1958 Charles Townes invents the laser
1963 Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig propose the quark/aces model
1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the 3K background radiation