Scientists — Influence Network

Placed the Sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the cosmos, setting off the scientific revolution.

• → Influenced: Johannes Kepler
• → Influenced: Galileo Galilei

Turned Copernicus's circles into elliptical laws of planetary motion, uniting observation with mathematics.

• ← Influenced: Nicolaus Copernicus
• → Built on: Isaac Newton

Turned the telescope to the heavens and founded the experimental study of motion — the father of modern science.

• ← Influenced: Nicolaus Copernicus
• → Built on: Isaac Newton
• → Influenced: Robert Boyle

United terrestrial and celestial motion under universal gravitation, giving science its first grand mathematical system.

• ← Built on: Johannes Kepler
• ← Built on: Galileo Galilei
• → Influenced: Charles Darwin
• → Built on: Ludwig Boltzmann

Discovered electromagnetic induction and the field concept, turning electricity into a practical and theoretical science.

• → Built on: James Clerk Maxwell

Compressed all of electromagnetism into four equations and predicted that light itself is an electromagnetic wave.

• ← Built on: Michael Faraday
• → Influenced: Ludwig Boltzmann
• → Influenced: Max Planck
• → Influenced: Albert Einstein

Explained heat and entropy through the statistics of atoms, founding statistical mechanics.

• ← Built on: Isaac Newton
• ← Influenced: James Clerk Maxwell
• → Influenced: Max Planck
• → Influenced: Albert Einstein

Proposed that energy comes in discrete quanta to explain radiation — the reluctant birth of quantum theory.

• ← Influenced: James Clerk Maxwell
• ← Influenced: Ludwig Boltzmann
• → Influenced: Albert Einstein
• → Influenced: Niels Bohr

Discovered the atomic nucleus and split the atom, becoming the father of nuclear physics.

• ← Influenced: Marie Curie
• → Built on: Niels Bohr

Relativity remade space, time, and gravity; his quantum work he later mistrusted, sparking a lifelong debate.

• ← Influenced: James Clerk Maxwell
• ← Influenced: Ludwig Boltzmann
• ← Influenced: Max Planck
• → Reacted against: Niels Bohr

Quantised the atom and championed the interpretation of quantum mechanics that Einstein resisted.

• ← Influenced: Max Planck
• ← Built on: Ernest Rutherford
• ← Reacted against: Albert Einstein

Separated chemistry from alchemy and framed the law relating a gas's pressure and volume.

• ← Influenced: Galileo Galilei
• → Influenced: Antoine Lavoisier

The father of modern chemistry: named oxygen, overturned phlogiston, and established conservation of mass.

• ← Influenced: Robert Boyle
• → Built on: John Dalton
• → Built on: Louis Pasteur

Revived atomism as a quantitative theory, assigning relative weights to the atoms of the elements.

• ← Built on: Antoine Lavoisier
• → Built on: Dmitri Mendeleev

Arranged the elements into the periodic table and boldly predicted the properties of ones not yet discovered.

• ← Built on: John Dalton
• → Influenced: Marie Curie

Discovered polonium and radium and pioneered the study of radioactivity, winning Nobel Prizes in two sciences.

• ← Influenced: Dmitri Mendeleev
• → Influenced: Ernest Rutherford

Natural selection gave life a history without design, unifying all of biology under a single principle.

• ← Influenced: Isaac Newton
• → Influenced: Gregor Mendel

His pea-plant experiments uncovered the laws of inheritance, founding the science of genetics.

• ← Influenced: Charles Darwin

Established the germ theory of disease and pioneered vaccination and pasteurisation.

• ← Built on: Antoine Lavoisier