History of Physics
Twenty-six centuries of matter, motion, and light on one screen — the experiments, laws, and revolutions that revealed how the universe works.
Each star is a thinker or work; solid lines draw the constellation of a school, dashed threads the passage of ideas between eras.
Select any point on the timeline to read about it.
All entries by era
Ancient Physics 600 BCE – 500 CE
Greek natural philosophers seek the principles behind motion, matter, and the heavens; Archimedes turns statics and buoyancy into exact law.
- 624 BCE – 546 BCE
He noticed that rubbed amber attracts light bodies and that lodestone draws iron — the first recorded observations of electricity and magnetism.
- 384 BCE – 322 BCE
His Physics framed motion, cause, place, and the elements for two thousand years — a system so complete it had to be overthrown to move forward.
- 287 BCE – 212 BCE
He founded statics and hydrostatics, stating the law of the lever and the buoyancy principle that still bears his name.
- 100 CE – 170 CE
His Almagest gave a mathematical model of the heavens, and his Optics tabulated the refraction of light — quantitative physics of vision.
Medieval & Islamic Physics 500 CE – 1400 CE
Scholars from Cairo to Paris rebuild optics on experiment and question Aristotle's account of falling bodies and projectile motion.
- 965 CE – 1040 CE
His Book of Optics showed that vision works by light entering the eye and pioneered controlled experiment — a founder of the scientific method.
- 1301 CE – 1358 CE
His theory of 'impetus' held that a thrown body keeps an impressed force — a medieval step toward the modern concept of inertia and momentum.
The Scientific Revolution 1400 CE – 1700 CE
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton replace the closed cosmos with a mathematical universe governed by universal laws of motion.
- 1473 CE – 1543 CE
He placed the Sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the planetary system, setting off the revolution that remade physics and cosmology.
- 1543 CE
Published in the year of his death, this book moved the Earth into motion and gave astronomy a Sun-centred mathematical framework.
- 1564 CE – 1642 CE
By measuring falling and rolling bodies and turning the telescope on the sky, he made experiment and mathematics the language of physics.
- 1571 CE – 1630 CE
From Tycho Brahe's data he derived three laws of planetary motion, showing that orbits are ellipses obeying exact mathematical rules.
- 1629 CE – 1695 CE
He built the pendulum clock, worked out centripetal force, and proposed that light travels as a wave — a rival to Newton's corpuscles.
- 1643 CE – 1727 CE
His three laws of motion and universal gravitation unified the heavens and the Earth under one mathematics, founding classical physics.
- 1687 CE
Perhaps the most important book in the history of science: it stated the laws of motion and gravity and derived Kepler's laws from them.
Classical Mechanics 1700 CE – 1800 CE
Newtonian mechanics is recast in the powerful language of analysis, while the first laws of gases and electrostatics take shape.
- 1627 CE – 1691 CE
His experiments with the air-pump gave the first gas law relating pressure and volume, bridging physics and the new chemistry.
- 1736 CE – 1813 CE
His Analytical Mechanics recast Newton's laws as elegant equations derived from energy, a form still used across modern physics.
- 1736 CE – 1806 CE
With a torsion balance he measured the force between electric charges, giving electrostatics its precise inverse-square law.
Fields & Thermodynamics 1800 CE – 1900 CE
Heat, energy, electricity, and magnetism are unified into fields and conservation laws — Maxwell's equations crown classical physics.
- 1791 CE – 1867 CE
He discovered electromagnetic induction and introduced the idea of the field — invisible lines of force filling space around charges and magnets.
- 1796 CE – 1832 CE
His analysis of the ideal heat engine founded thermodynamics and revealed the deep limit on how much heat can become work.
- 1818 CE – 1889 CE
His precise experiments measured the mechanical equivalent of heat, establishing that energy is conserved as it changes form.
- 1831 CE – 1879 CE
He unified electricity, magnetism, and light in four equations, predicting electromagnetic waves and crowning classical physics.
- 1844 CE – 1906 CE
He explained heat and entropy as the statistics of countless moving atoms, founding statistical mechanics against fierce opposition.
- 1873 CE
Maxwell's masterwork laid out the complete field theory of electromagnetism, the foundation of all later electrical technology.
- 1897 CE
J. J. Thomson showed cathode rays are streams of tiny negatively charged particles — the first subatomic particle, opening the atomic age.
Relativity & Quantum 1900 CE – 1950 CE
Relativity remakes space and time; quantum theory remakes matter and light. The two deepest revolutions in the history of physics.
- 1858 CE – 1947 CE
To explain the glow of hot bodies he proposed that energy comes in discrete quanta — the reluctant birth of quantum theory in 1900.
- 1871 CE – 1937 CE
His gold-foil experiment revealed the tiny dense atomic nucleus, and he later achieved the first artificial transmutation of an element.
- 1879 CE – 1955 CE
In one 'miracle year' he explained the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity, then remade gravity as curved spacetime.
- 1885 CE – 1962 CE
His model of the atom with quantized electron orbits explained the spectral lines and shaped the philosophy of quantum mechanics.
- 1902 CE – 1984 CE
His relativistic equation for the electron predicted antimatter, uniting quantum mechanics with special relativity and founding quantum field theory.
- 1905 CE
Einstein's 1905 paper made the speed of light absolute and space and time relative, giving the famous relation between mass and energy.
- 1915 CE
Einstein's field equations recast gravity as the curvature of spacetime by mass and energy, predicting bending light and an evolving cosmos.
- 1925 CE – 1926 CE
Heisenberg's matrix mechanics and Schrödinger's wave equation gave quantum theory its full mathematics; uncertainty replaced classical certainty.
Particles & Cosmology 1950 CE – 2000 CE
The Standard Model orders the particle zoo while the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background, and black holes map the universe at large.
- 1889 CE – 1953 CE
He proved that galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way and are rushing apart, giving the first evidence of an expanding universe.
- 1918 CE – 1988 CE
His diagrams and formulation of quantum electrodynamics made the interaction of light and matter calculable to astonishing precision.
- 1942 CE – 2018 CE
He showed that black holes are not wholly black but slowly radiate, forging a deep link between gravity, quantum theory, and thermodynamics.
- 1964 CE
Penzias and Wilson detected the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, turning cosmology from speculation into an observational science.
- 1973 CE
A single quantum field theory brought quarks, leptons, and three forces into one framework — the most tested theory in all of physics.
Contemporary Physics 2000 CE – 2025 CE
Giant detectors confirm the Higgs boson and catch gravitational waves, opening a new era of precision and multi-messenger astronomy.
- 2012 CE
The Large Hadron Collider found the particle that gives mass to matter, completing the Standard Model nearly fifty years after its prediction.
- 2015 CE
LIGO caught ripples in spacetime from two merging black holes, confirming Einstein's century-old prediction and opening a new astronomy.
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