Timeline of scientific discoveries

* 1824 - Carnot: described the Carnot cycle, the idealized heat engine

* 1827 - Georg Ohm: Ohm's law (Electricity)

* 1833 - Anselme Payen isolates first enzyme, diastase

* 1838 - Matthias Schleiden: all plants are made of cells

* 1843 - James Prescott Joule: Law of Conservation of energy (First law of thermodynamics), also 1847 - Helmholtz, Conservation of energy

* 1846 - William Morton: discovery of anesthesia

* 1848 - Lord Kelvin: absolute zero of temperature

* 1858 - Rudolf Virchow: cells can only arise from pre-existing cells

* 1859 - Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace: Theory of evolution by natural selection

* 1865 - Gregor Mendel: Mendel's laws of inheritance, basis for genetics

* 1869 - Dmitri Mendeleev: Periodic table

* 1873 - Maxwell: Theory of electromagnetism

* 1875 - William Crookes invented the Crookes tube and studied cathode rays

* 1876 - Josiah Willard Gibbs founded chemical thermodynamics, the phase rule

* 1877 - Boltzmann: Statistical definition of entropy

* 1895 - Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers x-rays

* 1897 - J.J. Thomson discovers the electron in cathode rays

[edit] 20th century

* 1900 - Max Planck: Planck's law of black body radiation, basis for quantum theory

* 1905 - Albert Einstein: special theory of relativity, explanation of Brownian motion, and photoelectric effect

* 1906 - Walther Nernst: Third law of thermodynamics

* 1912 - Alfred Wegener: Continental drift

* 1912 - Max von Laue : x-ray diffraction

* 1913 - Henry Moseley: defined atomic number

* 1913 - Niels Bohr: Model of the atom

* 1915 - Albert Einstein: general theory of relativity - also David Hilbert

* 1918 - Emmy Noether: Noether's theorem - conditions under which the conservation laws are valid

* 1924 - Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle

* 1925 - Erwin Schrödinger: Schrödinger equation (Quantum mechanics)

* 1927 - Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty principle (Quantum mechanics)

* 1927 - Georges Lemaître: Theory of the Big Bang

* 1928 - Paul Dirac: Dirac equation (Quantum mechanics)

* 1929 - Edwin Hubble: Hubble's law of the expanding universe

* 1929 - Lars Onsager's reciprocal relations: also called Fourth law of thermodynamics

* 1943 - Oswald Avery proves that DNA is the genetic material of the chromosome

* 1947 - William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invent the first transistor

* 1948 - Claude Elwood Shannon: 'A mathematical theory of communication' a seminal paper in Information theory.

* 1951 - George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa

* 1953 - Crick and Watson: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology

* 1964 - Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson: confirming experimental evidence for the Big Bang

* 1965 - Richard Feynman: Quantum electrodynamics

* 1965 - Leonard Hayflick: normal cells divide only a certain number of times: the Hayflick limit

* 1967 - Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discover first pulsar

* 1984 - Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction, a key discovery in molecular biology

* 1995 - Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz definitively observe the first extrasolar planet around a main sequence star

* 1997 - Ian Wilmut. In 2006 he admitted, under oath, in a Scottish court that he did not create the first mammal cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer, Dolly the sheep

[edit] 21st century

* 2001 - The first draft of the human genome is completed.