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Asked by epsilon465 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 20 Jun 2013.
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Kate Husband answered on 20 Jun 2013:
I think Einstein’s 4 1905 papers was a pretty major shake up of physics. In those papers was:
– special relativity (states the speed of light is a constant and so there is no ether(i.e. space is empty) and led on the theory of general relativity which explains gravity)
– the photoelectric effect (the first idea that things could be dividing up into little bits and the beginning of quantum mechanics)
– Brownian motion (so the idea that atoms are what make tiny bits of pollen in liquid shake around and hence the first indirect evidence of an atom)
– E=mc2 (the idea that matter is a form of energy and hence nuclear bomb/nuclear power was possible).Pretty good going for a guy not working as a scientist at the time!
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Sam Geen answered on 20 Jun 2013:
I’d go earlier than Kate and say Newton’s work was the most important. Newton’s 3 laws established modern physics, and allowed us to understand nearly everything that happens in the world. Relativity and quantum mechanics are important, but they only happen in extreme cases. Everything from bacteria moving about to weather forecasting to galaxies colliding uses Newton’s laws. Without these, we wouldn’t understand very much at all about the universe around us.
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Matthew Pankhurst answered on 21 Jun 2013:
I think even earlier – Aristotle who lived 2400 years ago was probably the first to invent the scientific method itself. This was at a time when people explain things around them with superstition and religion only, so it was a major breakthrough in using the human mind in an ordered way. This has lead to science being the most important way of developing as a species.
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Robert Woolfson answered on 22 Jun 2013:
I think Kate, Matt and Sam have covered the big three so I’m going to go for a slightly different breakthrough and say that Robert Boyle publishing the Sceptical Chymist in 1661. Boyle was a very eminent chemist and philosopher and this book represented the first clear break between the art of alchemy and the science of chemistry.
For modern chemists, whether they’ve read it or not, this book is probably one of the most important ever published. In it, he laid the foundations for the theory of chemistry as molecules, for modern study of chemical reactions and argued strongly for chemistry as a science in it’s own right.
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