HackingTheUniverse

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Phlogiston theory was a failure and eventually shown to be false. It was based on the idea that any combustible substance contained an element known as phlogiston that was released during the burning process. This had historical roots in various theories of alchemy which generally included four elements: fire, water, air and earth. The first [...]

Pierre de Fermat was born in 1601 in France and was a mathematician. Fermat’s work on integrals paved the way for Newton and Liebnitz to create the foundation for calculus. Pascal and Fermat collaborated on the foundations of probability theory. But Fermat may be most famous for a simple equation known as “Fermat’s Last Theorem”. [...]

Marin Mersenne was born in France in 1588 and studied theology, philosophy, mathematics and music. He is known for some of the first major contributions to acoustics and for his work compiling a list of large prime numbers by using the form 2^p – 1 where p is a known prime number. [raise 2 to [...]

In 1698 Thomas Savery patented a steam powered pump which he called “the miner’s friend” because it was intended to help pump water out of mines. He may have copied the design from a previously published book by Edward Somerset. The device had no piston and almost no moving parts, working through the expansion and [...]

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1646 and became known primarily for his contributions to philosophy and mathematics but was also accomplished in many other fields. He created the modern binary number system that is used by computers and at the same time as Newton, invented calculus. PRECURSOR: Descartes Pascal Huygens CONCURRENT: [...]

Rene Descartes was born in France in 1596. He is known as “the father of modern philosophy” and also contributed to mathematics and general science. The cartesian coordinate system is named for him and he created analytic geometry. He also did some work in the field of optics, with both refraction and reflection. Prior to [...]

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France. He is mostly known as being an outstanding mathematician, but also was a physicist and philosopher. He made significant contributions to the areas of conic sections and projective geometry. Pascal’s triangle is a number matrix in the shape of a triangle with the numbers staggered so [...]

Niccolo Fontana was born in Brescia, Italy around 1500 and became known as Tartaglia, which was a knickname meaning stammerer; the result of sabre wounds to his jaw. In 1537 he wrote Nova Scienta, which applied mathematical principles to the trajectories of cannonballs. This work later influenced Galileo. He produced both some of the earliest [...]

Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 in Sweden. He was an astronomer and alchemist who is known for his contributions to astronomy. While he was probably the last astronomer to work mostly without a telescope, he revolutionized the use of precise instrumentation in astronomy. Because of this precision, he was able to discover and document [...]

Boyle’s law describes the inverse relationship between pressure and volume in gases. In a closed system if temperature stays constant and either pressure or volume increases, the other (pressure or volume) will decrease proportionally. PRECURSOR: barometer SUCCESSOR: Robert Hooke ideal gas law