HackingTheUniverse

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Simeon Denis Poisson was born in 1781 in France and was a mathematician and physicist. He did work with integrals, differential equations and fourier analysis that laid foundations for many mathematicians who came later. Poisson’s “Treatise on Mechanics”, published in 1811, included work not just on mechanics but also key equations describing electricity and magnetism. [...]

Bi Sheng was born around 0990 in China and created a printing press made of porcelain that was the first to use movable type. At first, he used small wood blocks for each character, but then refined his technique by using clay that was fired to harden the characters into small thin porcelain pieces. PRECURSOR: [...]

Fluid mechanics is the study of the behavior and dynamics of fluids, both at rest and in motion. In addition to liquids and metal liquids, fluid mechanics is also applied to gases (air flow in aerodynamics) and other fluids and fluid-like substances such as plasmas and plastics. Fluid mechanics can also be used in an [...]

al-Battani (Abu Abdallah Mohammad ibn Jabir Al-Battani) was born around 850 in Turkey (then Mesopotamia) and was a mathematician and astronomer. He advanced the accuracy of astronomical observations beyond that established in Ptolemy’s “Almagest”, including the motion of five planets and the length of our solar year. He catalogued 489 stars. He pioneered the use [...]

In the 1980s, searching for a planet orbiting another star seemed like an absurd effort to many astronomers. Then Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler developed a methodology for finding extrasolar planets. A planet orbiting a star causes a very small “wobble” in the rotation of the star. This wobble can be detected by measuring the [...]

Baudhayana lived some time around -0800 in India and contributed to appendices of the Vedic hymns known as Shulba Sutras. The Shulba Sutras were instructions on the design and construction of fire altars and contained geometric principles including the Pythagorean theorem and rules for constructing many geometric shapes. They included Pythagorean triples, calculations using decimals [...]

Louis de Broglie’s doctoral thesis in 1924, “Research on Quantum Theory” proposed a theory of electron waves that include the properties of both waves and particles. The wave-like component of the electron was confirmed by experiment in 1927 and de Broglie’s theory became accepted and generally known as wave-particle duality. PRECURSOR: 1630 – “Treatise on [...]

-0450 – Leucippus -0450 – Empedocles – “roots” (elements) -0400 – Democritus -0300 – Epicurus -0200 – Kanada 1789 – Lavoisier – conservation of mass 1799 – definite proportions (Proust) 1803 – atomic weights (Dalton) 1811 – Avogadro’s law 1838 – dark space (Faraday) 1855 – vacuum tube 1857 – Geissler tubes 1869 – periodic [...]

Thales was a Greek philosopher born around -0624. He may have been the first documented Greek mathematician and did a lot of work with geometry which seems to have been passed on through Anaximander to Pythagoras. Thales was one of the first Greek philosophers to attempt to explain how things work without invoking the gods [...]

Niels Henrik Abel was born in 1802 in Norway and became a mathematician. He tried and failed to find a solution for the quintic equation and then completed Ruffini’s incomplete proof that it could not always be solved using radicals. This is now known as Abel’s impossibility theorem or the Abel–Ruffini theorem. Jacobi and Abel [...]