Chronology of the History of Physics in the World
480 BC – Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera elaborate the atomistic hypothesis, which says that matter is made up of atoms – tiny, indivisible units.
335 BC – Aristotle formulates the geocentric system, according to which the Earth is fixed at the center of the universe, a theory later developed by Ptolemy.
295 BC – Euclid publishes the first studies on Optics.
250 BC – Archimedes of Syracuse founds hydrostatics – study of the balance of liquids – by discovering the principles of fluctuation and relative densities.
1543 – The Polish Nicolas Copernicus publishes On the Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies, where he explains the principles of heliocentrism.
1600 – The Englishman William Gilbert publishes De Magnete, marking the beginning of studies on electricity and magnetism.
1604 – Galileo presents the first statements for the laws of falling bodies in his work On Accelerated Motion.
1647 – Blaise Pascal, French, states the existence of atmospheric pressure in the Preface to the Treatise on the Vacuum.
1648 – Italian Evangelista Torricelli invents the barometer, an instrument that measures atmospheric pressure.
1648 – The Dutchman Willebrord Snellius discovers the law of refraction of light.
1667 – The Englishman Isaac Newton identifies the dispersion of light.
1676 – Frenchman Edme Mariotte and Irishman Robert Boyle enunciate the law of compressibility of gases, according to which the pressure of a gas is inversely proportional to the volume occupied.
1676 – Danish astronomer Ole Römer discovers that the speed of light is finite, calculating it at 225,000 km per second.
1687 – Newton publishes Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, in which he states the laws of inertia and universal gravitation.
1738 – Swiss Daniel Bernoulli publishes the first studies on the pressure and speed of fluids.
1761 – Englishman Joseph Black creates calorimetry, the quantitative study of heat.
1785 – Frenchman Charles Augustin de Coulomb enunciates the law of electrostatic forces, according to which “electric charges of opposite sign attract each other and those of equal sign repel each other”.
1799 – German Friedrich Herschel discovers the existence of infrared rays.
1801 – German Carl Ritter discovers ultraviolet rays.
1814 – Frenchman Augustin Fresnel begins to develop the wave theory of light.
1820 – Frenchman André-Marie Ampère formulates laws of electrodynamics; Pierre Laplace calculates the electromagnetic force; the Danish Hans Christian Oersted describes the deviation produced by electrical currents on the compass needle and definitively unites electricity and magnetism.
1821 – Englishman Michael Faraday discovers the foundations of electromagnetic induction.
1824 – Frenchman Nicolas Sadi Carnot publishes Réflexions Sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu, which would later constitute the basis of thermodynamics.
1827 – The German Georg Ohm formulates the law that relates potential, resistance and electric current.
1831 – Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction.
1842 – Christian Doppler, Austrian, formulates the bases of the Doppler effect, used in acoustics and astronomy.
1843 – The Englishman James Joule determines the amount of mechanical work necessary to produce a unit of heat.
1846 – German Ernest Weber builds the first electrodynamometer to measure the force of attraction between electrical charges.
1847 – German Hermann von Helmholtz enunciates the principle of conservation of energy.
1849 – The Englishman William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) creates the absolute thermometric scale.
1850 – German Rudolf Julius Clausius formulates the second principle of thermodynamics and the kinetic theory of gases.
– Frenchman Léon Foucault demonstrates the rotation of the Earth using a 67-meter pendulum.
1851 – German Franz Ernst Neumann formulates the law of electromagnetic induction.
– Kelvin formulates the laws of energy conservation and dissipation.
– Scotsman William Rankine defines potential energy and kinetic energy.
1852 – Englishman George Stokes formulates the law of fluorescence, observing the effect of ultraviolet light on quartz.
1860 – Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell demonstrates that the kinetic energy of molecules depends on their temperature.
1869 – Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann calculates the speed of molecules.
1873 – Dutchman Johannes van der Waals discovers the forces of attraction between atoms and molecules.
1880 – Philipp von Jolly, German, measures the variation in weight in relation to altitude.
1884 – The North American Thomas Edison makes the first electronic valve.
1887 – Americans Albert Michelson and Edward Williams Morley show the constancy of the speed of light.
1888 – Working separately, the German Heinrich Hertz and the Englishman Oliver Lodge conclude that radio waves belong to the same family as light waves (electromagnetic waves).
1890 – Frenchman Paul Villard identifies gamma rays.
– New Zealander Ernest Rutherford and Englishman Frederick Soddy conceptualize radioactive families.
1895 – German Wilhelm Röntgen discovers X-rays.
– Jean-Baptiste Perrin, French, demonstrates that cathode rays carry negative electricity.
1896 – Rutherford discovers alpha and beta rays produced in radioactive atoms.
– Frenchman Henri Becquerel discovers the radioactivity of uranium salts.
1900 – The German Max Planck formulates the Quantum theory.
1902 – Oliver Heaviside, Englishman, states that there is an atmospheric layer that favors the refraction of radio waves.
1905 – Lee de Forest, an American, invents the triode, an electronic valve with three elements.
– German Albert Einstein formulates the foundations of the theory of restricted relativity, the law of equivalence between mass and energy, the theory of Brownian motion and the theory of the photoelectric effect.
1906 – German Walter Hermann Nernst postulates the third law of thermodynamics.
1910 – Polish Marie Sklodowska Curie manages to isolate the metallic element radium.
1911 – North American Victor Hess discovers cosmic rays.
– Rutherford creates the first model of an atom with a “planetary” structure, composed of electrons that revolve around a nucleus.
1913 – The Danish Niels Bohr develops the quantum model of the atom.
– The Englishman James Frank and the German Gustav Hertz demonstrate the existence of energy levels within the atom.
– Englishman Frederick Soddy creates the term “isotope” to designate atoms that have the same atomic number, but different mass numbers.
1916 – Einstein publishes his final studies on the General Theory of Relativity.
1918 – Englishman Arthur Stanley Eddington experimentally confirms Einstein's general relativity with the observation of the 1918 solar eclipse.
1923 – The American Louis Bauer analyzes the Earth's magnetic field.
– Frenchman Louis de Broglie establishes a correspondence between wave and particle and formulates wave mechanics.
1925 – The North American Samuel Goldsmith and the Danish George Uhlenbeck define the spin of the electron.
– The Germans Werner Heisenberg and Ernst Jordan, the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger, the Danish Niels Bohr and the Englishman Paul Dirac formulate the new theory of quantum mechanics.
1927 – Italian Enrico Fermi gives a statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics.
– Heisenberg formulates the uncertainty principle, according to which the position and speed of particles cannot be known at the same time and with precision.
1928 – Germans Hans Geiger and Walter Müller invent the Geiger counter to measure radioactivity.
1929 – Einstein publishes his conclusions on unified field theory.
1930 – Dutchman Petrus Debye uses X-rays to investigate molecular structure.
1931 – North American Ernest Lawrence develops the cyclotron, an instrument for accelerating charged particles.
1932 – North American Robert van de Graaff builds the first electrostatic machine.
– North Americans Carl Anderson, Robert Millikan and Englishman James Chadwick discover the neutrino and the positron.
– Englishman John Cockcroft and Irishman Ernest Walton build a particle accelerator that allows the first nuclear reaction to take place.
1934 – Japanese Hideki Yukawa elaborates the theory of the existence of the meson.
– The French couple Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie discover artificial radioactivity.
– Fermi concludes that neutrons and protons are the same fundamental particles in different quantum states.
1936 – North American Carl Anderson discovers the positron.
– Italian Enrico Fermi bombards heavy chemical elements with neutrons, producing elements heavier than those existing in nature.
1938 – Germans Otto Hahn and Fritz Strasmann discover nuclear fission.
1941 – The Manhattan Project begins in the United States to build the atomic bomb.
1942 – Fermi coordinates, in Chicago (United States), the construction of the first nuclear reactor.
1945 – In July, the United States detonates the first atomic bomb in the Sonoran Desert (USA). In August, the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
1948 – North Americans John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shokley formulate the transistor theory and build the first models.
1950 – Albert Einstein expands the theory of relativity into general field theory.
1952 – The United States explodes the first hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean. The following year, it was the Soviet Union's turn.
1955 – The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the United States, produces the first ultrafast frequency waves.
1956 – The Los Alamos Laboratory, in the USA, detects the neutrino.
1967 – China explodes its first hydrogen bomb.
1982 – The first controlled nuclear fusion takes place, lasting 5 seconds, at 100,000 ºC, at Princeton University (United States).
1983 – The Geneva Nuclear Research Center, Switzerland, discovers a particle (the intermediate Z boson) that confirms the theory of the unification of the electromagnetic force with weak nuclear energy.
1986 – The German Georg Bednorz and the Swiss Karl Müller produce, with a ceramic alloy of various chemical elements, a “high” temperature superconductor, that is, a material that, at low temperatures, has zero electrical resistivity.
1986 – Ephraim Fishbach, an American, proposes the existence of a fifth force, the repulsive one, in addition to those already known: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational.
1988 – Physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the United States, claim to have proven the existence of the fifth force.
1989 – Englishman Martin Fleishmann and North-American Stanley Pons claim to have achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature: “cold” fusion. Soon after, Fleishmann admits to having been mistaken.
1996 – Scientists at the Particle Physics Laboratory release the news that they have managed to produce antimatter atoms.
Chronology of the History of Physics in Brazil
1858 – The Central School, formerly the Military Academy, is created, with a section studying physical and mathematical sciences.
1934 – The University of São Paulo (USP) implements its first research group, with Marcelo Dami de Souza Santos, Mário Schenberg and Paulus Aulus Pompéia, guided by Gleb Wataghin.
1944 – Joaquim Costa Ribeiro discovers the thermodielectric effect, known as the Costa Ribeiro effect.
1947 – César Lattes participates in the discovery of the meson.
1951 – Foundation of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, in São Paulo.
– Creation of the National Nuclear Energy Commission, in Rio de Janeiro.
1953 – Foundation of the Radiation Research Institute, in Minas Gerais.
1954 – Mário Schenberg discovers a process of energy loss in stars, through the emission of neutrinos, called the Urca effect.
1957 – The São Paulo Atomic Energy Institute was created.
1958 – Installation of the first nuclear reactor in Latin America, at the University of São Paulo (SP).
1959 – Jacques Danon and Argus Henrique Moreira design a new particle accelerator.
1967 – César Lattes proves his discovery of the “fireball” inside the atomic nucleus, an intermediate stage in the formation of new particles.
1968 – Creation of the Brazilian Physics Society.
– Installation of the Nuclear Energy Center for Agriculture, in Piracicaba (SP).
1974 – Signing of the Brazil-Germany Nuclear Agreement, which establishes the purchase of the Angra I nuclear plant, against which Brazilian physicists speak out.
1983 – Inauguration of the Angra I nuclear plant, in Angra dos Reis (RJ), the first in Brazil.
1989 – The largest particle accelerator in the country begins operating in Campinas (SP).
