The Greatest Discoveries that Changed Science Forever

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The Greatest Discoveries that Changed Science Forever

By Joe Burgett - November 16, 2020

Astronomy

Year(s) Officially Discovered: Between 5,000 to 2,000 B.C.
Discovery Put Into Action: Immediately
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Eratosthenes, Claudius Ptolemy, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, Galileo Galilei, Giovanni Cassini, Isaac Newton, Christiaan Huygens, Edmond Halley, Charles Messier, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Henrietta Swann Leavitt, William Herschel, Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein, Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking

We should first reference that Astrology and Astronomy are not the same things. However, they used to be heavily connected and you could claim they were the same thing for centuries. Yet we eventually separated from this to create two different fields. A lot of people are to thank for Astronomy today, especially as it began to enter the world of Astrophysics. It seems that the major change and separation happened in the late B.C. era and by the ADs, Astronomy was a huge scientific field.

That is where you see the likes of Newton, Halley, Kepler, Hubble, Hawking, and Einstein come into play. To them, anything related to space overall as well as a lot of the things having to do with the planet was connected to Astronomy. In the original meaning, Astronomy was merely the study of the stars. This clearly expanded and allowed us to see some of the most critical things related to life, how we’re here, what keeps us here, plus much much more.

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Probability & Statistics

Year(s) Officially Discovered: The 16th Century Roughly, But Forms Of Both Go Back To Ancient Greece
Discovery Put Into Action: Immediately
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: [Probability]Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat, Christiaan Huygens, Jakob Bernoulli, Abraham de Moivre, Pierre de Laplace, A. Kolmogorov [Statistics] Al-Khalil, Ibn Adlan, Giovanni Villani, Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, William Sealy Gosset, Roger Cotes, Tobias Mayer, Roger Joseph Boscovich, William Playfair, Florence Nightingale, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Ronald Fisher, Egon Pearson, Jerzy Neyman, Charles Spearman

Several people contributed to both Probability & Statistics. While the two are both different forms of mathematics, they are essentially something that goes beyond math itself. Since they can be applied to so many things on a specific level, they are key to numerous areas of science, politics, and much more. They are not the exact same thing, but they work very well together which is why they are often looped.

You need probability to make a lot of statistical analysis work, so they must be connected a lot. That said, they were discovered at different points. Probability would not come about until the 17th Century officially while Statistics, as we know them today, was not discovered until the 19th Century. Their co-mingling has led to several advancements in numerous areas, and it’s all thanks to the people we referenced above. Clearly, these are some of the greatest discoveries ever.

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Biology

Year(s) Officially Discovered: Between 384-322 B.C.
Discovery Put Into Action: By The Late B.C. Era
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Ancient Greeks, Ancient Egyptians, Aristotle

Biology, in the way we know it today, is a natural science that studies life and all living organisms. This includes their molecular structure, physical structure, physiological mechanisms, chemical processes, and overall development/evolution. In Biology, the cell is the basic unit of life, genes, and all known things that allowed for the creation & evolution of all species. While Ancient Greeks & Egyptians were the first to do any studies on numerous areas of Biology, they did not invent it.

Rather, the person most responsible for the invention of Biology is the great teacher himself, Aristotle. He began writing about Biology in the 300s B.C. era. His first write-up on Biological material was his book on the History of Animals. In it, he focused on biological causation and the diversity of life in general. His work would, obviously, be added to extensively over the next few thousand years. Yet without him, a lot of our initial biological knowledge might have taken far longer to come along.

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Mechanics (Early Engineering)

Year(s) Officially Discovered: 8,000 to 5,000 B.C.
Discovery Put Into Action: Immediately
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Aristotle, Archimedes of Syracuse, Leonardo da Vinci, Heron of Alexandria, Issac Newton, Richard Arkwright, Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Nikola Tesla, Karl Benz, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, Zhang Heng

Mechanics of any kind date back thousands of years, all the way to some of the first Ancient Societies. Some first cities like Jericho were completely invested in mechanics. In fact, Jericho’s historic wall had sections where you had to lower a portion so people could get in and out. That takes a level of mechanical or engineering knowledge. While they were huge in the field, several other Ancient societies were too. Most notably, the Ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Egyptians.

Mechanics and early engineering are connected heavily to physics, which is an area of study with numerous amazing scientists involved. Yet those who truly stood out in mechanics overall include the likes of Aristotle, Archimedes of Syracuse, Leonardo da Vinci, Heron of Alexandria, Issac Newton, Richard Arkwright, as well as numerous inventors of some of our most notable tech. Galileo, Kepler, Einstein, and so many others helped us even perfect the industry to what we see today.

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Optics

Year(s) Officially Discovered: Early 11th Century
Discovery Put Into Action: Almost Immediately
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Kitab al-manazir, Albert Einstein, Issac Newton, Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, Roger Bacon, Joseph Priestley, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Lister, Peter Barlow, Lord Ralyeigh

When you hear about “optics,” many think of it as what we see. But rather, it is from the realm of physics and has to do with the behavior and properties of light itself, as well as its interaction with matter & the construction of instruments used to detect it. Specifically, optics target the visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Of course, light is connected to electromagnetic waves, therefore, it is connected to electromagnetic radiation such as x-rays, microwaves, and radio waves.

We utilize optical knowledge to develop scopes for guns, eyeglasses, and even cameras. We figured out a long time ago how light operates with other properties like crystal and even glass. Due to this, we are able to make devices that, in a way, manipulate light to give us things we view other things through. However, lasers are also born from optics knowledge as they too have to use some form of light to operate. From the non-lethal light version to those used in surgeries, all optic-connected.

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Linguistics

Year(s) Officially Discovered: Roughly, the 19th Century
Discovery Put Into Action: Most Work In The Field Began By The 1970s/80s
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Noam Chomsky

Some might assume that Linguistics is as old as writing or discussion, yet it’s not. However, it is one of our greatest discoveries and essentially inventions. Linguistics happens to be the study of language, full stop. Yet this study involves a lot of things, such as language form, meaning, and context. It also involves the analysis of how language is used in social, anthropological, historical, and political sectors. It is especially concerned with how language influences others.

Traditionally, a specific Linguist would study how humans interact by observing the relationship between sound and the meaning behind it. Linguistic knowledge has given us critical information regarding these connections, such as the field of semantics, sarcasm, and the principle discipline of pragmatics. Then you have theoretical linguists who try to understand patterns and structures that allow them to describe something specific. Such as a person’s true belief versus a lie.

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Economics

Year(s) Officially Discovered: 1776
Discovery Put Into Action: Almost Immediately
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Ancient Greeks & Egyptians, Adam Smith

Economics is truly a huge field and likely one of our greatest discoveries ever. Unlike others on this list, it is connected to the world of social science rather than natural science. It involves the study of how people interact with value overall. That includes production, distribution, and even consumption of goods and services. Economists tend to study how the behavior and interactions of economic agents & economics in general connect.

This can involve the larger world of economics (Macroeconomics) such as how the world handles trade, tariffs, GDP, labor, land, capital, inflation, economic growth, etc. Meanwhile, in Microeconomics, you’ll study the household, firms, buying and selling, etc. It was Adam Smith, the Father of Capitalism, that truly helped us separate Economics as its own thing. While the Ancient Greeks & Egyptians understood the basics of it, Smith was truly the pioneer of what we connect to economics today.

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White Light Spectrum Is A Mixture Of Distinct Colored Rays

Year(s) Officially Discovered: 1666
Discovery Put Into Action: It took over 100 more years
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Issac Newton

People often miss the fact that a lot of major inventions and discoveries came out of the greatest discoveries ever by Issac Newton. He found that the white light spectrum is a mixture of distinct colored rays. We know that might seem like gibberish, but this is what it means. Using a prism, Newton was able to find that the red light deviated consistently less than the violet light, which is pretty big.

It meant that when white light passes through something transparent (such as air), into another (such as glass), light components are deflected for the first time all based on color. The same occurs when they reemerge. That, in turn, makes colored light rays from red to violet. From this, Newton developed the White Light Spectrum, which consists of the colors red, orange, green, blue, & violet. In spite of his work, Newton did not know why it did this. Thomas Young would come into play 100 years later to give us the answer.

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New Form Of Stainless Steel & Electromagnetic Induction Discovered By The Same Man

Year(s) Officially Discovered: 1820 & 1831 Respectively
Discovery Put Into Action: Almost Immediately
Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Michael Faraday & James Stoddart (only for the steel)

Michael Faraday is one of the world’s greatest inventors, yet he also discovered a lot of important things too. One of the first he along with James Stoddart found was massive. The two discovered that alloying iron with chromium will produce a form of stainless steel that is resistant to oxidizing elements (basically, rust). This was huge and became a staple for several knives and other cutlery that we use today both outdoors and indoors. That’s along with a wide variety of other things too.

Alone, Faraday found that the production of an electromotive force across an electric conductor will change the magnetic field. This became known as electromagnetic induction and helped to give rise to numerous machines that Faraday would later be credited with creating. Moreover, his work pioneered what we see in mechanics and engineering, as this helped us form motors. Basically, all travel we know today is thanks to Faraday’s work. Clearly, these are some of the greatest discoveries of all time.

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