Famous Scientists and Discoveries
81 flashcards by MentisLibrary
Who figured out what, and when. Newton, Curie, Darwin, Rutherford, Salk, and dozens more, each paired with the discovery that changed our understanding of the world.
- Who formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation?
- Isaac Newton
- Who developed the theory of general relativity?
- Albert Einstein
- Whose 1905 explanation of the photoelectric effect won a Nobel Prize?
- Albert Einstein
- Who proposed evolution by natural selection in On the Origin of Species?
- Charles Darwin
- Who independently conceived natural selection, prompting Darwin to publish?
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- Who discovered penicillin from a contaminated culture plate?
- Alexander Fleming
- Who discovered the elements polonium and radium?
- Marie Curie (with Pierre Curie)
- Who proposed the double-helix structure of DNA?
- James Watson and Francis Crick
- Whose X-ray image 'Photo 51' was crucial to solving DNA's structure?
- Rosalind Franklin
- Who placed the Sun at the center of the universe in De revolutionibus?
- Nicolaus Copernicus
- Who first observed the four largest moons of Jupiter through a telescope?
- Galileo Galilei
- Who formulated the three laws of planetary motion?
- Johannes Kepler
- Who discovered electromagnetic induction?
- Michael Faraday
- Whose equations unified electricity, magnetism, and light?
- James Clerk Maxwell
- Who developed germ theory and the process now called pasteurization?
- Louis Pasteur
- Who created the first rabies vaccine used on a human?
- Louis Pasteur
- Who pioneered vaccination by using cowpox to protect against smallpox?
- Edward Jenner
- Whose pea-plant experiments founded the science of genetics?
- Gregor Mendel
- Who created the periodic table and predicted undiscovered elements?
- Dmitri Mendeleev
- Who discovered the electron?
- J. J. Thomson
- Who discovered the atomic nucleus with the gold-foil experiment?
- Ernest Rutherford
- Who discovered the neutron?
- James Chadwick
- Who introduced the idea that energy is emitted in discrete quanta?
- Max Planck
- Who proposed the model of the atom with electrons in fixed orbits?
- Niels Bohr
- Who formulated the uncertainty principle?
- Werner Heisenberg
- Whose wave equation became the foundation of quantum mechanics?
- Erwin Schrödinger
- Who predicted the existence of antimatter?
- Paul Dirac
- Who discovered the positron, confirming antimatter exists?
- Carl Anderson
- Who provided the theoretical explanation of nuclear fission?
- Lise Meitner (with Otto Frisch)
- Who built the first self-sustaining nuclear reactor?
- Enrico Fermi