Top Science Discoveries
Try to imagine life without antibiotics. We wouldn’t live nearly as long as we do
without them. Here’s a look at some discoveries that have changed the world.
It’s impossible to rank their importance, so they’re listed in the order they
were discovered.
The Copernicum System
In 1543, while on his deathbed, Polish astronomer Nicholas
Copernicus published his theory that the Sun is a
motionless body at the center of the solar system, with the planets revolving
around it. Before the Copernicum system was introduced, astronomers believed
the Earth was at the center of the universe.
Gravity
Isaac Newton, an English
mathematician and physicist, is considered the greatest scientist of all time.
Among his many discoveries, the most important is probably his law of universal
gravitation. In 1664, Newton figured out that gravity is the force that draws
objects toward each other. It explained why things fall down and why the
planets orbit around the Sun.
Electricity
If electricity makes life easier for us, you can thank Michael Faraday. He made two big
discoveries that changed our lives. In 1821, he discovered that when a wire
carrying an electric current is placed next to a single magnetic pole, the wire
will rotate. This led to the development of the electric motor. Ten years
later, he became the first person to produce an electric current by moving a
wire through a magnetic field. Faraday's experiment created the first
generator, the forerunner of the huge generators that produce our electricity.
Evolution
When Charles Darwin, the British
naturalist, came up with the theory of evolution in 1859, he changed our idea
of how life on earth developed. Darwin argued that all organisms evolve, or
change, very slowly over time. These changes are adaptations that allow a
species to survive in its environment. These adaptations happen by chance. If a
species doesn't adapt, it may become extinct. He called this process natural selection, but it is often called the
survival of the fittest.
Louis Pasteur
Before French chemist Louis Pasteur began experimenting
with bacteria in the 1860s, people did not know what caused disease. He not
only discovered that disease came from microorganisms, but he also realized
that bacteria could be killed by heat and disinfectant. This idea caused
doctors to wash their hands and sterilize their instruments, which has saved
millions of lives.
Theory of Relativity
Albert Einstein’s theory of special
relativity, which he published in 1905, explains the relationships between
speed, time and distance. The complicated theory states that the speed of light
always remains the same—186,000 miles/second (300,000 km/second) regardless of
how fast someone or something is moving toward or away from it. This theory
became the foundation for much of modern science.
The Big Bang Theory
Nobody knows exactly how the universe came into existence, but
many scientists believe that it happened about 13.7 billion years ago with a
massive explosion, called the Big Bang. In 1927, Georges Lemaître proposed the Big
Bang theory of the universe. The theory says that all the matter in the
universe was originally compressed into a tiny dot. In a fraction of a second,
the dot expanded, and all the matter instantly filled what is now our universe.
The event marked the beginning of time. Scientific observations seem to confirm
the theory.
Penicillin
Antibiotics are powerful drugs that kill dangerous bacteria in
our bodies that make us sick. In 1928, Alexander Flemingdiscovered the first
antibiotic, penicillin, which he grew in his lab using mold and fungi. Without
antibiotics, infections like strep throat could be deadly.
DNA
On February 28, 1953, James Watson of the United States and Francis
Crick of England made one of the greatest scientific
discoveries in history. The two scientists found the double-helix structure of
DNA. It’s made up of two strands that twist around each other and have an
almost endless variety of chemical patterns that create instructions for the
human body to follow. Our genes are made of DNA and determine how things like
what color hair and eyes we’ll have. In 1962, they were awarded the Nobel Prize
for this work. The discovery has helped doctors understand diseases and may
someday prevent some illnesses like heart disease and cancer.
