Timeline of scientific experiments - Definition and Overview

The timeline below shows the date of publication of major scientific experiments.

See also timeline of scientific discoveries, timeline of technological discoveries, list of timelines of science and technology, list of famous experiments.

• 240 BC - Eratosthenes measures the earth's circumference

• 16?? - Galileo Galilei use rolling balls to disprove the Aristotelian theory of motion
• 1609 - Galileo Galilei observes moons of Jupiter in support of the heliocentric model
• 1665 - Robert Hooke, using a microscope, observes cells
• 1676 - Ole Rømer measures the speed of light for the first time.

• 1798 - Henry Cavendish: Torsion bar experiment to measure the gravitational constant
• 1796 - Edward Jenner tests the first vaccine

• 1801 - Thomas Young: double-slit experiment showing wave-particle duality
• 1820 - Hans Christian Orsted discovers the connection of electricity and magnetism
• 1843 - James Prescott Joule measures the equivalence between mechanical work and heat, resulting in the law of conservation of energy
• 1845 - Christian Doppler demonstrates the Doppler shift
• 1851 - Léon Foucault uses Foucault pendulum is to demonstrate the rotation of the earth
• 1861 - Louis Pasteur disproves the theory of spontaneous generation
• 1863 - Gregor Mendel's pea plant experiments (Mendel's laws of inheritance)
• 1887 - Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect
• 1887 - Michelson and Morley: Michelson-Morley experiment, showing that the speed of light is invariant
• 1896 - Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity
• 1897 - Joseph John Thomson discovers the electron

• 1909 - Robert Millikan: oil-drop experiment which suggests that electric charge occurs as quanta (the electron)
• 1911 - Ernest Rutherford's gold foil experiment determines the shape of the atom
• 1911 - Onnes: superconductivity
• 1919 - Arthur Eddington: Our sun as gravitational lens, a proof of the Theory of relativity
• 1920 - Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach conduct the Stern-Gerlach experiment, which demonstrates particle spin
• 1920 - John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner conduct the Little Albert experiment
• 1928 - Griffith's experiment shows that living cells can be transformed via a transforming principle, later discovered to be DNA
• 1934 - Enrico Fermi splits the atom
• 1940 - Karl von Frisch decodes the "dance" honeybees use to communicate the location of flowers
• 1944 - Barbara McClintock breeds maize plants for color, which leads to the discovery of jumping genes
• 1947 - John Bardeen and Walter Brittain fabricate the first working transistor

• 1951 - Solomon Asch shows how group pressure can persuade an individual to conform to an obviously wrong opinion
• 1952 - Alfred Hersey & Martha Chase: Hershey-Chase experiment proves that DNA is the hereditary material
• 1953 - Stanley L. Miller & Harold C. Urey: Miller-Urey experiment demonstrates that organic compounds can arise spontaneously from inorganic ones
• 1955 - Clyde L. Cowan and Frederick Reines confirm the existence of the neutrino in the neutrino experiment
• 1958 - Meselson-Stahl experiment proves that DNA replication is semiconservative
• -1960 _ B.F. Skinner's demonstrations of operant conditioning
• 1961 - Crick, Brenner et al. experiment
• 1961 - Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment
• 1964 - Nirenberg and Leder experiment
• 1965 - Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson: Cosmic microwave background radiation, evidence of the Big Bang
• 1970 - Allan and Beatrice Gardner' teach American Sign Language to the chimpanzee Washoe
• 1974 - Stanley Milgram: Milgram experiment on obedience to authority
• 1995 - Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman synthesize Bose-Einstein condensate
• 2002 - Raymond Davis Jr. & Masatoshi Koshiba: detection of cosmic neutrinos, showing that neutrinos have a mass