Babylonian astronomers systematize the sky
Late Babylonian scribes kept centuries of systematic records of celestial positions and developed mathematical schemes to predict lunar and planetary phenomena.
Humanity
115 events across three thousand years — chosen to be multi-regional and honest about uncertainty. Follow a thread to trace one capability through time, or filter by region and kind.
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The Pythagorean program: number as structure
Pythagoras' school at Croton linked musical harmony to simple ratios and proposed that mathematical relations underlie nature.
Euclid's Elements
Euclid organized Greek geometry into axioms, definitions and proven theorems — one of the most reprinted books in history.
Al-Khwarizmi writes al-jabr
Al-Khwarizmi systematized solving equations in The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, and popularized Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Copernicus moves the Earth
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium proposed that the Earth orbits the Sun, published as its author lay dying.
Galileo turns the telescope skyward
With a Dutch toy rebuilt at higher power, Galileo saw Jupiter's moons, lunar mountains and the phases of Venus, published in Sidereus Nuncius.
Newton's Principia Mathematica
Newton showed that one mathematical law of gravitation governs falling apples and orbiting moons — with the calculus-like methods to prove it.
Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species
Darwin proposed that species change over generations through variation and selection — design without a designer, accumulated small steps.
Einstein rewrites space and time
In one miraculous year Einstein explained the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity; a decade later general relativity curved spacetime itself around mass.
The double helix
Watson and Crick proposed the double-helix structure of DNA, crucially informed by Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction images.
Chronology
Babylonian astronomers systematize the sky
Late Babylonian scribes kept centuries of systematic records of celestial positions and developed mathematical schemes to predict lunar and planetary phenomena.
The Pythagorean program: number as structure
Pythagoras' school at Croton linked musical harmony to simple ratios and proposed that mathematical relations underlie nature.
Euclid's Elements
Euclid organized Greek geometry into axioms, definitions and proven theorems — one of the most reprinted books in history.
Al-Khwarizmi writes al-jabr
Al-Khwarizmi systematized solving equations in The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, and popularized Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Copernicus moves the Earth
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium proposed that the Earth orbits the Sun, published as its author lay dying.
Galileo turns the telescope skyward
With a Dutch toy rebuilt at higher power, Galileo saw Jupiter's moons, lunar mountains and the phases of Venus, published in Sidereus Nuncius.
Newton's Principia Mathematica
Newton showed that one mathematical law of gravitation governs falling apples and orbiting moons — with the calculus-like methods to prove it.
Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species
Darwin proposed that species change over generations through variation and selection — design without a designer, accumulated small steps.
Einstein rewrites space and time
In one miraculous year Einstein explained the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity; a decade later general relativity curved spacetime itself around mass.
The double helix
Watson and Crick proposed the double-helix structure of DNA, crucially informed by Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction images.