20th century[edit]

 

• 1905 – Albert Einstein: theory of special relativity, explanation of Brownian motion, and photoelectric effect

• 1906 – Walther Nernst: Third law of thermodynamics

• 1907 – Alfred Bertheim: Arsphenamine, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent

• 1909 – Fritz Haber: Haber Process for industrial production of ammonia

• 1909 – Robert Andrews Millikan: conducts the oil drop experiment and determines the charge on an electron

• 1910 – Williamina Fleming: the first white dwarf, 40 Eridani B

• 1911 – Ernest Rutherford: Atomic nucleus

• 1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: Superconductivity

• 1912 – Alfred Wegener: Continental drift

• 1912 – Max von Laue : x-ray diffraction

• 1912 – Vesto Slipher : galactic redshifts

• 1912 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt: Cepheid variable period luminosity relation

• 1913 – Henry Moseley: defined atomic number

• 1913 – Niels Bohr: Model of the atom

• 1915 – Albert Einstein: theory of general relativity – also David Hilbert

• 1915 – Karl Schwarzschild: discovery of the Schwarzschild radius leading to the identification of black holes

• 1918 – Emmy Noether: Noether's theorem – conditions under which the conservation laws are valid

• 1920 – Arthur Eddington: Stellar nucleosynthesis

• 1922 – Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip, John Macleod: isolation and production of insulin to control diabetes

• 1924 – Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle

• 1924 – Edwin Hubble: the discovery that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies

• 1925 – Erwin Schrödinger: Schrödinger equation (Quantum mechanics)

• 1925 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Discovery of the composition of the Sun and that Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe

• 1927 – Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty principle (Quantum mechanics)

• 1927 – Georges Lemaître: Theory of the Big Bang

• 1928 – Paul Dirac: Dirac equation (Quantum mechanics)

• 1929 – Edwin Hubble: Hubble's law of the expanding universe

• 1929 – Alexander Fleming: Penicillin, the first beta-lactam antibiotic

• 1929 – Lars Onsager's reciprocal relations, a potential fourth law of thermodynamics

• 1930 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovers his eponymous limit of the maximum mass of a white dwarf star

• 1932 – James Chadwick: Discovery of the neutron

• 1932 – Karl Guthe Jansky discovers the first astronomical radio source, Sagittarius A

• 1932 - Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft: Nuclear fission by proton bombardment

• 1934 – Enrico Fermi: Nuclear fission by neutron irradiation

• 1934 – Clive McCay: Calorie restriction extends the maximum lifespan of another species

• 1938 – Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann: Nuclear fission of heavy nuclei

• 1938 – Isidor Rabi: Nuclear magnetic resonance

• 1943 – Oswald Avery proves that DNA is the genetic material of the chromosome

• 1945 - Howard Florey Mass production of penicillin

• 1947 – William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invent the first transistor

• 1948 – Claude Elwood Shannon: 'A mathematical theory of communication' a seminal paper in Information theory.

• 1948 – Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson: Quantum electrodynamics

• 1951 – George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa

• 1952 – Jonas Salk: developed and tested first polio vaccine

• 1952 - Frederick Sanger: demonstrated that proteins are sequences of amino acids

• 1953 – James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology

• 1962 – Riccardo Giacconi and his team discover the first cosmic x-ray source, Scorpius X-1

• 1963 – Lawrence Morley, Fred Vine, and Drummond Matthews: Paleomagnetic stripes in ocean crust as evidence of plate tectonics (Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis).

• 1964 – Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig: postulates quarks leading to the standard model

• 1964 – Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson: detection of CMBR providing experimental evidence for the Big Bang

• 1965 – Leonard Hayflick: normal cells divide only a certain number of times: the Hayflick limit

• 1967 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discover first pulsar

• 1967 – Vela nuclear test detection satellites discover the first gamma-ray burst

• 1971 – Place cells in the brain are discovered by John O'Keefe

• 1974 – Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. discover indirect evidence for gravitational wave radiation in the Hulse–Taylor binary

• 1977 - Frederick Sanger sequences the first DNA genome of an organism using Sanger sequencing

• 1980 – Klaus von Klitzing discovered the Quantum Hall Effect.

• 1982 – Becker et al. discover the first millisecond pulsar

• 1983 – Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction, a key discovery in molecular biology.

• 1986 – Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz: Discovery of High-temperature superconductivity.

• 1988 – Bart van Wees and colleagues at TU Deflt and Philips Research discovered the quantized conductance in a two-dimensional electron gas.

• 1992 - Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail observe the first pulsar planets (this was the first confirmed discovery of planets outside the Solar System)

• 1994 - Andrew Wiles proves Fermat's Last Theorem

• 1995 – Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz definitively observe the first extrasolar planet around a main sequence star

• 1995 - Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle attained the first Bose-Einstein Condensate with atomic gases, so called fifth state of matter at an extremely low temperature.

• 1996 – Roslin Institute: Dolly the sheep was cloned.[6]

• 1997 – CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab: Top quark.

• 1998 – Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team: discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe / Dark Energy.

• 2000 – The Tau neutrino is discovered by the DONUT collaboration

 

21st century[edit]

 

• 2001 – The first draft of the Human Genome Project is published.

• 2003 – Grigori Perelman presents proof of the Poincaré Conjecture.

• 2004 – Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated graphene, a monolayer of carbon atoms, and studied its quantum electrical properties.

• 2005 – Grid cells in the brain are discovered by Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser.

• 2010 – The first Self-Replicating, Synthetic Bacterial Cells are Constructed.[7]

• 2010 - The Neanderthal Genome Project presented preliminary genetic evidence that interbreeding did likely take place and that a small but significant portion of Neanderthal admixture is present in modern non-African populations.[citation needed]

• 2012 - Higgs boson is discovered at CERN (confirmed to 99.999% certainty)

• 2012 - Photonic molecules are discovered at MIT

• 2014 - Exotic hadrons are discovered at the LHCb

• 2015 - Traces of liquid water discovered on Mars[8]

• 2016 - The LIGO team detected gravitational waves from a black hole merger.

• 2017 - Gravitational wave signal GW170817 was observed by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. This was the first instance of a gravitational wave event that was observed to have a simultaneous electromagnetic signal when space telescopes like Hubble observed lights coming from the event, thereby marking a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy.[9][10][11]