Most of the events were taken from http://www.montgomerybell.com/~clarkb/events.htm

Pre-1600
1600s
1700s
1800s
1900s

• 3rd century BC - Aristarchus proposes a heliocentric model
• ~150 Ptolemy publishes Almagest
• 1054 Chinese and American Indian astronomers observe the Crab supernova explosion
• 1100s First known written description of the use of lodestone as a compass
• 1512 Nicholas Copernicus first states his heliocentric theory in Commentariolus
• 1543 Nicholas Copernicus publishes De Revolutionibus de Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)
• 1572 Tycho Brahe observes the supernova that appears in Cassiopeia
• 1577 Tycho Brahe uses parallax to prove that comets are distant entities and not atmospheric phenomena
• 1589 Galileo Galilei uses balls rolling on inclined planes to show that different weights fall with the same constant acceleration
  

• 1609 Johannes Kepler states his first two empirical laws of planetary motion
• 1609 Galileo Galilei builds his first telescope
• 1613 Galileo Galilei uses sunspots to demonstrate the rotation of the sun
• 1619 Johannes Kepler states his third empirical law of planetary motion
• 1621 Willebrord Snell states his law of refraction
• 1656 Christian Huygens builds the first highly accurate pendulum clock
• 1665 Isaac Newton deduces the inverse-square gravitational force law from the acceleration of the moon
• 1665 Isaac Newton invents his calculus
• 1668 John Wallis suggests the law of conservation of momentum
• 1673 Christian Huygens publishes his discovery that a_c=v²/R
• 1675 Ole Romer uses the orbital mechanics of Jupiter's moons to estimate the speed of light
• 1678 Christian Huygens states his principle of wavefront sources
• 1684 Isaac Newton proves that planets moving under an inverse-square force law will obey Kepler's laws
• 1687 Isaac Newton publishes his Principia Mathematica
• 
  

• 1705 Edmond Halley predicts the periodicity of Halley's comet
• 1752 Benjamin Franklin shows that lightning is electricity
• 1767 Joseph Priestly proposes an electrical inverse-square law
• 1781 William Herschel discovers Uranus
• 1783 John Michell suggests that some objects might be so massive that not even light could escape
• 1785 Charles Coulomb introduces the inverse-square law of electrostatics
• 1798 Henry Cavendish measures the gravitational constant and determines the mass of the Earth
• 1798 Count Rumford has the idea that heat is a form of energy

• 1800 Alessandro Volta announces his invention of the electric battery
• 1801 Thomas Young demonstrates the wave nature of light and the principle of interference
• 1820 Hans Oersted notices that a current in a wire can deflect a compass needle providing the first concrete evidence of the connection between electricity and magnetism
• 1820 Within a week after Oersted's discovery reached France, Ampere discovers that two parallel electic currents will exert forces on each other
• 1821 Michael Faraday builds an electricity-powered motor
• 1824 Sadi Carnot analyzes heat engines
• 1826 Simon Ohm states his law of electrical resistance
• 1827 Robert Brown discovers the Brownian motion
• 1831 Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction
• 1848 Lord Kelvin discovers the absolute zero point of temperature
• 1849 Joule publishes results from his series of experiments (including the paddlewheel experiment) which show that heat is a form of energy
• 1850 Fizeau and Foucault measure the speed of light in water and find that it is slower than in air, in support of the wave model of light
• 1859 Maxwell works out the mathematics of the distribution of velocities of the molecules of a gas
• 1864 James Maxwell publishes his papers on a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field
• 1873 James Maxwell states that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon
• 1874 Lord Kelvin formally states the second law of thermodynamics
• 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley do not detect the ether drift
• 1887 Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect
• 1888 Heinrich Hertz discovers radio waves
• 1896 Antoine Becquerel discovers the radioactivity of uranium
• 1897 Joseph Thomson discovers the electron
• 1899 Ernest Rutheford discovers that uranium radiation is composed of positively charged alpha particles and negatively charged beta particles
• 
  

• 1900 Max Planck states his radiation law and Planck's constant
• 1905 Albert Einstein completes his theory of special relativity
• 1913 Niels Bohr presents his first quantum model of the atom
• 1913 Robert Millikan measures the fundamental unit of charge
• 1915 Albert Einstein completes his theory of general relativity
• 1927 Werner Heisenberg states the quantum uncertainty principle
• 1929 Edwin Hubble discovers the expansion of the universe
• 1932 James Chadwick discovers the neutron
• 1932 Carl Anderson discovers the positron
• 1933 Wolfgang Pauli proposes the existence of neutrinos to account for an apparent violation of energy conservation in certain nuclear reactions
• 1958 Charles Townes invents the laser
• 1963 Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig propose the quark/aces model
• 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the 3K background radiation