Some key scientific events and figures in history
	Dates (years)	Person or event
	-350	Heraclides: Rotation of the Earth
	-240	Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth
	2nd century	Ptolemy proposed an Earth-centred Universe, with the Sun and planets rotating around the Earth
	1200 (approx)	Robert Grosseteste: Developed the rudiments of the scientific method
	1225	Fibonacci: Best known for the discovery of the Fibonacci numbers, and for his role in the introduction to Europe of the modern Arabic positional decimal system for writing and manipulating numbers
	1350 (approx)	William of Ockham: Ockham's Razor - in any explanation entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily
	1543	Nikolas Copernicus: "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) in the year of his death, though he had had the ideas much earlier
	1573	Tycho Brahe De Stella Nova. Brahe tried to rationalise the Copernican and the Ptolemaic systems
	1609	Johannes Kepler: First laws of planetary motion
	1610	Galileo Galilei: Telescopic Observations of the moon, the stars and the moons of Jupiter [Sidereus Nuncius]
	1628	William Harvey: Circulation of the blood, publication of the discovery of the human cirulatory system
	1642	The year in which Galileo died and Newton was born
	1665	Robert Hooke using a microscope publishes his Micrographica, classic account of microscopic observations
	1687	Isaac Newton: Laws of Motion, law of gravitation Newton's laws set up the basis for classical physics
	1707	Carolus Linneaus: laid the foundations for the modern scheme of taxonomy. He is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology
	1797	Charles Lyell: Geologist whose work on the age of the earth and on the structure of the earth was a major influence on Darwin
	1809	The year in which Charles Darwin was born
	1838	Matthias Schleiden: All plants are made out of cells
	1831	Charles Darwin left Plymouth as naturalist on board HMS Beagle
	1859	Charles Darwin: Published "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" heralding the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection
	1865	Gregor Mendel: His breeding of peas led to his laws of inheritance, the basis for genetics
	1869	Dmitri Mendeleev: The formulation of the periodic table
	1905	Albert Einstein: Special theory of relativity, ends the period of classical physics and starts the period of quantum physics
	1912	Alfred Wegener: Continental drift, the idea that the continents have moved since the beginning of the planet and continue to do so
	1913	Niels Bohr: Model of the atom
	1929	Edwin Hubble: Hubble's law of the expanding universe
	1950	Fred Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang"
	1953	Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin: Helical structure of DNA the basis for molecular biology
	1964	Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson: Experimental evidence for the Big Bang
	2001	The first draft of the Human Genome is produced
	2003	NASA's WMAP takes more detailed pictures of the universe by means of the cosmic microwave background radiation.