Scientific revolutions

How we learned to read the universe

In Hand of History for June 10, 2026 you place these 10 real events back into the order they happened. Here they are in chronological order, with the date revealed and why each one matters.

1543

Nicolaus Copernicus publishes his theory that Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around.

Legend says the finished book is placed in his hands on the very day he dies — he wakes briefly, looks at it, and passes away.

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is the seminal work on the heliocentric theory of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. The book, first printed in 1543 CE in Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, offered an alternative model of the universe to Ptolemy's geocentric system, which had been widely accepted since ancient times.

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1687

Isaac Newton publishes the Principia Mathematica, laying out his laws of motion and gravity.

The book nearly doesn't exist — Edmond Halley personally pays the printing costs after the Royal Society spends its budget on a book about fish.

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, often called simply the Principia, is a book by Sir Isaac Newton that expounds Newton's laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation.

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1859

Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, arguing that all life evolves by natural selection.

The first edition of 1,250 copies sells out on day one — largely to gentlemen naturalists who soon wish they hadn't bought it.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life is a work of scientific literature by the English naturalist Charles Darwin that is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. It was published on 24 November 1859. Darwin's book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection, although Lamarckism was also included as a mechanism of lesser importance. The book presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had collected on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation.

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1898

Marie and Pierre Curie discover two new elements, polonium and radium, and coin the term 'radioactivity.'

Marie keeps a jar of radium by her bedside because she loves its soft blue glow — her notebooks are still too radioactive to handle without gloves today.

Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie, better known as Marie Curie, was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie "for their joint researches on the radioactivity phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".

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1900

Max Planck proposes that energy is emitted in tiny discrete packets he calls 'quanta.'

He later calls it an 'act of desperation' — he only invented the idea to make his equations stop producing infinitely wrong answers.

In physics, Planck's law describes the spectral density of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a black body in thermal equilibrium at a given temperature T, when there is no net flow of matter or energy between the body and its environment.

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1905

Albert Einstein, a 26-year-old Swiss patent clerk, publishes his special theory of relativity.

He submits it without a single footnote or citation — he later admits he had read almost none of the prior literature on the subject.

In physics, the special theory of relativity, or simply special relativity, is a scientific theory of the relationship between space and time. In Albert Einstein's 1905 paper, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", the theory is presented as being based on just two postulates:The laws of physics are invariant (identical) in all inertial frames of reference. This is known as the principle of relativity. The speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of light source or observer. This is known as the principle of light constancy, or the principle of light speed invariance.

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1928

Alexander Fleming notices that a rogue mold has wiped out bacteria in a contaminated petri dish.

He had left the dish out before a two-week holiday — the world-changing discovery hinges entirely on him being a bit untidy.

The discovery of penicillin was one of the most important scientific discoveries in the history of medicine. Ancient societies used moulds to treat infections and in the following centuries many people observed the inhibition of bacterial growth by moulds. While working at St Mary's Hospital in London in 1928, Scottish physician Alexander Fleming was the first to experimentally demonstrate that a Penicillium mould secretes an antibacterial substance, which he named "penicillin". The mould was found to be a variant of Penicillium notatum, a contaminant of a bacterial culture in his laboratory. The work on penicillin at St Mary's ended in 1929.

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1929

Edwin Hubble publishes data showing that distant galaxies are speeding away from us in every direction.

Einstein, who had fudged his own equations to avoid this conclusion, later calls that fudge 'the greatest blunder of my life.'

Hubble's law, officially the Hubble–Lemaître law, is the observation in physical cosmology that galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance. Thus, the farther a galaxy is from the Earth, the faster it moves away. A galaxy's recessional velocity is typically determined by measuring its redshift, a shift in the frequency of light emitted by the galaxy.

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1953

James Watson and Francis Crick announce the double-helix structure of DNA in a one-page letter to Nature.

Crick bursts into a Cambridge pub and announces they've 'found the secret of life' — the pub is The Eagle, and it still marks the spot.

In molecular biology, the double helix is the structure formed by double-stranded molecules of nucleic acids such as DNA. The double-helical structure of a nucleic acid complex arises as a consequence of its secondary structure, and is a fundamental component in determining its tertiary structure.

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2012

Scientists at CERN announce they have detected the Higgs boson, the so-called 'God particle.'

Peter Higgs, who predicted it 48 years earlier, tears up in the audience — and admits he had given up hope of living to see it found.

The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson that couples to particles whose mass arises from their interactions with the Higgs field, has zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation.

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