This timeline lists significant discoveries in physics and the laws of nature, including experimental discoveries, theoretical proposals that were confirmed experimentally, and theories that have significantly influenced current thinking in modern physics. Such discoveries are often a multi-step, multi-person process. Multiple discovery sometimes occurs when multiple research groups discover the same phenomenon at about the same time, and scientific priority is often disputed. The listings below include some of the most significant people and ideas by date of publication or experiment. Antiquity 460–370 BCE - Democritus: Atomism via thought experiment 384–322 BCE - Aristotle: Aristotelian physics 367–282 BCE - Ptolemy: Ptolemaic geocentric system, a near accurate phenomenological model of planetary motions 250 BCE - Archimedes: Archimedes' principle 276–194 BCE - Eratosthenes: Measurement of the circumference of the Earth 129 BCE - Hipparchus: Determination of the precession of the equinoxes, Entire sky star catalog. 150–100 BCE - Unknown, possibly by Hipparchus: Invention of Astrolabe and the Antikythera mechanism, a mechanical analog computer of astronomical observations Early Middle Ages 500 CE - John Philoponus: Theory of impetus 16th century 1514 - Nicolaus Copernicus: Heliocentrism 1589 - Galileo Galilei: Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment 17th century 1609, 1619 - Kepler: Kepler's laws of planetary motion 1613 - Galileo Galilei: Inertia 1621 - Willebrord Snellius: Snell's law 1632 - Galileo Galilei: The Galilean principle (the laws of motion are the same in all inertial frames) 1660 - Blaise Pascal: Pascal's law 1660 - Robert Hooke: Hooke's law 1662 - Robert Boyle: Boyle's law 1676 - Ole Rømer: Rømer's determination of the speed of light traveling from the moons of Jupiter. 1678 - Christiaan Huygens mathematical wave theory of light, published in his Treatise on Light 1687 - Isaac Newton: Newton's laws of motion, and Newton's law of universal gravitation 18th century 1782 - Antoine Lavoisier: Conservation of mass 1785 - Charles-Augustin de Coulomb: Coulomb's inverse-square law for electric charges confirmed 19th century 1801 - Thomas Young: Wave theory of light 1803 - John Dalton: Atomic theory of matter 1806 - Thomas Young: Kinetic energy 1814 - Augustin-Jean Fresnel: Wave theory of light, optical interference 1820 - André-Marie Ampère, Jean-Baptiste Biot, and Félix Savart: Evidence for electromagnetic interactions (Biot–Savart law) 1824 - Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot: Ideal gas cycle analysis (Carnot cycle), internal combustion engine 1826 - Ampère's circuital law 1827 - Georg Ohm: Electrical resistance 1831 - Michael Faraday: Faraday's law of induction