The following is a list of historically important scientific experiments and observations.
See also: timeline of scientific experiments, list of famous discoveries, thought experiment.
Astronomy
Biology
- Robert Hooke, using a microscope, observes cells (1665)
- Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovers microorganisms (1674-1676)
- James Lind, publishes 'A Treatise of the Scurvy' which describes a controlled ship board experiment using two identical populations but with only one variable, the consumption of citrus fruit. (1753)
- Edward Jenner tests his hypothesis for the protective action of mild cowpox infection for smallpox, the first vaccine (1796)
- Gregor Mendel's experiments with the garden pea lead him to surmise many of the fundamental laws of genetics (dominant vs recessive genes, the 1-2-1 ratio, see Mendelian inheritance) (1856-1863)
- Louis Pasteur uses S-shaped flasks to prevent spores from contaminating broth. Disproves the theory of Spontaneous generation (also known as abiogenesis). (1861) An extension of the rancid meat experiment of Francesco Redi to the micro scale.
- Charles Darwin and his son Frances, using dark-grown oat seedlings, discover the stimulus for phototropism is detected at the tip of the shoot (the coleoptile tip), but the bending takes place in the region below the tip (1880).
- Frederick Griffith demonstrates (Griffith's experiment) that living cells can be transformed via a transforming principle, later discovered to be DNA (1928)
- Alexander Fleming demonstrates that the zone of inhibition around a growth of Penicillium mold on a culture dish of bacteria is caused by a diffusable substance secreted by the mold. (1928)
- Karl von Frisch decodes the "dance" honeybees use to communicate the location of flowers (1940)
- George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum prove the "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis using induced mutations in bread mold, Neurospora crassa (1941)
- Luria-Delbruck experiment demonstrates that in bacteria, beneficial mutations arise in the absence of selection, rather than being a response to selection. (1943)
- Barbara McClintock breeds maize plants for color, which leads to the discovery of transposable elements or jumping genes. (1944)
- Linus Pauling and colleagues show that a human genetic disease, sickle cell anemia, is caused by a molecular change in a specific protein, hemoglobin. (1949)
- Hershey-Chase experiment (by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase) uses bacteriophage to prove that DNA is the hereditary material (1952)
- Miller-Urey experiment demonstrates that organic compounds can arise spontaneously from inorganic ones (1953)
- Meselson-Stahl experiment proves that DNA replication is semiconservative (1958)
- Crick, Brenner et al. experiment using frameshift mutations to support the triplet nature of the genetic code (1961)
- Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment with in vitro protein synthesis using synthetic RNA as to substitute for messenger RNA (1961).
- John Gurdon clones an animal, a frog tadpole, from an egg cell using the nucleus from an intestinal cell (1962).
- Roger W. Sperry shows the potential independence of the two sides of the human brain using split-brain patients (1962-1965)
- Nirenberg and Leder experiment, binding tRNA to ribosomes with synthetic RNA to decipher the genetic code (1964)
- Demonstration of the role of reverse transcriptases in tumor viruses, independently by Howard Temin and David Baltimore, 1970
- Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen selectively clone genes in bacteria, using bacterial plasmids cut by specific endonucleases (1975).
- Mary-Dell Chilton shows that crown gall tumors of plants are caused by the transfer of a small piece of DNA from the bacterium, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, into the host plant, where it becomes part of its genome (1977).
- Kary Mullis demonstrates the polymerase chain reaction, a method for amplifying specific bits of DNA (1983).
- Napoli, Lemieux and Jorgensen discover RNA interference (1990)
Chemistry
- Blaise Pascal caries a barometer up a church tower and a mountain to determine that atmospheric pressure is due to a column of air (1648).
- Robert Boyle uses an air pump to determine the inverse relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas. This relationship came to be known as Boyle's law (1660-1662).
- Joseph Priestley suspends a bowl of water above a beer vat at a brewery and synthesizes carbonated water (1767).
- Antoine Lavoisier determines that oxygen combines with materials upon combustion, thus disproving phlogiston theory (1783).
- Antoine Lavoisier determines that chemical reactions in a closed container do not alter total mass. From these observations he establishes the law of conservation of mass (1789).
- Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford demonstrates that the heat developed by the friction of boring cannon is nearly inexhaustible. This result was presented in opposition to caloric theory (1798).
- Humphry Davy uses electrolysis to isolate elemental potassium, sodium, calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium, and chlorine (1807-1810).
- Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac studies reactions among gases and determines that their volumes combine chemically in simple integer ratios (1809).
- Robert Brown studies very small partices in water under the microscope and observes Brownian motion which was later named in his honor (1827).
- Friedrich Wöhler synthesizes the organic compound urea using inorganic reactants, disproving the application of vitalism to chemical processes (1828).
- Thomas Graham measures the rates of effusion for different gases and establishes Graham's law of effusion and diffusion (1833).
- Julius Robert von Mayer and James Prescott Joule measure the heat generated by mechanical work. This establishes the principle of conservation of energy and the kinetic theory of heat (1842-1843).
- Louis Pasteur separates a racemic mixture of two enantiomers by sorting individual crystals, and demonstrates their impact on the polarization of light (1849).
- Anders Jonas Ångström observes the presence of hydrogen and other elements in the spectrum of the sun (1862).
- François-Marie Raoult demonstrates that the decrease in the vapor pressure and freezing point of liquids caused by the addition of solutes is proportional to the number of solute molecules present. This establishes the concept of colligative properties (1878).
- Henri Louis Le Chatelier performs several experiments to disturb a chemical equilibrium before formulating Le Chatelier's Principle (1884).
- Svante Arrhenius studies the conductivity of salt solutions and determines that salts dissociate into ions in water. (1884)
- Svante Arrhenius determines the impact of temperature on reaction rates and formulates the concept of activation energy. (1889)
- William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh (John Strutt) isolate the noble gases (1894-1898).
- Mikhail Tsvet (Mikhail Semyonovich Tsvet) separates chlorophyll from other plant pigments using chromatography (1901).
- Frederick Soddy and William Ramsay observe the production of helium (from alpha particles during radioactive decay (1903).
- Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann observe nuclear fission (1938).
- Glenn Theodore Seaborg creates and isolates five transuranium elements. He reorganizes the periodic table to its current form. (1941-1950).
- Melvin Calvin and Andrew Benson delineate the path of carbon in photosynthesis using Chlorella and carbon dioxide labeled with carbon-14 (14CO2) (1945) - (1954).
- Neil Bartlett mixes xenon and platinum hexafluoride leading to the first synthesis of a noble gas compound, xenon hexafluoroplatinate (1962).
- Robert Burns Woodward announces the total synthesis of Vitamin B-12 by a team he led (1973). Insights from this work lead to the discovery of the Woodward-Hoffmann rules for elucidating the stereochemistry of the products of organic reactions.
- Frederick Sanger demonstrates the dideoxy- or chain termination method for determining DNA sequences 1975.
- Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley isolate buckyballs and other fullerenes (1985).
Physics