Scientific Discoveries through the Ages Quiz

Nicolaus Copernicus published his work "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" immediately before his death in 1543. This placed the Sun at the centre of the Solar system. In time, the Catholic Church reacted to the Copernican doctrine, censoring the work and having Galileo placed under house arrest in 1633 for the rest of his life under suspicion of heresy for defending the doctrine.

This was when Isaac Newton published his Principia in which he formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, forming a mathematical foundation for the theory of classical mechanics. It is considered one of the more important scientific works. He built on the work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.

Although not the first to use the relatively-mild cowpox to inoculate against the more-serious smallpox, Edward Jenner developed the concept of vaccination as well as a smallpox vaccine. The term 'vaccine' in fact comes from the Latin for cowpox pustules (namely Variolae vaccinae) which he used to make the vaccine.

There are two types of smallpox with the more serious resulting in a 30% death rate. The death rates were much higher than that in the local population when Europeans first arrived in the Americas.

Charles Babbage was building his difference engine (designed to tabulate polynomial functions) from 1819, basically a mechanical calculator. His 1837 analytical engine design is the first considered Turing-complete (computationally universal) with structural elements equivalent to those found in modern computers. He never completed the build of any of these designs.

The miasma theory (where noxious air from rotting flesh was the mechanism for disease transmission) had been in place since the 5th Century B.C. Various forms of germ theory had been proposed but not accepted over the years since. It was Louis Pasteur who did the experiments to demonstrate what he called germ theory and helped to turn the tide against miasma theory.

He had earlier worked out that fermentation was caused by something alive rather than being a process of decay. Pasteurisation (named after him) stemmed from this work.

This probably falls into the accidental discovery class, both discovering the existence of x-rays and the taking of a radiographic image of his hand. The discovery of x-rays earned Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen the first Nobel Prize for Physics and he also had a radioactive chemical element named after him.

Also known as Einstein's theory of gravity, it is the description of gravity used in modern physics. It is not without its problems, particularly when it comes to reconciling it with the laws of quantum physics. Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was for his services to theoretical physics, especially his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. This latter discovery helped with the development of quantum theory.

Discoveries such as the Doppler-shift of a spiral galaxy in 1912 (indicating the galaxy was receding from Earth) challenged the static universe model of the time. The theory of an expanding universe was outlined by Georges Lemaître in 1927, with a number of models developed since that tally with the observable phenomena.

There are still gaps in accepted theory for the earliest stages of the Big Bang. Fred Hoyle, a supporter of a steady-state model, is credited with coining the term "Big Bang" during a 1949 BBC radio interview, although it didn't catch on until the 1970s.

DNA carries the genetic instructions for all known organisms and many viruses. First isolated in 1869, it was not until 1953 that the double-helix structure of DNA was inferred. Central to this discovery was an x-ray diffraction image made under the supervision of Rosalind Franklin. She died before the Nobel Prize was awarded and so missed out on that honour.

Cloning animals using nuclei from somatic cells was first done by John Gurdon in 1958 with frogs. Dolly the sheep, cloned at the Roslin Institute, is the one which attracts the attention, however Dolly was not the first mammal to be cloned, which was another sheep in 1984. What was groundbreaking about Dolly was that adult cells were used, demonstrating that ordinary cells can be reprogrammed.

As a result, Dolly's most important contribution is possibly in stem cell research.