Ten Great Moments in Science

This week’s quiz will test your knowledge of science history. As you read these ten great moments in science, try to match them up with the year in which they occurred.
   I’m starting something new this week: a ladder competition. If you submit your name along with your answers I will keep a running tally of the top ten scores over time and update the results weekly. See if you have what it takes to make the top ten!

Here are the years to choose from for the ten items below. Each year is only used once.: 1543, 1665, 1687, 1775, 1859, 1905, 1909, 1919, 1923 and 1928.

1) Newton publishes Principia, describing the three fundamental laws of motion forming the basics of classical mechanics. ______

2) Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, under the direction of Ernest Rutherford, perform the gold foil experiment which probes the structure of the atom demonstrating the existence of the atomic nucleus. ______

Charles Darwin

3) Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published and becomes the foundation for evolutionary biology. ______




4) Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen. ______

5) Albert Einstein’s Miracle Year, where he publishes four articles that contribute to the foundation of modern physics, covering the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass/energy equivalence. ______

Nicolaus Copernicus

6) Nicolaus Copernicus describes a heliocentric solar system with the Earth and other planets revolving around the Sun, challenging the common perception at the time that the Earth was the center of the universe—as had been the assumption since the time of the Greeks. ______

7) Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic. ______

8) Arthur Eddington observes the bending of light during a total solar eclipse, confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity. ______

9) Robert Hooke coins the term “cell” to describe the building blocks of life that he saw and described in his book Micrographia. ______

10) Edwin Hubble discovers that Andromeda is a galaxy, proving that the Milky Way is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible universe. ______