Timeline of Science and Technology in the 20th Century and 21st Century
A list of major events selected by piero scaruffi
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Continued from Science of the 19th Century (See also: A timeline of Biotechnology) (See also: A timeline of Artificial Intelligence) (See also: A timeline of Neuroscience) (See also: A timeline of Computing) (See also: A timeline of Silicon Valley) (See also: Which city invented what) 1900: Max Planck discovers that atoms can emit energy only in discrete amounts or "quanta" and that the energy of light is proportional to the frequency 1900: Mendel's theory is rediscovered 1900: Ferdinand von Zeppelin builds the first rigid dirigible 1900: Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" 
1901: Guglielmo Marconi conducts the first transatlantic radio transmission (for the first time humans can send sounds to any place on Earth without any wires) 
1901: Karl Landsteiner discovers blood types 1902: Willis Carrier invents the air conditioner 1902: Clarence McClung discovers the sex chromosomes 1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright fly the first airplane 1903: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's "The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices" 1903: Valdemar Poulsen invents an arc transmitter for radio broadcasts 1903: William Bayliss and Ernest Starling discover that hormones are chemical messengers 1904: John Fleming uses a diode to detect radio signals 1904: Thomas Morgan discovers that chromosomes are responsible for inheritance of traits 1905: Albert Einstein publishes "The Special Theory of Relativity" 
1905: Albert Einstein explains that the photoelectric effect is due to the fact that light is made of packets (later dubbed "photons") that behave like particles and its energy can change only by multiples of Planck's constant proportional to the light's frequency 1905: Albert Einstein explains Brownian motion, and proves the existence of atoms 1905: Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon develop the Intelligence Quotient test 1906: William Bateson names a new discipline, "Genetics" 1906: Robert von Lieben invents the triode, the "vacuum tube" (birth of electronics) 1907: Lee DeForest creates the first electronic amplifier 1907: Hermann Minkowski's four-dimensional spacetime 1907: Leo Baekeland invents "bakelite", the first entirely synthetic plastic 1908: Jacques Brandenberger invents cellophane 1908: Ernst Zermelo founds axiomatic set theory 1909: Paul Ehrlich discovers the first drug to cure syphilis 1909: Charles Walcott discovers the Burgess Shale 1909: Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invent a process to produce the fertilizer ammonia 1911: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity 1911: General Electric introduces the first commercial refrigerator 1911: Ernest Rutherford discovers that the atom is made of a nucleus and orbiting electrons, and mostly empty, a miniature solar system 1911: Edward Thorndike founds "connectionism" to explain how the mind learns 1912: Alfred Wegener discovers the continental drift 1912: Joseph John Thomson invents the mass spectrometer 1912: Max Wertheimer founds Gestalt Psychology 1912: Alfred Wegener proposes that in ancient times the Earth only had one giant continent, Pangaea) 1913: Ford installs the first assembly line 1913: John Watson founds Behaviorism 
1913: Niels Bohr proves that electrons are permitted to occupy only some orbits around the nucleus of the atom, and the angular momentum of an electron is proportional to Planck's constant, and the energy of an atom changes in discrete quantities
Nov 1915: Albert Einstein publishes "The Theory of General Relativity" and David Hilbert publishes "The Foundations of Physics", an axiomatic derivation of the same field equations 1916: Karl Schwarzschild predicts the existence of black holes 1917: Wolfgang Koehler studies problem solving in chimpanzees 1918: Ronald Fisher founds Population Genetics 1918: Hermann Weyl introduces the concept of gauge field to unify gravitation and electromagnetism 1919: Theodor Kaluza adds a fifth dimension to General Relativity 1920: David Hilbert sets out a program to axiomatize mathematics 1921: Edward Sapir formulates the "principle of linguistic relativity" that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers think 
1923: Jean Piaget formulates the theory that the mind grows just like the body grows 1923: Kodak releases the 16-mm Cine-Kodak hand-held movie camera 1923: Arthur Holly Compton performs an experiment (the "Compton Effect") demonstrating that light cannot be only a wave but must also be made of particles 1924: Louis DeBroglie discovers that matter is both particles and waves, with frequency and wavelength being proportional to energy and momentum 1924: Hubble discovers the galaxy Andromeda 1924: Alexander Oparin formulates the theory of the "primordial soup" to explain the beginning of life 1924: Hans Berger records electrical waves from the human brain, the first electroencephalograms 1924: Otto Laporte formulates the law of conservation of parity 1925: Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein discover a condensate that exhibits macroscopic quantum phenomena 1925: Wolfgang Pauli discovers that some particles (the "fermions") can never occupy the same state at the same time 
1926: Erwin Schroedinger's equation of Quantum Mechanics 
1926: Waldo Semon improves polyvinyl chloride (PVC) 1926: Oskar Klein proposes a fourth spatial dimension that is undetectable because it is the size of the Planck length 1926: Films with synchronized voice and music are introduced (talking movies) 1926: Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fuel rocket 1926: Max Born's probabilistic interpretation of the wave amplitudes in Schroedinger's equation. 
1927: First vaccines for tuberculosis and tetanus 1927: Warren Marrison invents the quartz-crystal clock 1927: Philo Farnsworth invents the television 1927: Werner Heisenberg discovers the uncertainty principle and Niels Bohr formulates the principle of complementarity 
1927: Louis de Broglie discovers a "hidden-variables" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics 
1927: Fritz London introduces the first successful gauge theory (phase invariance of electromagnetism) 1928: David Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem 1928: Fritz Pfleumer invents magnetic tape for audio recording 1928: Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin 1928: Umberto Nobile's dirigible flies over the North Pole 1928: Warren Marrisson invents the electronic quartz clock 1929: Edwin Hubble discovers that the universe is expanding 1930: Karl Lashley discovers that functions are not localized but distributed around the brain 
1930: Paul Dirac proves that the vacuum is not empty 1930: Wolfgang Pauli derives theoretically the existence of the neutrino, a particle that does not interact with ordinary matter 1930: Clyde Tombaugh discovers a new planet in the Solar System, Pluto 1931: Kurt Goedel's theorem of incompleteness 
1931: Georges Lemaitre proposes the theory of the big bang 1932: Fredrick Bartlett formulates the theory of Reconstructive Memory 
1932: John VonNeumann's "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" 1932: Gerhard Domagk's team at Bayer develops Prontosil 1932: Carl David Anderson discovers the positron 1932: James Chadwick discovers the neutron 1933: Edwin Armstrong invents FM radio 1933: Vladimir Kotelnikov publishes the sampling theorem 1933: Fritz Zwicky speculates that the universe must be full of "dark matter" 1933: Otto Stern discovers that the (electrically neutral) neutron has a magnetic field, an ndication that it must have an internal structure 1933: Ernst Ruska builds an electron microscope that exceeds the resolution attainable with an optical microscope 1934: Fritz Zwicky describes supernovae, neutron stars and cosmic rays 1935: Wallace Carothers invents nylon 1935: Robert Watson-Watt builds the first RADAR 1935: AEG introduces the first magnetic tape recorder 1935: Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen discover an apparent paradox of Quantum Mechanics (the EPR paradox) 1935: Schroedinger's cat, the most famous thought experiment of Quantum Mechanics, and the first use of the term "entanglement" 1935: Arthur George Tansley introduces the concept of the "ecosystem" 1936: Technetium, the first human-made element 1936: Alan Turing's Universal Machine 
1936: Heinrich Focke flies the first helicopter 1937: Chester Carlson invents the photocopier 1938: Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman and Lise Meitner demonstrate nuclear fission Dec 1938: Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann carry out the nuclear fission of uranium 1938: Chester Carlson invents xerography 1939: Niels Bohr and John Wheeler describe the mechanism of nuclear fission 1939: Rene Dubos discovers the first commercial antibiotic, tyrothricin 1939: Walter Schottky explains how the interface between a semiconductor and a metal works 1943: Enrico Fermi achieves a nuclear reaction 
1943: Tommy Flowers and others build the Colossus, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer 1944: Oswald Avery discovers that genes are made of DNA 1944: Arthur Holmes explains continental drift 1945: Howard Florey and Ernst Chain develop the first antibiotics 1945: John Von Neumann designs a computer that holds its own instructions, the "stored-program architecture" 
1945: The first atomic bombs are exploded by the USA 1946: Marcello Conversi, Ettore Pancini and Oreste Piccioni carry out the first experiment of high-energy physics 1946: Willard Libby invents a method for dating organic materials by measuring their content of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of carbon ("radiocarbon dating") 1947: John Bardeen and William Shockley invent the transistor 1947: Einstein coins the expression "spooky action at a distance" to describe entanglement 1947: Edwin Land invents Polaroid, the first instant camera 1947: Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics 
1947: Dennis Gabor invents the hologram 1948: Claude Shannon's Theory of Information 
1948: Hendrik Casimir shows how the zero-point energy can be detected ("Casimir effect") 1948: Georgiy Gamow predicts that the big bang would leave behind a cosmic microwave radiation 
1949: Donald Hebb's neural selectionism 
1949: John von Neumann computes pi to 2,037 decimal places using the ENIAC computer 1950: James-Jerome Gibson argues that biological systems pick up information from the environment 1950: "Human calculator" Shakuntala Devi tours Europe 1951: Carl Djerassi and others invent the oral contraceptive pill 1951: Linus Pauling predicts the secondary structure of proteins 1951: William Wilson Morgan discovers the structure of the MilkyWay galaxy 1951: David Bohm hypothesizes that Quantum Mechanics requires a fifth dimension 
1951: Electricity is generated by a nuclear reactor at Arco in Idaho 1951: Fred Sanger sequences a protein, bovine insulin 1952: Harold Urey and Stanley Miller recreate the conditions of early Earth in a laboratory and show how aminoacids may have formed 1952: Alan Turing's theory of morphogenesis 1953: Eugene Aserinsky discovers "rapid eye movement" (REM) sleep that corresponds with periods of dreaming 1953: Clair Patterson dates the Earth to 4.5 billion years old 1953: Conrad Waddington's epigenetics 1953: Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double helix of the DNA 
1953: Taiichi Ohno invents "lean manufacturing" (or "just-in-time" manufacturing) 1953: Jonas Salk develops the first polio vaccine 1953: Roger Sperry studies the "split brain" and discovers that the two hemispheres are specialized in different tasks 
1954: Daryl Chapin, Gerald Pearson and Calvin Fuller at Bell Labs demonstrate the first practical solar cell 1954: Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills generalize Maxwell's electromagnetism 1954: The Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant in the USSR became the first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid 1954: Christian Anfinsen discovers that the three-dimensional structure of a protein depends solely on the sequence of amino acids 1954: Bell Labs' Gerald Pearson, Calvin Fuller and Daryl Chapin build the first silicon solar cell 1954: The first transistor radio ("Regency") 1955: John McCarthy's Artificial intelligence 
1955: Niels Jerne proposes a natural-selection theory of antibody formation 
1956: Charles Ginsburg builds the first practical videotape recorder 1956: The first flying car, the Aerocar, is certified in the USA 1956: Chien-Shiung Wu, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee prove the violation of parity 1957: Frank Rosenblatt conceives the "Perceptron", the first artificial neural network 1957: Albert Sabin develops the oral polio vaccine 
1957: The Soviet Union tests the R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) 1957: John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Schrieffer publish the first theory of superconductivity 
1957: Hugh Everett introduces an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics without uncertainties, the multiverse 1957: Noam Chomsky's theory of grammar 
1957: the Soviet Union launches the first artificial satellite, the Sputnik, mostly designed by Sergei Korolev 1957: Chien-Shiung Wu discovers that subatomic particles involved in the weak nuclear force are left-handed 1958: Boeing introduces the long-distance jet 1958: Jack Kilby invents the integrated circuit 1958: Jim Backus invents the Fortran programming language, the first machine-independent language 1959: Eveready (later renamed Energizer) introduces the alkaline battery 1959: Michel Jouvet discovers that REM sleep is generated in the brain stem 
1959: Robert Noyce co-invents the integrated circuit 1959: Min Chueh Chang invents in-vitro fertilization 1959: John Kendrew and Max Perutz determine the three-dimensional structure of a protein May 1960: Theodore Maiman demonstrates the first working LASER 1960: Wernher von Braun spearheads development of NASA's Mercury and Apollo space programs 1960: Leonard Hayflick discovers cellular senescence 1960: The world's first commercially produced birth-control pill, Enovid-10 1961: Charles Bachman develops the first database management system 1961: Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei discover how the 4-letter genetic code gets translated into the 20-letter language of proteins (1961: General Motors unveils "Unimate", the first industrial robot) 1961: Fernando Corbato builds the first time-sharing system that allows users to remotely access a computer 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first astronaut 1961: Marshall Nirenberg cracks the genetic code 1961: Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob discover gene regulation 1961: Sydney Brenner, Francois Jacob and Matthew Meselson determine the function of messenger RNA (mRNA) 1962: Telstar, the first telecommunication satellite 1962: Robert Rightmire invents a practical supercapacitor 1962: Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts 1962: Texas Instruments introduces what will be come known as LED (Light-emitting diode) technology, invented by James Biard and Gary Pittman 1962: The first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) takes place with, among others, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan 1962: Hanns-Peter Boehm discovers a new material later named "graphene" 1963: Murray Gell-Mann's theory of quarks, Quantum Chromodynamics 1963: The touch-tone phone 1963: Douglas Engelbart builds the first "mouse" 1963: Ivan Sutherland demonstrates "Sketchpad", the first program with a graphical user interface 1964: American Airlines' SABRE reservation system is the first online transaction processing 1964: June Almeida is the first scientist to identify a coronavirus 1964: Following an earthquake in Alaska, the second strongest on record, George Plafker's theory that earthquake are caused by plate tectonics is widely accepted 1964: John Young proposes a "selectionist" theory of the brain (learning is the result of the elimination of neural connections) 1964: John Bell solves the EPR paradox and proves that there are no hidden variables 1964: IBM introduces the first "operating system" for computers 1964: Japan inaugurates the first "bullet train", the Shinkansen 1964: Peter Higgs proves the existence of a mass-giving boson 1965: DEC introduces the first mini-computer based on integrated circuits, the PDP-8 1965: Robert Holley discovers transfer RNA 1965: Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the cosmic microwave background radiation 1966: Hironari Miyazawa proposes a supersymmetry relating mesons and baryons 1966: Rene Thom formulates catastrophe theory 1967: Jack Kilby develops the first hand-held calculator 1967: Syukuro Manabe discovers that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause increased temperatures on Earth 1967: The first pulsar is observed 1967: Christian Barnard performs the first human heart transplant 1967: Ilya Prigogine shows that biological systems are dissipative systems which self-organize far from equilibrium 1968: Barclays Bank installs networked "automated teller machines" or ATMs 1968: Andries van Dam introduces the "Undo" command 1968: Gabriele Veneziano discovers that a string can describe the interaction of strongly interacting particles 1968: MIT scientists and engineers found Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA) 1969: The Arpanet (Internet) is inaugurated 1969: Neil Armstrong is the first human to walk on the Moon 1969: Jonathan Beckwith, James Shapiro and Lawrence Eron isolate a gene 1969: The Concorde, a supersonic passenger airplane 1969: Paul MacLean proposes the theory of the "triune brain" 1969: Yoichiro Nambu introduces string theory 1970: The first practical optical fiber is developed by glass maker Corning Glass Works 1970: Koryo Miura conceives the Miura-ori fold in origami 1970: Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph Ledoux discover the left-brain "interpreter" 1971: Ananda Chakrabart develops a genetically engineered organism, a new species of Pseudomonas bacteria 1971: Ray Tomlinson invents email 1971: Vera Rubin discovers anomalies in the rotation of galaxies that show the existence of "dark matter" 1971: Sony introduces the U-matic, first commercial videocassette recorder (VCR) 1971: Ted Hoff and Federico Faggin build the first universal micro-processor 1971: Pierre Ramond introduces the first supersymmetric theory 1972: Ray Tomlinson invents e-mail 1972: Christian Anfinsen postulates that a protein's amino acid sequence must determine its structure 1972: Jacob Bekenstein discovers that a black hole should store a huge amount of entropy 1972: Robert Moore and Irving Zucker discover that the suprachiasmatic nuclei is the site of the circadian biologic clock 1972: Hamilton Watch introduces the Hamilton Pulsar P1, the first electronic digital watch and the first using a digital LED display 1972: Raymond Damadian builds the world's first magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine 1972: Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack invent computed tomography scanning or CAT-scanning 1972: Theodore Friedmann and Richard Roblin's "Gene Therapy for Human Genetic Disease?" 1972: Paul Berg's team synthesizes the first recombinant DNA molecule 1972: The Global Positioning System (GPS) is launched 1972: Magnavox introduces the first videogame console, "Odyssey" 1973: Sharp develops the LCD technology for display monitors 1973: Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer create the first recombinant DNA organism (the birth of "biotechnology") 1973: Brandon Carter introduces the "anthropic principle" in cosmology 1973: Martin Cooper invents the cellular telephone 1973: Jean-Pierre Changeux discovers neural Darwinism 1973: Simon Morris proves that the Burgess Shale is evidence of an explosion of species during the Cambrian period 1974: Ed Roberts invents the first personal computer, the Altair 8800 1974: Donald Johanson discovers a skeleton that is hailed as the missing link between ape and human, "Lucy" 1974: Sam Hurst invents the touch-screen user interface 1974: Stephen Hawking discovers the radiation of black holes 1974: John Schwarz suggests that string theory is a theory of gravity (superstring theory) 1974: Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow propose a grand unification theory (GUT) to unify weak, strong and electromagnetic forces 1975: Benoit Mandelbrot presents a theory of "fractals" 1975: Wilson Edward Osborne founds Sociobiology 1976: Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle and Whitfield Diffie describe the concept of public-key cryptography 1976: Julian Jaynes introduces the theory of the "bicameral mind" 1976: Sergio Ferrara, Daniel Freedman, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen introduce the first supersymmetry that included gravity. 1977: The Voyager unmanned probes are launched to explore the solar system and beyond 1977: Fritz-Karl Winkler and others produce the first crystallographic X-ray structure of a virus, the tomato bushy stunt virus 1977: The World Health Organization (WHO) announces the eradication of smallpox 1977: Frederick Sanger invents a method for rapid DNA sequencing and publishes the first full DNA genome of a living being 1978: Louise Brown is born through Robert Edwards' technique of in-vitro fertilization, the first "test-tube baby" 1978: David Goeddel and Dennis Kleid of Genentech produces the first genetically-engineered insulin 1979: Smallpox is eradicated 1979: Alan Guth's inflationary model of the universe 1980: Douglas Hofstadter publishes "Godel Escher Bach" 1980: Walter Alvarez and Luis Alvarez propose that the crash of an asteroid caused the mass Cretaceous�Tertiary extinction 1980: Giorgio Parisi discovers a general solution for the disordered states of the spin glass 1980: Luis and Walter Alvarez proposed, based on iridium deposits, that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid impact 1980: Humberto Maturana publishes "Autopoiesis and Cognition" 1980: Ilya Prigogine publishes "From Being to Becoming" 1980: John Goodenough invents the lithium-ion battery 1981: Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer build the scanning tunneling microscope, an instrument for "seeing" the atomic level 1981: Martin Evans identifies embryonic stem cells (in mice) 1981: Sony introduces the video camera Betacam, the first camcorder 1982: Richard Feynman proposes a universal quantum simulator that can simulate any physical object 1982: The first synthetic insulin is approved in the USA 1982: Andrei Linde's chaotic inflationary multiverse 1982: Sony and Philips introduce the CD (compact disc) 1983: Kary Banks Mullis develops the polymerase chain reaction for DNA sequencing 1983: Robert Gallo discovers that AIDS is caused by a new virus, HIV 1984: Psion introduces the first personal digital assistant 1984: Barry Marshall and Robin Warren show that ulcers are caused by bacteria 1985: David Deutsch's universal quantum computer 1985: Akira Yoshino creates the first commercially-viable lithium-ion battery 1984: Fujio Masuoka invents flash memory 1984: Michael Green and John Schwarz demonstrate that superstring theory can only work in ten dimensions 1986: The Soviet Union launches the permanent space station MIR 1986: Ernst Dickmanns demonstrates the self-driving car "VaMoRs" 1986: Karl Muller and Johannes Bednorz discover the first high-temperature superconductor 1986: Abhay Ashtekar founds quantum loop theory 1987: Applied Biosystems introduces the first fully automated sequencing machine 1989: Magellan Corporation introduces the first hand-held GPS receiver 1989: Christof Koch discovers that at, any given moment, very large number of neurons oscillate in synchrony and one pattern is amplified into a dominant 40 Hz oscillation 1989: Margaret Geller and John Huchra discover the CfA2 Great Wall of galaxies, 500 million light-years long, 300 million light years wide and 15 million light years thick. 1990: The Hubble space telescope is launched 1990: The first Internet search engine, "Archie" 1990: Tim Berners-Lee invents the HyperText Markup Language "HTML" and demonstrates the World-Wide Web 1990: Dycam introduces the world's first digital camera 1990: William French Anderson performs the first procedure of gene therapy 1991: Karlheinz Brandenburg at Bell Labs invents the mp3 format 1992: Calgene creates the "Flavr Savr" tomato, the first genetically-engineered food to be sold in stores 1992: The first text (SMS) message is sent from a phone 1993: Gerard 't Hooft develops the holographic theory 1993: William Wootters and others discover how to achieve quantum teleportation using entanglement 1994: Andrew Wiles works out the first successful proof of Fermat's last theorem 1995: The MP3 standard is introduced for digital video 1995: Ted Jacobson derives Einstein's equation of general relativity from purely thermodynamic concepts 1995: The top quark, the last missing quark, is finally observed at Fermilab 1995: Edward Witten introduces M-Theory 1995: Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman produce the first Bose-Einstein condensate 1995: Ward Cunningham creates WikiWikiWeb, the first "wiki" 1995: Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discover an exoplanet, "51 Pegasi b" 1995: The Ebola virus kills entire villages in Congo (Zaire) 1995: Sony and Philips introduce the DVD in Japan 1996: Nokia introduces the first "smartphone" 1996: Giacomo Rizzolatti discovers that the brain uses "mirror" neurons to represent what others are doing 1997: Ian Wilmut clones the first mammal, the sheep Dolly 1997: Isaac Chuang and Mark Kubinec build the first quantum computer 1997: Dennis Lo detects fetal DNA in the plasma of a pregnant mother (prenatal genetic diagnosis) 1997: John Dick and Dominique Bonnet discover that leukemia is caused by tumor stem cells 1997: The Mars Pathfinder is the first rover robot on Mars 1997: Toyota begins selling a hybrid car, the Prius 1998: Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess discover that the expansion of the universe is accelerating (dark energy) 1998: James Thomson and John Gearhart isolate human embryonic stem cells and grow them in the lab 1998: Juan Maldacena's model of the holographic universe 1998: James Thomson and others grow human embryonic stem cells in cell culture 1998: The first handheld devices to read ebooks 1998: Jeff Kimble and others teleport a photon for about one meter 1998: George Mitchell employs hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" to extract natural gas from the shale rock of Texas' Barnett Shale 1999: The first social networking platform, Friendster, is launched by Jonathan Abrams 1999: John Pendry discovers a way to create metamaterials 2003: The Human Genome Project is completed, having identified all the genes in human DNA 2003: A NASA probe finds that one side of the universe is hotter than the other 2003: J Richard Gott III and Mario Juric discover the Sloan Great Wall of galaxies, 1.5 billion light years in length 2003: Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel discover that a massive black hole lies in the center of our galaxy 2004: Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novosolev produce a sheet of graphene 2005: Rice is the first cereal crop to be sequenced (by the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project) 2005: Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman discover how to insert artificial mRNA into cells, the foundation of mRNA vaccines 2006: Paul Rothemund invents DNA origami 2006: Shinya Yamanaka discovers a way of converting skin cells into embryonic stem cells through four reprogramming factors 2007: Knome introduces the first commercially available human genome sequencing 2010: Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith reprogram a bacterium's DNA 2010: Geron carries out the first stem-cell therapy on a human 2010: Autonomous vehicles drive 13,000 km from Italy to China, the first intercontinental trip ever by autonomous vehicles 2011: Paolo Macchiarini at the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden carries out the world's first synthetic organ transplant 2012: Markus Covert simulates an entire living organism (Mycoplasma genitalium) in software 2012: Jennifer Doudna's group invents the CRISPR-cas9 system for gene editing 2012: Kiyotaka Miura at Kyoto University invents quartz glass memories that can hold data for millions of years 2012: PAL-V builds a flying car 2013: Istvan Horvath discovers the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall of galaxies 2014: Brent Tully discovers that the Milky Way belongs to the Laniakea supercluster of galaxies, 520 million light years across 2014: Floyd Romesberg chemically synthesizes two artificial nucleotides and inserts them into a bacteria thus creating a new genetic alphabet 2014: Robert Lanza generates human stem cells from adults 2015: Junjiu Huang genetically modifies human embryos 2015: Nathan Guisinger's team synthesizes borophenes 2015: Mikhail Eremets (Max Planck Inst) discovers that hydrogen sulfide H3S is a superconductor at 203K 2016: Gravitational waves are observed for the first time, 100 years after they were discovered by Einstein 2016: Heidi Lietzen discovers the BOSS Great Wall of galaxies, over one billion light years across 2020: Daniel Pomarede discovers the South Pole Wall of galaxies, stretching 1.4 billion light-years across Dec 2020: BioNTech's covid vaccine, developed in Germany by Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, and Moderna's covid vaccine are the first RNA vaccines for use on humans and the first vaccines ever developed in less than 10 months 2021: Alexia Lopez discovers the Giant Arc of galaxies, in the constellation of Bootes the Herdsman, spanning 3.3 billion light years. See also A Timeline of Neuroscience A note on the past, the present and the futureWhen "futurists" talk about "accelerating progress", they are usually not talking about new ideas and inventions, but about the refinement of old ideas and inventions, particularly in electronics, a fact that is due mainly to progress in manufacturing (miniaturization, customization, integration, etc). They mainly count a new product in an existing category as progress, and even the new releases of a product as progress. They don't count (and discount) the many examples of fields in which progress has fallen short: travel speed has actually decreased with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003; energy is still mostly provided by oil, followed by nuclear; the agricultural revolution (which increased grain yields by 126% between 1950 and 1980) has stalled; life expectancy in most developed countries is no longer increasing; incomes have been stagnating for decades in the West and are actually falling in parts of Europe; health care is more likely to deteriorate than improve; the Great Recession of 2008 was the biggest in 80 years; the space program of the 1960s (that took us to the Moon in 1969 but nowhere else) has been largely abandoned and the Space Shuttle retired; the flying car debuted in 1956 but we still drive regular cars; smartphone batteries last about one day whereas traditional phones were working 24/7 and voice quality has deteriorated dramatically with smartphones; not to mention customer support that is rapidly dwindling towards a simple "good luck, buyer"; on october 21 of 2011 Google's news aggreator displayed "Internal Server Error" as the main news of the day; etc. Even population, that was supposed to increase exponentially forever, has begun to decline in some countries. And of course the attention span of people, especially the abovesaid futurists (whom i find stunningly ignorant about history, economics and even technology and science), has been declining exponentially, something that qualifies as "progress" only in the universe of insects. The unquestionable progress has been in manufacturing techniques. In particular, the rate of miniaturization has been truly stunning in the last century. The recent "miracles" of technology were not due to conceptual breathroughts (a smartphone was simply a bad camera plus a bad phone plus a bad computer plus a bad camcorder) but were due to progress in manufacturing techniques, a progress that started when transistors were invented. This progress accounts for the ability to integrate more functions in smaller devices. Whether this constitutes "invention/discovery" is debatable. In my opinion it belongs to a different timeline. See also my essay on Regress and the debate on the stagnation of innovation:
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