Early History
- 4th century BC - Aristotle founds the system of Aristotelian physics
- 260 BC - Archimedes mathematically works out the principle of the lever and discovers the principle of buoyancy
- 60 AD - Hero of Alexandria writes Metrica, Mechanics, and Pneumatics
- 1000-1030 - Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī applies experimental procedures in statics and dynamics; and realizes that acceleration is connected with non-uniform motion
- 1000-1030 - Alhazen and Avicenna develop the concepts of inertia and momentum
- 1100-1138 - Avempace develops the concept of a reaction force
- 1100-1165 - Hibat Allah Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdaadi discovers that force is proportional to acceleration rather than speed, a fundamental law in classical mechanics
- 1121 - Al-Khazini publishes The Book of the Balance of Wisdom, in which he develops the concepts of gravitational potential energy and gravity at-a-distance
- 1340-1358 - Jean Buridan develops the theory of impetus
- 1490 - Leonardo da Vinci describes capillary action
- 1500-1528 - Al-Birjandi develops the theory of "circular inertia" to explain Earth's rotation
- 1581 - Galileo Galilei notices the timekeeping property of the pendulum
- 1589 - Galileo Galilei uses balls rolling on inclined planes to show that different weights fall with the same acceleration
- 1638 - Galileo Galilei publishes Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
- 1658 - Christian Huygens experimentally discovers that balls placed anywhere inside an inverted cycloid reach the lowest point of the cycloid in the same time and thereby experimentally shows that the cycloid is the tautochrone
- 1668 - John Wallis suggests the law of conservation of momentum
- 1676-1689 - Gottfried Leibniz develops the concept of vis viva, a limited theory of conservation of energy
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Classical Mechanics
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