Learn the Timeline of Science: 200 Flashcards from the Nippur Cubit Rod to the Microprocessor
Study 200 science discovery flashcards in order: Eratosthenes, Newton, Mendeleev, Einstein and the microprocessor, plus two backs worth fixing.
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The deck is filed under trivia, but open it and you find something more useful: a chronological spine of science, running from Bronze Age measurement to the microprocessor, with a short history-of-science block bolted on at the end. Science Trivia & Discoveries (code SI7949, 200 cards) on Flip It is best studied as a timeline, not as a quiz.
Study this deck: Science Trivia & Discoveries
1 / 10When were units of measurement first developed?
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
What the 200 cards cover
Cards 1-118 march forward in time: units of measurement in Egypt and Mesopotamia (c. 3000 BC), the Nippur cubit rod, Babylonian quadratics, the Shulba Sutras, Hippasus and irrational numbers, Euclid, Pingala's binary numbers, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Hipparchus, Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Ibn Sahl, Shen Kuo, Madhava, Cardano, Vesalius, Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Napier, Snellius, Harvey, Torricelli, Boyle, Hooke, Steno, Newton, Romer, Linnaeus, Franklin, Bayes, Lavoisier, Herschel, Cuvier, Jenner, Volta, Dalton, Orsted, Faraday, Babbage, Bessel, Doppler, Joule, Boole, Kelvin, Virchow, Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell, Mendel, Clausius, Mendeleev, Rayleigh, Gibbs, Boltzmann, the Curies, Michelson-Morley, Rontgen, Becquerel, Thomson, Planck, Einstein, Haber and Millikan.
The last 56 cards switch mode: definitions of science and its branches, the etymology of scientia, Nabta Playa, Plimpton 322, the Milesian school, Democritus, Hippocrates, the Socratic method, Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, the House of Wisdom, Gondishapur, Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, Bologna in 1088, Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes and the Enlightenment academies.
Ten cards from the deck
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| What is the oldest extant record of a unit of length? | The cubit-rod ruler from Nippur (c. 2650 BC) |
| Who discovered irrational numbers around 500 BC? | Hippasus, a Pythagorean |
| Who measured the circumference of the Earth in ancient times? | Eratosthenes (3rd century BC) |
| When were negative numbers first accepted as numeric? | 210 AD in the Chinese text 'The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art' |
| Who described the notion of inertia in 525 AD? | John Philoponus in Byzantine Egypt |
| What was first published in 1665? | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first peer-reviewed scientific journal |
| Who first measured the speed of light in 1676? | Ole Romer |
| What did the Michelson-Morley experiment show in 1887? | Lack of evidence for the aether |
| What three things did Einstein publish in 1905? | Theory of special relativity, explanation of Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect |
| Who introduced the term 'scientist' and when? | William Whewell in 1834, in a review of Mary Somerville's book |
Study the two halves differently
The chronology stops at card 118. After Millikan's oil drop experiment (1909), the deck jumps back to Galois in 1827, and the next 26 cards are an unsorted appendix: Wohler's urea, Lobachevsky, Viete's notation (1591), Halayudha's triangle (975), the Antikythera mechanism, then a computing run — Zuse Z3 (1941), the Manchester Baby, the transistor, Kilby and Noyce, the microprocessor. Run cards 1-118 in order once to build the skeleton, then shuffle everything: the deck's order will stop matching the century you are asked about.
Mine the deck for its "who first, who got the name" pairs. Snell's law is credited twice — Ibn Sahl in 984 and Willebrord Snellius in 1628. Heliocentrism appears as Aristarchus (260 BC) and Copernicus (1543). The Pythagorean theorem goes to Baudhayana c. 700 BC, while another card notes that Plimpton 322 already lists Pythagorean triples c. 1800 BCE. Answer those cards with both names; that contrast is the actual history, and it doubles your recall hooks.
Two backs worth rewriting. General anaesthesia in 1796, Hanaoka Seishu: his documented operation under tsusensan was 1804 — 1796 belongs to Jenner's vaccine on the neighbouring card. And oxygen, 1778, Lavoisier and Priestley: Priestley isolated it in 1774, Scheele earlier still; Lavoisier explained and named it.
Study this deck on Flip It — search the library for Science Trivia & Discoveries (SI7949) once you're logged in.
Related: Memorize 208 Famous Quotes and Proverbs: Meanings and Who Said Them
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