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Greatest Inventions And Discoveries Did you ever give any thought to what actually were the greatest scientific discoveries made by man? Some of them were made thousands of years ago, while others are fairly new. Some of these discoveries had to do with the everyday world we live in. An example of this was one of the greatest discoveries of all. It was the fact that when you look into the heavens you can see that some things, that look like stars, actually move. This was how the planets were eventually discovered and this changed how humanity thought of itself. We were not in a static never changing place, we could actually see that some objects in the heavens actually changed their positions. Another great discovery was made by Galileo. Everyone could see that the earth had a moon, but he discovered that Jupiter was not only round but that it also had moons. This was not talked about much in his time for fear of persecution by the church, but it made many people feel that there might be other places out in space that were similar to ours and maybe they had life on them. It took us a lot of time to discover a fact that we had suspected, and that was the fact that some stars have planets around them. This is due to the great distances between us and them, but we have verified the fact hundreds of times now and we have even found planets that exist in zones relative to where our earth is in relation to its distance from its star, the sun. I guess when it comes to space, finding out that the universe is accelerating was one of the greatest of all discoveries. Prior to this, most astronomers had thought that it was slowing down and eventually would fall back to the state it was in before the big bang, but this is not the case. Most astronomers now think that eventually everything will get so far apart from each other that all the stars and planets will die and space will just be a cold place without life. Of course we now think that parallel universes might exist, so if they do this may not be true for all of them.
Wright Brothers First Powered Flight When it comes to human medicine, one of the most important discoveries was made by Andreas Vesalius. You might say who was that and if you did, I couldn't blame you? He was a man that decided that surgery could not be performed correctly without superior knowledge of human anatomy, so he spent years dissecting human bodies and drawing precise anatomical charts, which were published in books to aid doctors. Without this knowledge we would be nowhere today. Another medical discovery that has saved millions of lives was the classification of blood groups. This didn't happen until 1902. Before that year, there just wasn't any way to perform a safe blood transfusion unless you got lucky and the donor had the same type blood as the recipient. My personal favorite greatest medical invention is anesthesia. Where would we be without it? Can you imagine getting ready for an operation, laying on the table and screaming in pain as they performed surgery? This is exactly what used to happen. We can thank dentists in the 19th century for early experiments with anesthesia, they used mainly nitrous oxide, knows as laughing gas and ether. In physics there has been some very big discoveries. While the ancients may have discovered many things, a lot of them were found to be false beliefs. An example of this is something that was taught by Aristotle and that was that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones. Galileo proved in 1604 that all bodies fall at the same rate of speed. The reason that a feather might take a lot longer to fall is not due to its weight, but to its air resistance. Newton came along and found that all objects exert a gravitational pull on each other. You may not think about it, but your sandwich is putting out a feeble gravitational force and trying to attract what is around it and so forth. When we found out in the last century that some materials have no resistance to the flow of electricity, we had the basis for superconductivity. This simple discovery may someday allow the loss-less generation and transfer of electrical power giving us much more electricity to work with. In 1906 it was determined that the earth had a liquid core. This was figured out by a seismologist named Richard Oldham. He found out that earthquakes move much slower when traveling going through the center of the earth. Years later another scientist found that some waves from earthquakes don't even pass through the center of the earth, they get reflected. This led to the discovery that the earth has a solid iron core that is surrounded by a liquid. There are still those that subscribe to the theory that the center of the earth contains a star that heats it and that this star is in a hollow place.
Fire Looking at these discoveries I can't help but feel that there are some that were left out. When the Wright brothers launched that first heavier than air plane and flew at Kitty Hawk, it changed the world and I think that this should be included. Even lighter than air craft stoked our interest in getting into the sky and this led to the heavier than air craft. Where would be without fire? Fire has to be the number one invention of all times. It has led to so many other inventions that they are too numerous to count. Many of these inventions helped mankind. For instance where would smelting be without fire, or cooking? The flip side is that unfortunately fire is also used to kill people, just look at all the weapons that were based on fire and used through history. Gunpowder was another invention that had its good side and its bad and changed the history of the human race forever. Without it we could not have began to clear large obstacles from the land or mine efficiently and yet it is one of the most fearsome war time weapons ever invented and to this day the power in bullets and some shells are direct descendents of it. Some inventions and discoveries just rise naturally above others and this is the case with these inventions and discoveries. We would be back in caves if it weren't for some of these things.
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