The four great achievements of natural science in the 17th century

Three Laws of Planetary Motion.

The invention of calculus.

Cell Theory.

The three major discoveries of natural science in the 19th century and their inventors were:

1.The cell theory was proposed in the thirties of the 19th century by the German botanist Schleiden and the zoologist Schwann.

2.The law of conservation of energy and transformation can be said to be the result of research by many people. In 1842, the young German physician Meyer (1814-1878) wrote his first treatise on the law of conservation of energy and transformation**

On the Forces of Inorganic Nature"; In 1847, the British brewer Joule and the German physicist Helmholtz respectively gave their respective lectures on the conservation of energy and the law of transformation. However, Joule is considered to have been the first to establish the laws of conservation and transformation of energy using scientific experiments, but Joule and Helmholtz also acknowledged Mayer's priority in discovering the laws of conservation of energy and transformation. In 1953, William Thomson helped Joule finally complete a precise formulation of the laws of conservation and transformation of energy. At this point, one of the three major discoveries in the natural sciences, the law of energy transformation and conservation of energy was proclaimed.

3.In 1859, the British biologist Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species", which expounded the theory of biological evolution with the theory of natural selection as the main content, which dealt a heavy blow to creationism and the theory of species immutability. It was also one of the three major discoveries of natural science in the 19th century.

1. Cell theory.

The main content is that the cell is the basic structural unit of animal and plant organisms, and it is also the basic unit of life activities. In this way, the structural unity of the whole biological world is demonstrated, and the cell connects all the species in the biological world, and there is a kinship between organisms.

This is a huge endorsement of the theory of biological evolution. The establishment of the cell theory gave a strong impetus to the development of biology and provided an important natural scientific basis for dialectical materialism, which Engels spoke highly of and praised the cell theory as one of the three major discoveries of natural science in the 19th century.

2. Theory of biological evolution.

In 1859, Charles Darwin, an English biologist and the founder of the theory of biological evolution, put forward the theory of natural selection for biological evolution in his magnum opus "The Origin of Species". The main point of the doctrine is that individuals in groups have differences in traits and that these individuals have different adaptations to the environment in which they live; Due to limited space and food, there is competition between individuals for survival, as a result, individuals with favorable traits are able to survive and pass on to their offspring through reproduction, and individuals with unfavorable traits are gradually eliminated (Darwin called this process of retaining the good and eliminating the inferior in nature natural selection); Due to the long-term effects of natural selection, the same species distributed in different regions may have divergent traits and lead to the formation of new species.

3. The law of conservation of energy and transformation.

The law of conservation of energy and transformation was an important theoretical cornerstone of natural science in the 19th century. The significance of conservation of energy is, first and foremost, to establish an equiquantitative relationship between certain physical quantities in the process of material motion and change. In this regard, we do not need to know the actual interaction process between matter, nor do we need to know the transformation path between energy in the process of material motion change, as long as the relationship between energy and physical quantity corresponding to the state of matter motion is established, we can establish an equal relationship between the initial state and the final state in the process of material motion change, so as to facilitate the solution of the quantity of the material motion change process.

Three major achievements: Faraday et al.'s theory of electromagnetic induction, Darwin's theory of evolution, and Einstein's theory of relativity.

Impact: The discovery of the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction made it possible to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy, which created the possibility of manufacturing generators, which created conditions for opening up a new era of human life - the era of electricity, thus promoting the second industrial revolution centered on the promotion and application of electric power technology, and accelerating the process of industrial capitalist development.

Darwin's theory of evolution scientifically explained the development and change of biological species, which was a great synthesis of biology and liberated human understanding from the religious superstition that species were "created by God".

Einstein's theory of relativity broke the traditional concept of physics and established the foundation of modern physics. It reveals the variability of time and space, and allows human understanding to penetrate into the field of microscopic high-speed motion. Its famous mass-energy relationship laid the theoretical foundation for the use of atomic energy.