Harriman's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries in Physics - Notes

I should preface by saying I'm a fan of David Harriman. He's a physicist and teacher at the Van Damme Academy. Among many articles/lectures available through the Ayn Rand Bookstore and two forthcoming books, he published a lecture series based upon his teachings at the Academy. I've been eying his "Fundamentals of Physical Science" for a while, though the price tag scares me. But now, he's offering an hour introduction to the series for free! So to get a better idea of his lecture style and to decide if $900 is a fair price for the series I downloaded the lecture and these are my notes on what he says are the greatest scientific discoveries and why he thinks so. My purpose is to give myself some context as a starting point for when I decide to read more in depth about each of these characters, because I find such context makes it easier to integrate the biographies of particular individuals with the rest of my knowledge of history.

Thales [~600 BC] - He starts out, properly I think, with epistemology and the development of the methods of scientific inquiry, though I'm a bit surprised Lucretius didn't make the cut. Thales "discovered natural science" by postulating that "everything is water". Now this turned out to be wrong, but: (1.) Thales presents a natural, physically observable, explanation of matter and (2.) attempted to integrate particular facts, instead of accepting them at face value, into more fundamental truths.

Aristarchus [~280 BC] - Figured the dimensions of the Moon and it's relation to the Earth based upon careful observation and basic math when it was taken for granted that such distant bodies were unknowable to man. In this way Aristarchus "gave people the idea that man really can understand the universe".

Archimedes [~240 BC] - He was the greatest pioneer of mathematical physics, or math applied to physical problems. Some examples: buoyancy/water displacement and law of levers. He demonstrated how narrow truths modeled mathematically can help you to understand aspects of the physical world.

Galileo [~1600] - Harriman cites Galileo's law of pendulums as his greatest discovery, though it's a simple physical phenomenon and not his work in astronomy, because it uses mathematical physics, like Archimedes, to understand moving bodies, which is something the Greeks didn't understand how to do. This law lead to Galileo's law of free fall which lead to Newton ...

Newton [~1666] - Newton's law of universal gravitation which infamously started with a falling apple. What's so great about this discovery is that Newton could take that one simple principle and, having developed a new branch of mathematics, could work out in detail all the implications including the orbit and revolution of planets, the motion of tides, and an apple falling.

Newton [~1669] - His experimental work in optics lead him to be the first to associate wavelengths with visible colors and develop mathematical formulas to describe the phenomenon. This was previously an entirely unquantifiable field and his discoveries gave birth to the laser and imaging/display technology we have today.

Galvani/Volta [~1800] - Both discovered that electrons move in currents that can be harnessed to do work in a battery. The significance of this discovery is again motion. Coulomb's work in electrostatics made way for currents, but it is really understanding how currents move and do work that technology advances.

Faraday [1831] - With his development of electric field theory and the link to electricity and magnetism his most important discovery was then the relationship between electricity and motion, how they may induce one another, and how to make it do work in the first electric generator.

Maxwell [1864] - Who discovered the relationship between electromagnetism and light, or how light is an EM field, by defining the mathematics of Faraday's discovery and working out the implications.

Rutherford [~1910] - His discovery of the basic structure of the atom opened the entire field of atomic physics for generations to explore.