- 13.740 billion years ago - Hot Big Bang
- 13.739 billion years ago 
- 13.738 billion years ago - 1.5 million years
   after the Big Bang - First clusters
          of galaxies form

- 13 billion years ago - 30 million years after
- 12 billion years ago   the Big Bang - First
- 11 billion years ago   stars form
- 10 billion years ago 
- 9 billion years ago 
- 8 billion years ago - The Solar System
- 7 billion years ago    forms
- 6 billion years ago 
- 5 billion years ago 
- 4 billion years ago - First simple life
- 3 billion years ago    evolves
- 2 billion years ago - First plant life evolves
- 1 billion years ago



- 900 million years ago
- 800 million years ago
- 700 million years ago
- 600 million years ago            
- 500 million years ago              
- 400 million years ago              
- 300 million years ago             
- 200 million years ago              
- 100 million years ago            



- 10 million years ago
- 9 million years ago
- 8 million years ago
- 7 million years ago      
- 6 million years ago - Chimps and
- 5 million years ago    humans diverge
- 4 million years ago
- 3 million years ago
- 2 million years ago 
- 1 million years ago 



- 500,000 years ago
- 400,000 years ago
- 300,000 years ago 
- 200,000 years ago 
- 100,000 years ago



- 90,000 years ago
- 80,000 years ago
- 70,000 years ago
- 60,000 years ago
- 50,000 years ago
- 40,000 years ago
- 30,000 years ago
- 20,000 years ago
- 10,000 years ago



- 9,000 B.C. 
- 8,000 B.C. 
- 7,000 B.C. 
- 6,000 B.C.
- 5,000 B.C. 
- 4,000 B.C. - Sumerians make
- 3,000 B.C.   constellation charts
- 2,000 B.C.
- 1,000 B.C. 




- 900 B.C. 


- 800 B.C. 


- 700 B.C. 


- 600 B.C. 


- 500 B.C.  Anaxagoras is born


- 400 B.C. 


- 300 B.C. 


- 200 B.C. 


- 100 B.C. 


- 0          
- 100        
- 200
- 300
- 400
- 500 
- 600        
- 700
- 800
- 900
- 1000
- 1100
- 1200
- 1300
- 1400


       
- 1500        

The Sun forms 4.57 -
The Earth forms 4.54  
Oxygen atmosphere develops 2.5 -

Neanderthals walk the Earth 250,000 -
Homo sapiens evolve 250,000 -

The last Ice age occurs 
35,000 - 11,000 -
First domesticated dogs 12,000 -


First domesticated sheep and goats,   
cattle and pigs 9000-7000 -
Egypt develops their own 
constellations 6400 -

Babylonians invent the  
solar zodiac 2300 -

Thales of Miletus, who devised  
ancient star charts, is born 624 -

Gautama Buddha is born 563 -

Democritus, who believed that 
the Milky Way was a cloud 
of faint stars, is born 460 -

Aristotle is born 384 -





Hipparchos is born 190 -







Jesus is born 1-2 -





Mohammed is born 570 -



   
964-
Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi 
publishes Book of Fixed Stars 



- 490 -
                    
- 399 -                    
                   
Zeno of Elea, poses
paradoxes of space and time

Socrates is put to death for corrupting youth
- 360 -
- 315 -
Plato writes The Republic
Aratus, who wrote Phaenomena, is born
------ 83 Ptolemy, who devised
                 the Ptolemaic system, is born
- 1572 Tycho Brahe observes
           supernova and devises star
           catalogue
Nicolaus Copernicus publishes, On the  
Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres 1543 -

- 1600

- 1610 - Galileo Galilei observes moons of
              Jupiter, phases of Venus, craters
- 1620   on the moon and a buldge around
              Saturn
- 1630

- 1640

- 1650

- 1660

- 1670

- 1680

- 1690 - John Locke publishes An Essay
              Concerning Human Understanding
- 1700

- 1710

- 1720

- 1730

- 1740

- 1750 - Nicolas Louis de Lacaille filled the
              gaps in constellation maps of the
- 1760   Southern sky

- 1770

- 1780

- 1790

- 1800

- 1810

- 1820

- 1830

- 1840

- 1850

- 1860

- 1870

- 1880

- 1890

- 1900




Johannes Kepler publishes his first two  
laws of planetary motion 1609 -
Johannes Kepler publishes his third  
law of planetary motion 1619 -




René Descartes, publishes  
The Discourse on the Method 1637 -

Thomas Hobbes publishes the   
Leviathan 1651 -

Edmond Halley is born 1656 -

Christiaan Huygens devises wave theory of  
light and Robert Hooke publishes  
Hooke's law 1678 -
Isaac Newton publishes the Mathematical    Principles of Natural Philosophy 1687 -
Isaac Newton publishes Opticks 1704 -





George Berkeley publishes The Analyst 1734 -
Carl Linnaeus publishes Systema Naturae 1735 -

Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon  
publishes the Histoire naturelle 1748 -

Jean-Jacques Rousseau  
publishes the Social Contract 1762 -

Pierre Charles Le Monnier  
published 'Constellation de Solitaire' 1776 -
Immanuel Kant, publishes  
The Critique of Pure Reason 1781 -
Thomas Young performs  
double slit experiment on light 1801 -


    
Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers  
devises Olbers paradox 1823 -

Richard Owen classifies certain  
fossils as 'Dinosauria' 1842 -
Johann Gottfried Galle  
discovers Neptune 1846 -
Charles Darwin publishes,   
On the Origin of Species 1859 -

John Tyndall gives the Belfast address 1874 -
- 1861 -
- 1862 -

John Stuart Mill publishes On Liberty 1869 -
James Clerk Maxwell presents electromagnetic theory of light and take first colour photograph
Lord Kelvin calculated the age of the Earth as between 24 million and 400 million years

- 1900 - Max Planck
- 1901    discovers Planck's constant
- 1902 - Radioactive dating brought the
- 1903    Earth up to 3400 million years old
- 1904
- 1905
- 1906  
- 1907 - Hermann Minkowski develops
- 1908   Minkowski spacetime
- 1909 - David Hilbert devises Hilbert space
- 1910
- 1911
- 1912
- 1913 - Niels Bohr presents Bohr model of
- 1914   the atom
- 1915
- 1916
- 1917
- 1918
- 1919
- 1920
- 1921
- 1922
- 1923 - Louis de Broglie shows all matter
- 1924   can be thought of as waves
- 1925 - Pauli devises exclusion principle
- 1926 - Werner Heisenberg publishes the
- 1927    Uncertainty Principle
- 1928 - Max Born develops probability
- 1929   interpretation to wave equation
- 1930 - Tombaugh discovers Pluto
- 1931
- 1932
- 1933
- 1934
- 1935
- 1936
- 1937
- 1938 - Friedrich Bessel measures parallax
- 1939
- 1940 - Jean-Paul Sartre publishes
- 1941    The Imaginary
- 1942
- 1943
- 1944
- 1945
- 1946
- 1947
- 1948 - Gamow and Alpher devise the
- 1949   Big Bang theory
- 1950 - Alan Turing proposes the
- 1951    Turing test
- 1952 - Poincaré develops theory of 
- 1953    Pessimistic meta induction
- 1954
- 1955
- 1956  
- 1957 - Sputnik 1, the first
- 1958   man-made object to
- 1959   orbit the Earth, is
- 1960   launched
- 1961
- 1962
- 1963
- 1964 - John S. Bell devises Bell's theorem
- 1965
- 1966 - Luna 9 is the first spacecraft to
- 1967    soft-land on the moon
- 1968    Apollo 11 lands on Moon and
- 1969 - Apollo 12 is launched
- 1970 - Apollo 13 is launched
- 1971   
- 1972 - Apollo 16 and 17 is launched
- 1973
- 1974
- 1975
- 1976 - Nelson Goodman publishes
- 1977    Languages of Art
- 1978 - Two Pioneer spacecraft reach Venus
- 1979 - Pioneer 11 reaches Saturn
- 1980
- 1981 - Alan Guth proposes inflation theory
- 1982
- 1983
- 1984
- 1985
- 1986
- 1987
- 1988
- 1989
- 1990 - Noël Carroll publishes,
- 1991    The Philosophy of Horror: Or,
- 1992   Paradoxes of the Heart
- 1993
- 1994
- 1995
- 1996
- 1997
- 1998
- 1999
- 2000
- 2001
- 2002
- 2003
- 2004
- 2005
- 2006
- 2007
- 2008
- 2009
- 2010









Sigmund Freud publishes         
The Interpretation of Dreams -
Albert Einstein explains the Photoelectron  
effect in terms of quanta and publishes  
theories of special and general relativity -
Stern-Gerlach experiment   
measures spin of electrons -
Erwin Schrödinger publishes wave  
equation of quantum mechanics -
Edwin Hubble discovers that galactic  
distances are generally proportional  
to their redshifts -
David Bohm presents Bohm interpretation  
of quantum mechanics -
C.C. Patterson determines the age of the  
Earth to be 4.55 billion years old using  
Uranium-Lead dating on meteorites -
Everett publishes Everett interpretation -
of quantum mechanics  
Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson  
discover cosmic microwave 
background radiation -
Yoichiro Nambu, Leonard Susskind,  
and Holger Nielsen begin 
to devise string theory -
Apollo 14 moon is launched and Apollo 15 is  
launched with the first moon rover -
Viking 2 lands on Mars where it   
discovered water frost and   
Richard Dawkins publishes The Selfish Gene -
Voyagers 1 and 2 leave Earth to -
meet with Jupiter in 1979  
and Saturn in 1980  
If the universe was a year old it would have begun at 00:00 Jan 1st
Mar
Apr
May

Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Jan


















Dec 1st - 6th
Dec 7th - 12th
Dec 13th - 18th
Dec 19th - 24th
Dec 25th - 30th
Dec 31st
00.00 - 17.00 hrs
Dec 31st
17.00 -  19.00 hrs
Dec 31st
19.00 - 21.00 hrs
 
Dec 31st
21.00 - 23.00 hrs
Dec 31st
23.00 - 23.40 hrs
Dec 31st 23.40 - 23.50 hrs
Dec 31st 23.50 - 23.56 hrs
Dec 31st 23.56 - 23.57 hrs
Dec 31st 23.57 - 23.58 hrs
Dec 31st
23.58 - 23.59 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.00 - 23.59.34 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.34 - 23.59.40 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.40 - 23.59.46 hrs
Dec 31st 23.59.46 - 23.59.52 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.52 - 23.59.54 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.54 -
23.59.55 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.55 - 23.59.56 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.56 - 23.59.57 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.57 - 23.59.58 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.58 - 23.59.59 hrs
Dec 31st
23.59.59 hrs
---- Herschel discovers
                Uranus
- The Human Genome Project
   is completed
The inflationary and Grand unification epoch,
gravity separates from the fundamental electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces
- 10-36 - 10-32 seconds after the Big Bang
Big Bang nucleosynthesis
- 3 - 20 minutes after the Big Bang
Recombination occurs, creating Cosmic microwave background radiation
- 240,000-310,000 years after the Big Bang

 
Australopithecines evolve 3.7 -
Homo habilis evolves 2.5 - 1.6 -
Homo erectus walks the Earth 
1.8 - 500,000 -

Gondwanaland formed 550-500  
Trilobites and the first complex  
life evolves 530 -

Pangaea forms 230  
The first Dinosaurs evolve 230 -

The dinosaurs die out 65 -

Timeline images (from top to bottom) courtesy of: NASA, NASA, BBC, Wikipedia, BBC, Wikipedia, Archaeoastronomy, Tamut, Rundetaarn, Utilitarianism, The Galilean Library, Wikipedia, ArtThe University of Cambridge, Faurel, et al., Histoire naturelle, Wikipedia, Cambridge Physics, SMH, Wikipedia, NASA, Amazon, Andrew Syred.
Timeline
Feb
Christopher Columbus sails to America 1498 -