Famous laws of science

22 items · Ages 12+

22 laws. Many were found by more than one person; the item notes say who else, and the matching accepts the other names. Years are when the law was first stated or published.

A scientific law is a short statement of something nature always does, tested again and again. These are the ones that turn up in every physics and chemistry class, and knowing who found them, and when, ties science to history.

How to learn it

Encode the meaning before the name: for each law, picture the everyday scene in the hook and say the law in your own words (narration). Then hang it on a timeline, chunked by century, so the people line up in order: Archimedes alone in the ancient world, then Kepler, Boyle, Hooke and Newton in the 1600s, and so on. Retrieve it by explaining one law a day to someone else.

Encode make it vivid → Space bring it back on day 1, 3, 7, 21 → Retrieve pull it from your head. From the infographic Remember It on Purpose.

Famous laws of science

Law	Who	Year	What it says
Archimedes' principle	Archimedes	c. 250 BC	Anything in water or another fluid is pushed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it pushes aside.
Kepler's first law	Johannes Kepler	1609	Each planet travels around the Sun in an ellipse (a stretched circle), with the Sun at one focus, a little off center.
Kepler's second law	Johannes Kepler	1609	A line from the Sun to a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, so a planet moves faster when it is nearer the Sun.
Kepler's third law	Johannes Kepler	1619	The farther a planet is from the Sun, the longer its year: the square of its year is proportional to the cube of its average distance.
Snell's law (refraction)	Willebrord Snellius	1621	When light passes from one clear material into another, it bends by an amount set by how much each material slows it.
Note: Ibn Sahl described the same rule in about AD 984. Snellius did not publish it; René Descartes published it in 1637.
Boyle's law	Robert Boyle	1662	At a steady temperature, squeeze a gas into half the space and its pressure doubles: pressure times volume stays the same.
Note: Richard Towneley and Henry Power found the same relation about a year earlier, and Edme Mariotte independently in 1676.
Hooke's law	Robert Hooke	1678	A spring stretches in proportion to the force pulling it, as long as it is not stretched too far.
Newton's first law of motion	Isaac Newton	1687	An object stays still, or keeps moving in a straight line at the same speed, unless a force acts on it.
Newton's second law of motion	Isaac Newton	1687	Force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma): the same push speeds up a light object more than a heavy one.
Newton's third law of motion	Isaac Newton	1687	When one object pushes on another, the second pushes back just as hard in the opposite direction.
Newton's law of universal gravitation	Isaac Newton	1687	Every mass pulls on every other mass, more strongly for bigger masses and more weakly with distance (one over the distance squared).
Bernoulli's principle	Daniel Bernoulli	1738	Where a moving fluid speeds up, its pressure drops.
Note: Published in his book Hydrodynamica.
Coulomb's law	Charles-Augustin de Coulomb	1785	Electric charges push apart if alike and pull together if opposite, with a force that weakens with the square of the distance.
Charles's law	Jacques Charles	1787	At a steady pressure, a gas expands as it warms: its volume is proportional to its absolute temperature.
Note: Charles did the work around 1787 but did not publish it; Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac published the law in 1802 and credited him.
Law of conservation of mass	Antoine Lavoisier	1789	In a chemical reaction, matter is not created or destroyed: the total mass stays the same.
Note: Mikhail Lomonosov showed the same idea decades earlier, but his work was less known. Lavoisier stated it in his 1789 textbook.
Avogadro's law	Amedeo Avogadro	1811	Equal volumes of gases, at the same temperature and pressure, hold the same number of molecules.
Note: André-Marie Ampère reached nearly the same idea in 1814.
Ohm's law	Georg Simon Ohm	1827	The current through a wire equals the voltage across it divided by its resistance (I = V / R).
Faraday's law of induction	Michael Faraday	1831	A changing magnetic field through a loop of wire makes an electric current flow in the wire.
Law of conservation of energy (first law of thermodynamics)	Hermann von Helmholtz	1847	Energy is never created or destroyed; it only changes from one form to another.
Note: Built on work by Julius Robert von Mayer (1842) and James Prescott Joule (1840s); Rudolf Clausius wrote it as the first law of thermodynamics in 1850.
Second law of thermodynamics	Rudolf Clausius	1850	Heat flows on its own from hot to cold, never from cold to hot; some energy always spreads out as unusable heat.
Note: Lord Kelvin gave another form of it in 1851, building on Sadi Carnot (1824).
Mendel's laws of inheritance	Gregor Mendel	1865	Each parent passes on one of its two copies of each gene, by chance; genes for different traits are often passed on independently.
Note: Presented in 1865 and published in 1866; mostly overlooked until 1900.
Hubble-Lemaître law	Edwin Hubble	1929	Distant galaxies are moving away from us, and the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away.
Note: Georges Lemaître proposed it in 1927; Hubble published the observations in 1929. The International Astronomical Union recommended the name Hubble-Lemaître law in 2018.

Famous laws of science: practice sheet

Name: ______________________ Date: ____________ Score: ____ / 22

Law	Who	Year	What it says
			Anything in water or another fluid is pushed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it pushes aside.
			Each planet travels around the Sun in an ellipse (a stretched circle), with the Sun at one focus, a little off center.
			A line from the Sun to a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, so a planet moves faster when it is nearer the Sun.
			The farther a planet is from the Sun, the longer its year: the square of its year is proportional to the cube of its average distance.
			When light passes from one clear material into another, it bends by an amount set by how much each material slows it.
			At a steady temperature, squeeze a gas into half the space and its pressure doubles: pressure times volume stays the same.
			A spring stretches in proportion to the force pulling it, as long as it is not stretched too far.
			An object stays still, or keeps moving in a straight line at the same speed, unless a force acts on it.
			Force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma): the same push speeds up a light object more than a heavy one.
			When one object pushes on another, the second pushes back just as hard in the opposite direction.
			Every mass pulls on every other mass, more strongly for bigger masses and more weakly with distance (one over the distance squared).
			Where a moving fluid speeds up, its pressure drops.
			Electric charges push apart if alike and pull together if opposite, with a force that weakens with the square of the distance.
			At a steady pressure, a gas expands as it warms: its volume is proportional to its absolute temperature.
			In a chemical reaction, matter is not created or destroyed: the total mass stays the same.
			Equal volumes of gases, at the same temperature and pressure, hold the same number of molecules.
			The current through a wire equals the voltage across it divided by its resistance (I = V / R).
			A changing magnetic field through a loop of wire makes an electric current flow in the wire.
			Energy is never created or destroyed; it only changes from one form to another.
			Heat flows on its own from hot to cold, never from cold to hot; some energy always spreads out as unusable heat.
			Each parent passes on one of its two copies of each gene, by chance; genes for different traits are often passed on independently.
			Distant galaxies are moving away from us, and the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away.

Write from memory, then check against the study sheet. Mark the misses and review those first next time. · teddyrookbook.com/memory/challenges/scientific-laws/

Sources

Checked October 30, 2026. Progress is kept on this device only (per learner). More lists: all memory challenges · memory games.