Сборник материалов международной научной конференции студентов, магистрантов, аспирантов



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С.С. Бетеня


Республика Беларусь, Брест, БрГУ имени А.С. Пушкина

Научный руководитель – Т.С. Троцюк


LIFE-CHANGING DISCOVERIES

Our life is full of discoveries. Humanity could not exist without the constant progress of finding and implementing new technologies, inventions and discoveries. Today many of them are outdated and they are not needed, while others, like a wheel, are still. Here’s a look at some discoveries that have changed the world. It’s impossible to rank their importance, so we’ve listed them in the order they were discovered.

In 1543, while on his deathbed, Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus published his theory that the Sun is a motionless body in the center of the solar system, with the planets revolving around it. Before the Copernicus system was introduced, astronomers believed the Earth was in the center of the universe.

Isaac Newton, an English mathematician and physicist, is considered the greatest scientist of all times. Among his discoveries, the most important is the law of universal gravitation. In 1664, Newton figured out that gravity is the force that draws objects toward each other. It explained why things fall down and why the planets orbit around the Sun.

Oxygen was first discovered by Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele. He had discovered it by about 1772. Scheele called the gas “fire air” because it was the only known supporter of combustion, and wrote an account of that discovery in a manuscript he titled Treatise on Air and Fire, which he sent to his publisher in 1775. However, that document was not published until 1777. Meanwhile, oxygen was also identified by Joseph Priestly in 1774. Priestly discovered a colourless gas from heated red mercuric oxide. He found that gas was highly combustible. He called it dephlogisticated air. Priestly shared his discovery with the French scientist Antoine Lavoiser. Lavoiser was able to show oxygen supported animal life respiration.

Thanks to the discovery of electricity by Michael Faraday the life has become much easier. He made two big discoveries that changed our lives. In 1821, he discovered that when a wire carrying an electric current is placed next to a single magnetic pole, the wire will rotate. This led to the development of the electric motor. Ten years later, he became the first person to produce an electric current by moving a wire through a magnetic field. Faraday’s experiment created the first generator, the forerunner of huge generators that produce electricity.

When Charles Darwin, the British naturalist, came up with the theory of evolution in 1859, he changed the idea of how life on earth developed. According to Darwin’s theory of evolution all organisms evolve, or change, very slowly over time. These changes are adaptations that allow a species to survive in its environment. These adaptations happen by chance. If a species doesn't adapt, it may become extinct. He called that process natural selection.

Before French chemist Louis Pasteur began experimenting with bacteria in the 1860s, people did not know what caused disease. He not only discovered that certain diseases came from microorganisms, but he also realized that bacteria could be killed by heat and disinfectant. That idea caused doctors to wash their hands and sterilize their instruments, which has saved millions of lives.

Wilhelm Roentgen, a German physicist, discovered X-rays in 1895. X-rays go right through some substances, like flesh and wood, but are stopped by others, such as bones and lead. This allows them to be used to see broken bones or explosives inside suitcases, which makes them useful for doctors and security officers. For this discovery, Roentgen was awarded the first-ever Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which he published in 1905, explains the relationships between speed, time and distance. The complicated theory states that the speed of light always remains the same – 186,000 miles/second (300,000 km/second) regardless of how fast someone or something is moving towards or away from it. That theory has become the foundation for lots of modern science.

Danish physicist Niels Bohr is considered to be one of the most important figures in modern physics. He won a 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on the structure of an atom and for his work in the development of the quantum theory. His discovery was used for developing the atomic bomb.

Try to imagine life without antibiotics. We wouldn’t live nearly as long as we do without them. Antibiotics are powerful drugs killing dangerous bacteria in our bodies which make us sick. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, which he grew in his lab using mold and fungi. Without antibiotics, infections like strep throat could be deadly.

On February 28, 1953, James Watson of the United States and Francis Crick of England made one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history. The two scientists found the double-helix structure of DNA. It’s made up of two strands that twist around each other and have an almost endless variety of chemical patterns creating instructions for the human body to follow. Our genes are made of DNA and determine how things like what colour hair and eyes we’ll have. The discovery has helped doctors understand diseases and may someday prevent some illnesses like heart disease and cancer [1].

These discoveries have changed our life completely, but it is becoming better due to other factors as well.

For example, the epoch of great geographical discoveries had a great impact on the future of tourism. They contributed to the formation of the world market, the development of international diplomatic and cultural relations, and creation of permanent water and land routes between continents, which subsequently became tourist routes.

The invention of the wheel and the sail provided new models of transportation. The appearance of railway transport brought to life the growth of people’s mobility, which led to formation of the system of hotels and public food system. The so-called grand-hotels appeared in XIX century. They had a restaurant and hotel in the same building. The history of the modern restaurant has begun since the XVIII-th century. A Parisian M. Boulanger offered his visitors the main dish; it was the soup under the name “restorantes”, which meant “restoring physical strength” [2, c. 53].

In turn, a great contribution to the development of tourism has been made by Thomas Cook. He, Baptist preacher and activist with the rage in contemporary England drunkenness organized the world’s first group guided tour on the fifth of July in 1841. At his insistence, the railway company Midland Counties Railway provided a special train for the “non-alcoholic” trip of 570 workers “Friends of sobriety” in the scenic route in nine open wagons between the cities of Leicester and Loughborough in central England. In the future for promotional purposes railways began to provide Kuku discounts, which allowed organizing recreational trips for people with the limited financial resources. Therefore, customers were not hundreds, but thousands. His tours and travel based on a very powerful principle: “Getting the maximum benefit for the maximum number of people at the lowest price” [2, c. 54].

There are a lot of outdated technologies, which have already become history. A huge number of discoveries had not been recognized for real and lost in time; others were not appreciated by the contemporaries, and waited for the recognition and application for hundreds of years. Conversely, there are ancient discoveries like fire, paper, tire and others which a man needed to survive, they have no equality until now. Science is going forward, but these findings remain for us the most important and significant.




  1. Научные открытия, изменившие жизнь [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0932440.html. – Дата доступа: 10.03.2015.

  2. Панько, А.Д. История путешествий и туризма : курс лекций / А.Д. Панько. – Брест : БрГУ, 2011. – 86 с.

В статье речь идёт об открытиях, которые в значительной мере оказали влияние как на бытовую, так и на профессиональную сферу жизни человечества. Также автор раскрывает основные аспекты нововведений в сфере туризма и их практическое значение.



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