Color enhanced drawings of the Moon and the Pleiades from Hooke's Micrographia. Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was a British scientist who made numerous discoveries in fields as diverse as astronomy and microbiology. His name is remembered in Hooke's Law, which relates the load on a spring to its extension. He used a compound microscope to observe a wide range of specimens and then published the results of his remarkably detailed observations in Micrographia in 1665.