1.
Hotel Metropole, Brussels
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The Hotel Metropole Brussels, built in 1895, is the only nineteenth-century hotel in Brussels still in operation today. The hotel has 262 rooms and 22 spacious suites, in 1890, two brothers with a brewing company opened Café Metropole as a place in the city to sell their beer. The café was a success and the Weilemans-Ceuppens family then purchased the building next-door, a former bank. Today, the reception desk is easily recognizable as the desk of the former bank. The brothers commissioned French architect Alban Chambon to be the designer of the hotel. Today, Chambon’s design is still a prominent feature of the heritage hotel, not only was Hotel Metropole one of the first luxury hotels, it was also the first to have electricity and central heating, and is now the only existing 19th century hotel in Brussels. In fact, many tours of Brussels visit the Hotel Metropole to look upon its facades. The hotel’s reception, lobby, and lounge are overtly ornate with Corinthian columns, rich furnishings, gilded details, similarly, the meetings and conference rooms of the hotel are decorated in a Renaissance style. The Hotel Metropole is famous for having hosted the first Solvay Conference in 1911, moreover, it is the birthplace of the Black Russian cocktail, which was created in 1949 by barman Gustave Tops for the United States ambassador to Luxembourg, Perle Mesta. Official website A list of guests who have stayed at the Metropole Pure Heritage Hotels
Hotel Metropole, Brussels
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Hotel Metropole in the 1920s
2.
Walther Nernst
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Nernst helped establish the modern field of physical chemistry and contributed to electrochemistry, thermodynamics and solid state physics. He is also known for developing the Nernst equation, Nernst was born in Briesen in West Prussia as son of Gustav Nernst and Ottilie Nerger. His father was a country judge, Nernst had three older sisters and one younger brother. The third sister died due to cholera, Nernst went to elementary school at Graudenz. He studied physics and mathematics at the universities of Zürich, Berlin, Graz and Würzburg, in 1889, he finished his habilitation at University of Leipzig. It was said that Nernst was mechanically minded in that he was thinking of ways to apply new discoveries to industry. Nernsts hobbies included hunting and fishing, Nernst married in 1892 to Emma Lohmeyer with whom he had two sons and three daughters. Both of Nernsts sons died fighting in World War I and he was a colleague of Svante Arrhenius, and suggested setting fire to unused coal seams to increase the global temperature. He was a critic of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. In 1933, the rise of Nazism led to the end of Nernsts career as a scientist, Nernst died in 1941 and is buried near Max Planck, Otto Hahn and Max von Laue in Göttingen, Germany. After some work at Leipzig, he founded the Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at Göttingen, Nernst invented, in 1897 an electric lamp, using an incandescent ceramic rod. His invention, known as the Nernst lamp, was the successor to the lamp of Edison. Nernst researched osmotic pressure and electrochemistry, in 1905, he established what he referred to as his New Heat Theorem, later known as the Third law of thermodynamics. This is the work for which he is best remembered, as it provided a means of determining free energies of reactions from heat measurements. Theodore Richards claimed Nernst had stolen the idea from him, in 1911, with Max Planck, he was the main organizer of the first Solvay Conference in Brussels. In 1912, the impressionist painter Max Liebermann painted his portrait, in 1914 Nernst showed his support for German militarism by signing the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three. He also accepted the post of Staff Scientific Advisor in the Imperial German Army, in 1918, after studying photochemistry, he proposed the atomic chain reaction theory. The atomic chain reaction theory stated that when a reaction in which atoms are formed
Walther Nernst
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Walther Nernst
Walther Nernst
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Nernst 1912, portrait by
Max Liebermann
3.
Marcel Brillouin
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Louis Marcel Brillouin was a French physicist and mathematician. Born in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France, his father was a painter who moved to Paris when Marcel was a boy, there he attended the Lycée Condorcet. The Brillouin family returned to Saint-Martin-lès-Melle during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to escape the fighting, there he spent time teaching himself from his grandfathers philosophy books. After the war, he returned to Paris and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1874, Brillouin then held successive posts as assistant professor of physics at universities in Nancy, Dijon and Toulouse before returning to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1888. Later, he was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Collège de France from 1900 to retirement in 1931, in 1911 he was one of only six French physicists invited to the first Solvay Conference. He was awarded the Prix La Caze for 1912, Brillouin was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1921. He was an officer of the Legion of Honour, most notably he, built a new model of the Eötvös balance, wrote on Helmholtz flow and the stability of aircraft, worked on a theory of the tides. His son Léon Brillouin, also had a prominent career in physics, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography ed. by C. C. Propagation de lÉlectricité, Histoire et Théorie, leçons sur la Viscosité des Liquides et des Gaz. Jubilé de M. Brillouin pour son 80ème anniversaire, comptes Rendus de lAcadémie des Sciences, vol. Biography at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland
Marcel Brillouin
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Marcel Brillouin in 1895
Marcel Brillouin
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Marcel Brillouin at the first
Solvay Conference, in 1911
4.
Ernest Solvay
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Ernest Gaston Joseph Solvay was a Belgian chemist, industrialist and philanthropist. Born at Rebecq, he was prevented by acute pleurisy from going to university and he worked in his uncles chemical factory from the age of 21. In 1861, he developed the process for the manufacturing of soda ash from brine and limestone. The process was an improvement over the earlier Leblanc process and he founded the company Solvay & Cie and established his first factory at Couillet in 1863 and further perfected the process until 1872, when he patented it. Soon, Solvay process plants were established in the United Kingdom, today, about 70 Solvay process plants are still operational worldwide. In 1903, he founded the Solvay Business School which is part of the Free University of Brussels. A later conference would include Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and he was twice elected to the Belgian Senate for the Liberal Party and granted honorary title of Minister of State at the end of his life. Solvay, New York and Rosignano Solvay, the locations of the first Solvay process plants in the United States, Solvay died at Ixelles at the age of 84 and is interred there in the Ixelles Cemetery. 1918, Minister of State, By Royal Decree,1918, Grand Cordon in the Order of Leopold, by Royal Decree. Solvay Institute of Sociology Emile Waxweiler Solvay Hut Bertrand, Louis, een hervormer op maatschappelijk gebied, Brussels, Agence Dechenne,1918,113 p. Boianovsky, Mauro, Erreygers, Guido, Social comptabilism and pure credit systems. Solvay and Wicksell on monetary reform, in, Fontaine, Philippe, Leonard, Robert, The experiment in the history of economics, London, Routledge,2005, pp. 98–134. Studies of neglected thinkers of Belgium, France, The Netherlands and Scandinavia, Cheltenham-Northampton, Edward Elgar,1998, des rives de la Sambre aux confins de la terre, Bruxelles, Didier Hatier,1989,187 p. Author not stated. Vie DErnest Solvay Bruxelles, Chez le Libraire Lamertin,1929,164 pp. Ten heliogravures Soft cover, media related to Ernest Solvay at Wikimedia Commons Quotations related to Ernest Solvay at Wikiquote
Ernest Solvay
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Ernest Solvay (c1900)
Ernest Solvay
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The portrait of participants to the first
Solvay Conference in 1911. Ernest Solvay is the third seated from the left. Solvay was not present at the time the photo was taken, so his photo was cut and pasted onto this one for the official release
5.
Hendrik Lorentz
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Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He also derived the equations which formed the basis of the special relativity theory of Albert Einstein. For this he received honours and distinctions during his life. Hendrik Lorentz was born in Arnhem, Gelderland, the son of Gerrit Frederik Lorentz, a well-off nurseryman, in 1862, after his mothers death, his father married Luberta Hupkes. Despite being raised as a Protestant, he was a freethinker in religious matters, from 1866 to 1869 he attended the Hogere Burger School in Arnhem, a new type of public high school recently established by Johan Rudolph Thorbecke. His results in school were exemplary, not only did he excel in the sciences and mathematics, but also in English, French. In 1870 he passed the exams in languages which were then required for admission to University. After earning a degree, he returned to Arnhem in 1871 to teach night school classes in mathematics. On 17 November 1877, only 24 years of age, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was appointed to the established chair in theoretical physics at the University of Leiden. The position had initially offered to Johan van der Waals. On 25 January 1878 Lorentz delivered his lecture on De moleculaire theoriën in de natuurkunde. In 1881 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts, during the first twenty years in Leiden, Lorentz was primarily interested in the theory of electromagnetism to explain the relationship of electricity, magnetism, and light. After that, he extended his research to a wider area while still focusing on theoretical physics. Lorentz made significant contributions to fields ranging from hydrodynamics to general relativity and his most important contributions were in the area of electromagnetism, the electron theory, and relativity. Lorentz theorized that atoms might consist of charged particles and suggested that the oscillations of charged particles were the source of light. When a colleague and former student of Lorentzs, Pieter Zeeman, discovered the Zeeman effect in 1896, the experimental and theoretical work was honored with the Nobel prize in physics in 1902. Lorentz name is now associated with the Lorentz-Lorenz formula, the Lorentz force, the Lorentzian distribution, in 1892 and 1895 Lorentz worked on describing electromagnetic phenomena in reference frames that move relative to the luminiferous aether. He discovered that the transition from one to another reference frame could be simplified by using a new variable which he called local time
Hendrik Lorentz
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Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
Hendrik Lorentz
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Portrait by
Jan Veth
Hendrik Lorentz
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Albert Einstein and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, photographed by
Ehrenfest in front of his home in Leiden in 1921.
6.
Emil Warburg
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Emil Gabriel Warburg was a German physicist who during his career was professor of physics at the Universities of Strassburg, Freiburg and Berlin. He was president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft 1899-1905 and he was a friend of Albert Einstein. Among his students were James Franck, Eduard Grüneisen, Robert Pohl, Erich Regener and he was a member of the Warburg family. He carried out research in the areas of theory of gases, electrical conductivity, gas discharges, heat radiation, ferromagnetism. He was the father of Otto Heinrich Warburg
Emil Warburg
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Emil Gabriel Warburg (1846-1931)
7.
Jean Baptiste Perrin
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For this achievement he was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1926. Born in Lille, France, Perrin attended the École Normale Supérieure and he became an assistant at the school during the period of 1894–97 when he began the study of cathode rays and X-rays. He was awarded the degree of docteur ès sciences in 1897, in the same year he was appointed as a lecturer in physical chemistry at the Sorbonne, Paris. He became a professor at the University in 1910, holding this post until the German occupation of France during World War II, in 1895, Perrin showed that cathode rays were of negative electric charge in nature. He determined Avogadros number by several methods and he explained solar energy as due to the thermonuclear reactions of hydrogen. Perrin was the author of a number of books and dissertations, most notable of his publications were, Rayons cathodiques et rayons X, Les Principes, Electrisation de contact, Réalité moléculaire, Matière et Lumière, Lumière et Reaction chimique. Perrin was also the recipient of prestigious awards including the Joule Prize of the Royal Society in 1896. He was twice appointed a member of the Solvay Committee at Brussels in 1911 and he also held memberships with the Royal Society of London and with the Academies of Sciences of Belgium, Sweden, Turin, Prague, Romania and China. He became a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1926 and was made Commander of the Order of Léopold, in 1919, Perrin proposed that nuclear reactions can provide the source of energy in stars. · In 1927, he founded the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique together with chemist André Job, funding was provided by Edmond James de Rothschild. In 1937, Perrin established the Palais de la Découverte, a museum in Paris. Perrin is considered the father of the National Centre for Scientific Research. In 1936, Perrin, now an undersecretary for research, founded the Service Central de la Recherche Scientifique, both institutions were merged under the CNRS umbrella on October 19,1939. His notable students include Pierre Victor Auger, jean Perrin was the father of Francis Perrin, also a physicist. Perrin was an atheist and a socialist and he was an officer in the engineer corps during World War I. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, he escaped to the U. S. A. together with his partner Nine Choucroun and he died in New York City. After the War, in 1948, his remains were transported back to France by the cruiser Jeanne dArc, exposé de thermodynamique /Principles of thermodynamics Traité de chimie physique
Jean Baptiste Perrin
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Perrin in 1926
8.
Wilhelm Wien
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He also formulated an expression for the black-body radiation which is correct in the photon-gas limit. His arguments were based on the notion of adiabatic invariance, and were instrumental for the formulation of quantum mechanics, Wien received the 1911 Nobel Prize for his work on heat radiation. He was a cousin of Max Wien, inventor of the Wien bridge, Wien was born at Gaffken near Fischhausen, Province of Prussia as the son of landowner Carl Wien. In 1866, his family moved to Drachstein near Rastenburg, in 1879, Wien went to school in Rastenburg and from 1880-1882 he attended the city school of Heidelberg. In 1882 he attended the University of Göttingen and the University of Berlin, from 1896 to 1899, Wien lectured at RWTH Aachen University. In 1900 he went to the University of Würzburg and became successor of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, in 1896 Wien empirically determined a distribution law of blackbody radiation, later named after him, Wiens law. However, Wiens law was valid at high frequencies. Planck corrected the theory and proposed what is now called Plancks law, in 1900, he assumed that the entire mass of matter is of electromagnetic origin and proposed the formula m = E / c 2 for the relation between electromagnetic mass and electromagnetic energy. While studying streams of ionized gas, Wien, in 1898, Wien, with this work, laid the foundation of mass spectrometry. J. J. Thomson refined Wiens apparatus and conducted experiments in 1913 then, after work by Ernest Rutherford in 1919. During April 1913, Wien was a lecturer at Columbia University, in 1911, Wien was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discoveries regarding the laws governing the radiation of heat. Wiens distribution law History of special relativity Mass–energy equivalence ——, ueber die Fragen, welche die translatorische Bewegung des Lichtäthers betreffen. Über die Möglichkeit einer elektromagnetischen Begründung der Mechanik, Über die Differentialgleichungen der Elektrodynamik für bewegte Körper. Über die Differentialgleichungen der Elektrodynamik für bewegte Körper, erwiderung auf die Kritik des Hrn. Aus dem Leben und Wirken eines Physikers, rüchardt, E. Zur Entdeckung der Kanalstrahlen vor fünfzig Jahren. Rüchardt, E. Zur Erinnerung an Wilhelm Wien bei der 25, Wilhelm Wien OConnor, John J. Robertson, Edmund F. Wilhelm Wien, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews
Wilhelm Wien
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Wilhelm Wien
9.
Marie Curie
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Marie Skłodowska Curie, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris and she was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She studied at Warsaws clandestine Floating University and began her scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris and she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with physicist Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and her achievements included the development of the theory of radioactivity, techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. Under her direction, the worlds first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms and she founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw, which remain major centres of medical research today. During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals, while a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland and she named the first chemical element that she discovered—polonium, which she isolated in 1898—after her native country. Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw, in the Russian partition of Poland, on 7 November 1867, the fifth and youngest child of well-known teachers Bronisława, née Boguska, the elder siblings of Maria were Zofia, Józef, Bronisława and Helena. On both the paternal and maternal sides, the family had lost their property and fortunes through patriotic involvements in Polish national uprisings aimed at restoring Polands independence. This condemned the subsequent generation, including Maria, her sisters and her brother. Marias paternal grandfather, Józef Skłodowski, had been a teacher in Lublin, where he taught the young Bolesław Prus. Her father, Władysław Skłodowski, taught mathematics and physics, subjects that Maria was to pursue, after Russian authorities eliminated laboratory instruction from the Polish schools, he brought much of the laboratory equipment home, and instructed his children in its use. Marias mother Bronisława operated a prestigious Warsaw boarding school for girls and she died of tuberculosis in May 1878, when Maria was ten years old. Less than three years earlier, Marias oldest sibling, Zofia, had died of typhus contracted from a boarder, Marias father was an atheist, her mother a devout Catholic. The deaths of Marias mother and sister caused her to give up Catholicism and become agnostic. When she was ten years old, Maria began attending the school of J. Sikorska, next she attended a gymnasium for girls. After a collapse, possibly due to depression, she spent the year in the countryside with relatives of her father, and the next year with her father in Warsaw
Marie Curie
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Marie Skłodowska Curie, c. 1920
Marie Curie
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Birthplace on ulica Freta in Warsaw's "
New Town " – now home to the
Maria Skłodowska-Curie Museum
Marie Curie
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Władysław Skłodowski with daughters (from left) Maria,
Bronisława, Helena, 1890
Marie Curie
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At a Warsaw laboratory, in 1890–91, Maria Skłodowska did her first scientific work
10.
Robert Goldschmidt
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Robert Goldschmidt was a Belgian chemist, physicist, and engineer who first proposed the idea of standardized microfiche. Goldschmidt was a polymath who made advances in aviation and wireless telegraphy. He inaugurated the first regular broadcasts of concerts in 1914 and was a participant in the first. Educated in Brussels and Berlin, Goldschmidt was a professor of chemistry at the University of Brussels for some thirty years, in the first years of the 20th century, he worked with Paul Otlet on the creation of microfilm, then known as microphotographs. Thus there is a need for “a new form of book that will overcome these major inconveniences. ”In 1907, Goldschmidt performed an experiment with wireless telegraphy at the Brussels Palace of Justice, the experiments involved Tervuren. As a result, King Albert I supported the building of a station in the Royal Palace of Laeken. A similar station was built in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo, Goldschmidt worked extensively in the Belgian Congo, where he set up a telegraph and telephone network. While in the Congo, he devised an amphibious train. In 1908 he opened a Popular Laboratory of Electricity in Brussels, Goldschmidt developed an interest in aviation, and in 1909 constructed a dirigible balloon, La Belgique. An alternator developed by Goldschmidt was installed in Tuckerton, New Jersey and it was not removed from service until 1948. Goldschmidt continued to be interested in microphotography throughout his life and he invented reading machines and film processes. In 1925, he and Otlet described an easily manufactured microphotographic library, Goldschmidt died in 1935 and was buried in Brussels
Robert Goldschmidt
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Robert Goldschmidt at the first
Solvay Conference in 1911
11.
Max Planck
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Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, FRS was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. However, his name is known on a broader academic basis, through the renaming in 1948 of the German scientific institution. The MPS now includes 83 institutions representing a range of scientific directions. Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family and his paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen, his father was a law professor in Kiel and Munich. Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his second wife and he was baptised with the name of Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck, of his given names, Marx was indicated as the primary name. However, by the age of ten he signed with the name Max and he was the 6th child in the family, though two of his siblings were from his fathers first marriage. Among his earliest memories was the marching of Prussian and Austrian troops into Kiel during the Second Schleswig War in 1864 and it was from Müller that Planck first learned the principle of conservation of energy. Planck graduated early, at age 17 and this is how Planck first came in contact with the field of physics. Planck was gifted when it came to music and he took singing lessons and played piano, organ and cello, and composed songs and operas. However, instead of music he chose to study physics, the Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised Planck against going into physics, saying, in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes. Planck replied that he did not wish to discover new things, but only to understand the fundamentals of the field. Under Jollys supervision, Planck performed the experiments of his scientific career, studying the diffusion of hydrogen through heated platinum. In 1877 he went to the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin for a year of study with physicists Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff and mathematician Karl Weierstrass. He wrote that Helmholtz was never quite prepared, spoke slowly, miscalculated endlessly and he soon became close friends with Helmholtz. While there he undertook a program of mostly self-study of Clausiuss writings, in October 1878 Planck passed his qualifying exams and in February 1879 defended his dissertation, Über den zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Wärmetheorie. He briefly taught mathematics and physics at his school in Munich. In June 1880, he presented his thesis, Gleichgewichtszustände isotroper Körper in verschiedenen Temperaturen. With the completion of his thesis, Planck became an unpaid private lecturer in Munich
Max Planck
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Planck in 1933
Max Planck
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Max Planck's signature at ten years of age.
Max Planck
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Plaque at the
Humboldt University of Berlin: "Max Planck, discoverer of the elementary quantum of action h, taught in this building from 1889 to 1928."
Max Planck
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Planck in 1918, the year he received the
Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on
quantum theory
12.
Arnold Sommerfeld
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He served as PhD supervisor for many Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry. He introduced the 2nd quantum number and the 4th quantum number and he also introduced the fine-structure constant and pioneered X-ray wave theory. Sommerfeld studied mathematics and physical sciences at the Albertina University of his city, Königsberg. His dissertation advisor was the mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann, and he benefited from classes with mathematicians Adolf Hurwitz and David Hilbert. His participation in the student fraternity Deutsche Burschenschaft resulted in a scar on his face. He received his Ph. D. on October 24,1891, after receiving his doctorate, Sommerfeld remained at Königsberg to work on his teaching diploma. He passed the exam in 1892 and then began a year of military service. He completed his military service in September 1893, and for the next eight years continued voluntary eight-week military service. With his turned up moustache, his build, his Prussian bearing. In October, Sommerfeld went to the University of Göttingen, which was the center of mathematics in Germany, Sommerfelds Habilitationsschrift was completed under Klein, in 1895, which allowed Sommerfeld to become a Privatdozent at Göttingen. As a Privatdozent, Sommerfeld lectured on a range of mathematical and mathematical physics topics. Lectures by Klein in 1895 and 1896 on rotating bodies led Klein and Sommerfeld to write a four-volume text Die Theorie des Kreisels – a 13-year collaboration, the first two volumes were on theory, and the latter two were on applications in geophysics, astronomy, and technology. The association Sommerfeld had with Klein influenced Sommerfelds turn of mind to be applied mathematics, while at Göttingen, Sommerfeld met Johanna Höpfner, daughter of Ernst Höpfner, curator at Göttingen. In October,1897 Sommerfeld began the appointment to the Chair of Mathematics at the Bergakademie in Clausthal-Zellerfeld and this appointment provided enough income to eventually marry Johanna. At Kleins request, Sommerfeld took on the position of editor of Volume V of Enzyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften, in 1900, Sommerfeld started his appointment to the Chair of Applied Mechanics at the Königliche Technische Hochschule Aachen as extraordinarius professor, which was arranged through Kleins efforts. At Aachen, he developed the theory of hydrodynamics, which would retain his interest for a long time, later, at the University of Munich, Sommerfelds students Ludwig Hopf and Werner Heisenberg would write their Ph. D. theses on this topic. From 1906 Sommerfeld established himself as professor of physics and director of the new Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Munich. He was selected for positions by Wilhelm Röntgen, Director of the Physics Institute at Munich
Arnold Sommerfeld
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Arnold Sommerfeld, Stuttgart 1935
Arnold Sommerfeld
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Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld (1868–1951)
13.
Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
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He advocated the area bombing of German cities during the Second World War and doubted the sophistication of Nazi Germanys radar technology and the existence of its V weapons programme. Lindemann was the second of three sons of Adolph Friedrich Lindemann, who had emigrated to the United Kingdom circa 1871, Frederick was born in Baden-Baden in Germany where his American mother Olga Noble, the widow of a wealthy banker, was taking the cure. After schooling in Scotland and Darmstadt, he attended the University of Berlin and he did research in physics at the Sorbonne that confirmed theories, first put forward by Albert Einstein, on specific heats at very low temperatures. For this and other work, Lindemann was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920. In 1911 he was invited to the Solvay Conference on Radiation, Lindemann was a teetotaler, non-smoker and a vegetarian, although Churchill would sometimes induce him to take a glass of brandy. He was an excellent pianist, and sufficiently able as a player to compete at Wimbledon. He was known to friends as the Prof in reference to his position at the University of Oxford, Lindemann believed that a small circle of the intelligent and the aristocratic should run the world, resulting in a peaceable and stable society, led by supermen and served by helots. Some sources say that he was Jewish, but Frederick Smiths biography and it was no longer necessary, he wrote, to wait for the haphazard process of natural selection to ensure that the slow and heavy mind gravitates to the lowest form of activity. At the outbreak of the First World War, Lindemann was playing tennis in Germany and had to leave in haste to avoid internment, in 1915, he joined the staff of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. He developed a theory of aircraft spin recovery, and later learned to fly so that he could test his ideas himself. Prior to Lindemanns work, a aircraft was almost invariably unrecoverable. Also in 1919, he was one of the first people to suggest that in the solar wind particles of both polarities, protons as well as electrons, come from the Sun and he was probably not aware that Kristian Birkeland had made the same prediction three years earlier. At the same time he worked on the theory of specific heats, in the field of chemical kinetics, he proposed the Lindemann mechanism in 1921 for unimolecular chemical reactions, and showed that the first step is one of bimolecular activation. At the same time Churchills wife Clementine partnered with Lindemann for a charity tennis match and they became close friends and remained so for 35 years, with Lindemann visiting Chartwell more than 100 times from 1925 to 1939. Lindemann opposed the General Strike of 1926, and mobilised the reluctant staff of the Clarendon to produce copies of Churchills anti-strike newspaper, Lindemann was also alarmed and fearful of political developments in Germany. In the 1930s, Lindemann advised Winston Churchill when the latter was out of Government – the Wilderness Years – and he appointed to the Clarendon one of Churchills social set that included the Mitfords and the Cavendish family, the young Welshman Derek Jackson. This brilliant young physicist, the son of Sir Charles Jackson, transferred from the Nobel prize-winning labs at Cambridge, one frequently intoxicated visitor was a wayward Randolph Churchill, who would eventually find his destiny in the secret war of the Greek partisans. In 1932, Lindemann joined Winston to complete a trip throughout Europe and were dismayed at what they saw
Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
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The Right Honourable The Viscount Cherwell
CH PC FRS
Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
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Lindemann, Churchill and Vice Admiral
Phillips watching a demonstration at
Holt, Norfolk
Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
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Prime Minister First Lord of the Treasury
14.
Maurice, 6th duc de Broglie
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Louis-César-Victor-Maurice, 6th duc de Broglie was a French physicist. De Broglie was born in Paris, to Victor de Broglie, in 1901, he was married to Camille Bernou de Rochetaillée in Paris. They had one daughter, Laure, born on 17 November 1904 and he acceded to the title of duc de Broglie on his fathers death in 1906. He died on 14 July 1960 in Neuilly-sur-Seine and his only child having died almost a half-century before, his brother Louis succeeded him as duke. Having graduated from officers school, Maurice de Broglie spent nine years in the French Navy, serving on a gunboat at Bizerte. While serving, he interested in physics, and began doing research on electromagnetism. De Broglie defied his familys wishes and left the navy in 1904 to pursue a scientific career and he studied under Paul Langevin at the Collège de France in Paris, receiving his doctorate in 1908. De Broglie made advances in the study of X-ray diffraction and spectroscopy, during the First World War, he worked on radio communications for the navy. After the war, he resumed his research at a laboratory in his home. He occasionally collaborated with his younger brother Louis, who followed his lead and was training as a physicist. After Louis de Broglies rise to prominence in the 1920s, building on some of their shared research, while Louis was primarily a theoretician, Maurice himself was always the experimental physicist par excellence. De Broglie became a member of the Académie des sciences in 1924 and he had the unique honor of welcoming his own brother into the Academy on the latters induction. In 1942 he succeeded his mentor, assuming Langevins chair in physics at the Collège de France and he was also elected to the Royal Society of London on 23 May 1940, having received the Royal Societys Hughes Medal in 1928. Media related to Maurice de Broglie at Wikimedia Commons
Maurice, 6th duc de Broglie
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Pastel drawing of Maurice de Broglie by
Marcel Baschet, 1932
15.
Martin Knudsen
–
Knudsen received the Universitys gold medal in 1895 and earned his masters degree in physics the following year. He became lecturer in physics at the University in 1901 and professor in 1912 and he held this post until his own retirement in 1941. Knudsen was renowned for his work on theory and low-pressure phenomena in gases. His name is associated with the Knudsen flow, Knudsen diffusion, Knudsen number, Knudsen layer, also there is the Knudsen equation, two instruments, the Knudsen absolute manometer and Knudsen gauge, and one gas pump that operates without moving parts, the Knudsen pump. His book, The Kinetic Theory of Gases, contains the results of his research. Knudsen was also active in physical oceanography, developing methods of defining properties of seawater. He was editor of Hydrological Tables and he was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences in 1935. Matematiken i Danmark by Niels Nielsen, Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, Vol. I, 1801-1908, published 1910, Vol. II, 1528-1800, published 1912. Note, This important work is a compilation of Danish mathematical writings, in addition to mathematicians, the short biographical notes include many physicists, astronomers, and early natural philosophers, including medical practitioners. Kemien i Danmark by Stig E. Veibel, Vol. I, Kemiens historie i Danmark,1939. Vol. II, Dansk Kemisk Bibliografi, 1800-1935,1943, Vol III, Danske Kemikere, edited by Bodil Jerslev,1968. All published by Nyt Nordisk Forlag, Copenhagen, note, Vol. II is a compilation of Danish publications in chemistry and includes works by physicists, geologists, biologists, and physicians, along with biographical information. Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Charles Coulston Gillispie, editor, Scribners & Sons, New York,1980
Martin Knudsen
–
Martin Knudsen, 1934 at London
16.
James Hopwood Jeans
–
Sir James Hopwood Jeans OM FRS was an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician. Born in Ormskirk, Lancashire, the son of William Tulloch Jeans, Jeans was educated at Merchant Taylors School, Northwood, Wilsons Grammar School, Camberwell and Trinity College, Cambridge. He told them that he could not guarantee that they would come out higher than fifteenth in the list of wranglers, but he understood that they would never regret it. They accepted his advice, and went to R. R. Webb, Walker accordingly took Jeans himself, and the result was a triumph. Jeans was bracketed second wrangler with J. F. Cameron. R. W. H. T. Hudson was Senior Wrangler and G. H, Jeans was elected Fellow of Trinity College in October 1901, and taught at Cambridge, but went to Princeton University in 1904 as a professor of applied mathematics. He returned to Cambridge in 1910 and he made important contributions in many areas of physics, including quantum theory, the theory of radiation and stellar evolution. This theory is not accepted today, Jeans, along with Arthur Eddington, is a founder of British cosmology. In 1928 Jeans was the first to conjecture a steady state cosmology based on a continuous creation of matter in the universe. This theory fell out of favour when the 1965 discovery of the microwave background was widely interpreted as the tell-tale signature of the Big Bang. His scientific reputation is grounded in the monographs The Dynamical Theory of Gases, Theoretical Mechanics and these books made Jeans fairly well known as an expositor of the revolutionary scientific discoveries of his day, especially in relativity and physical cosmology. In 1939, the Journal of the British Astronomical Association reported that Jeans was going to stand as a candidate for parliament for the Cambridge University constituency, the election, expected to take place in 1939 or 1940 did not take place until 1945, and without his involvement. He also wrote the book Physics and Philosophy where he explores the different views on reality from two different perspectives, science and philosophy, on his religious views, Jeans was an agnostic Freemason. Jeans married twice, first to the American poet Charlotte Tiffany Mitchell in 1907, one of Jeans major discoveries, named Jeans length, is a critical radius of an interstellar cloud in space. It depends on the temperature, and density of the cloud, Jeans also helped to discover the Rayleigh–Jeans law, which relates the energy density of black-body radiation to the temperature of the emission source. F =8 π c k B T λ4 Jeans is also credited with calculating the rate of escape from a planet due to kinetic energy of the gas molecules. The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality, the Universe begins to more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an intruder into the realm of matter. We ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter and he replied, I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe
James Hopwood Jeans
–
Sir James Hopwood Jeans
17.
Ernest Rutherford
–
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS was a New Zealand-born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday and this work was done at McGill University in Canada. Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester in the UK, Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. He conducted research that led to the first splitting of the atom in 1917 in a reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered the proton. Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1919, after his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newtons tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium was named after him in 1997, Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England. James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, to raise a little flax, Ernest was born at Brightwater, near Nelson, New Zealand. His first name was mistakenly spelled Earnest when his birth was registered, Rutherfords mother Martha Thompson was a schoolteacher. He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand, in 1898 Thomson recommended Rutherford for a position at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was to replace Hugh Longbourne Callendar who held the chair of Macdonald Professor of physics and was coming to Cambridge, in 1901 he gained a DSc from the University of New Zealand. In 1907 Rutherford returned to Britain to take the chair of physics at the Victoria University of Manchester, during World War I, he worked on a top secret project to solve the practical problems of submarine detection by sonar. In 1916 he was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal, in 1919 he returned to the Cavendish succeeding J. J. Thomson as the Cavendish professor and Director. Between 1925 and 1930 he served as President of the Royal Society, in 1933, Rutherford was one of the two inaugural recipients of the T. K. Sidey Medal, set up by the Royal Society of New Zealand as an award for outstanding scientific research. For some time before his death, Rutherford had a hernia, which he had neglected to have fixed. Despite an emergency operation in London, he died four days afterwards of what physicians termed intestinal paralysis, after cremation at Golders Green Crematorium, he was given the high honour of burial in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton and other illustrious British scientists. At Cambridge, Rutherford started to work with J. J. Thomson on the effects of X-rays on gases. Hearing of Becquerels experience with uranium, Rutherford started to explore its radioactivity, continuing his research in Canada, he coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray in 1899 to describe the two distinct types of radiation. He then discovered that thorium gave off a gas which produced an emanation which was itself radioactive and he found that a sample of this radioactive material of any size invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay – its half-life
Ernest Rutherford
–
The Right Honourable The Lord Rutherford of Nelson
OM FRS
Ernest Rutherford
–
Signature
Ernest Rutherford
–
Rutherford aged 21
Ernest Rutherford
–
A plaque commemorating Rutherford's presence at the
Victoria University, Manchester
18.
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
–
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate. He exploited the Hampson-Linde cycle to investigate how materials behave when cooled to nearly absolute zero and his production of extreme cryogenic temperatures led to his discovery of superconductivity in 1911, for certain materials, electrical resistance abruptly vanishes at very low temperatures. Kamerlingh Onnes was born in Groningen, Netherlands and his father, Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, was a brickworks owner. His mother was Anna Gerdina Coers of Arnhem, in 1870, Kamerlingh Onnes attended the University of Groningen. He studied under Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff at the University of Heidelberg from 1871 to 1873, again at Groningen, he obtained his masters in 1878 and a doctorate in 1879. His thesis was Nieuwe bewijzen voor de aswenteling der aarde, from 1878 to 1882 he was assistant to Johannes Bosscha, the director of the Delft Polytechnic, for whom he substituted as lecturer in 1881 and 1882. He was married to Maria Adriana Wilhelmina Elisabeth Bijleveld and had one child and his brother Menso Kamerlingh Onnes was a fairly well known painter, while his sister Jenny married another famous painter, Floris Verster. From 1882 to 1923 Kamerlingh Onnes served as professor of physics at the University of Leiden. In 1904 he founded a very large cryogenics laboratory and invited other researchers to the location, the laboratory is known now as Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory. Only one year after his appointment as professor he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts, on 10 July 1908, he was the first to liquefy helium, using several precooling stages and the Hampson-Linde cycle based on the Joule-Thomson effect. This way he lowered the temperature to the point of helium. By reducing the pressure of the liquid helium he achieved a temperature near 1.5 K and these were the coldest temperatures achieved on earth at the time. The equipment employed is at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, in 1911 Kamerlingh Onnes measured the electrical conductivity of pure metals at very low temperatures. Others, including Kamerlingh Onnes, felt that an electrical resistance would steadily decrease. On 8 April 1911, Kamerlingh Onnes found that at 4.2 K the resistance in a solid mercury wire immersed in liquid helium suddenly vanished and he immediately realized the significance of the discovery. He reported that Mercury has passed into a new state, which on account of its electrical properties may be called the superconductive state. He published more articles about the phenomenon, initially referring to it as supraconductivity and, some of the instruments he devised for his experiments can be seen at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. The apparatus he used to first liquefy helium is on display in the lobby of the department at Leiden University
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
–
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
–
Commemorative plaque in Leiden
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
–
Grave of Kamerlingh Onnes in
Voorschoten
19.
Albert Einstein
–
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. He developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics, Einsteins work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. Einstein is best known in popular culture for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led him to develop his theory of relativity during his time at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. Briefly before, he aquired the Swiss citizenship in 1901, which he kept for his whole life and he continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the theory of relativity to model the large-scale structure of the universe. He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and, being Jewish, did not go back to Germany and he settled in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1940. This eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project, Einstein supported defending the Allied forces, but generally denounced the idea of using the newly discovered nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955. Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works, on 5 December 2014, universities and archives announced the release of Einsteins papers, comprising more than 30,000 unique documents. Einsteins intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein synonymous with genius, Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879. His parents were Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, the Einsteins were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews, and Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of 5 for three years. At the age of 8, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium, the loss forced the sale of the Munich factory. In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan, when the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the schools regimen. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought was lost in strict rote learning, at the end of December 1894, he travelled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctors note. During his time in Italy he wrote an essay with the title On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field
Albert Einstein
–
Albert Einstein in 1921
Albert Einstein
–
Einstein at the age of 3 in 1882
Albert Einstein
–
Albert Einstein in 1893 (age 14)
Albert Einstein
–
Einstein's matriculation certificate at the age of 17, showing his final grades from the Argovian cantonal school (Aargauische Kantonsschule, on a scale of 1–6, with 6 being the highest possible mark)
20.
Paul Langevin
–
Paul Langevin ForMemRS was a prominent French physicist who developed Langevin dynamics and the Langevin equation. He was one of the founders of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, Langevin was also president of the Human Rights League from 1944 to 1946 – he had just recently joined the French Communist Party. Being a public opponent against fascism in the 1930s resulted in his arrest and he is entombed at the Panthéon. Langevin was born in Paris, and studied at the École de Physique et Chimie and he then went to Cambridge University and studied in the Cavendish Laboratory under Sir J. J. Thomson. Langevin returned to the Sorbonne and obtained his Ph. D. from Pierre Curie in 1902, in 1904 he became professor of physics at the Collège de France. In 1926 he became director of the École de Physique et Chimie and he was elected, in 1934, to the Académie des sciences. Langevin is noted for his work on paramagnetism and diamagnetism, and his most famous work was in the use of ultrasound using Pierre Curies piezoelectric effect. During World War I, he working on the use of these sounds to detect submarines through echo location. However the war was over by the time it was operational, during his career, Paul Langevin also did much to spread the theory of relativity in France and created what is now called the twin paradox. In 1910 he reportedly had an affair with the then-widowed Marie Curie, today, their grandson and granddaughter are married to one another, Hélène Langevin-Joliot. He was also noted for being an opponent of Nazism. He was later restored to his position in 1944 and he died in Paris in 1946, two years after living to see the Liberation of Paris. He is buried near several other prominent French scientists in the Pantheon in Paris and his daughter, Hélène Solomon-Langevin, was arrested for Resistance activity and survived several concentration camps. She was on the convoy of female political prisoners as Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier. The amount of time taken by the signal to travel to the enemy submarine, langevins successful application of the use of piezoelectricity in the generation and detection of ultrasound waves was followed by further development. Wolfram research biographical entry by Michel Barran, Paul Langevin – From Montmartre to the Panthéon, The Paris journey of an exceptional physicist. Langevin, Paul - Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography,2008
Paul Langevin
–
Paul Langevin
Paul Langevin
–
Albert Einstein,
Paul Ehrenfest, Paul Langevin,
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, and
Pierre Weiss at Ehrenfest's home in
Leiden
21.
Brussels
–
Brussels, officially the Brussels-Capital Region, is a region of Belgium comprising 19 municipalities, including the City of Brussels which is the capital of Belgium. The Brussels-Capital Region is a part of both the French Community of Belgium and the Flemish Community, but is separate from the region of Flanders or Wallonia. The region has a population of 1.2 million and an area with a population of over 1.8 million. Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union as it hosts a number of principal EU institutions, the secretariat of the Benelux and the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are also located in Brussels. Today, it is considered an Alpha global city, historically a Dutch-speaking city, Brussels has seen a language shift to French from the late 19th century onwards. Today, the majority language is French, and the Brussels-Capital Region is a bilingual enclave within the Flemish Region. All road signs, street names, and many advertisements and services are shown in both languages, Brussels is increasingly becoming multilingual with increasing numbers of migrants, expatriates and minority groups speaking their own languages. The most common theory of the origin of Brussels name is that it derives from the Old Dutch Broekzele or Broeksel, meaning marsh, Saint Vindicianus, the bishop of Cambrai made the first recorded reference to the place Brosella in 695 when it was still a hamlet. The origin of the settlement that was to become Brussels lies in Saint Gaugericus construction of a chapel on an island in the river Senne around 580. The official founding of Brussels is usually situated around 979, when Duke Charles of Lower Lotharingia transferred the relics of Saint Gudula from Moorsel to the Saint Gaugericus chapel, Charles would construct the first permanent fortification in the city, doing so on that same island. Lambert I of Leuven, Count of Leuven gained the County of Brussels around 1000 by marrying Charles daughter, as it grew to a population of around 30,000, the surrounding marshes were drained to allow for further expansion. The Counts of Leuven became Dukes of Brabant at about this time, in the 13th century, the city got its first walls. After the construction of the city walls in the early 13th century, to let the city expand, a second set of walls was erected between 1356 and 1383. Today, traces of it can still be seen, mostly because the small ring, Brabant had lost its independence, but Brussels became the Princely Capital of the prosperous Low Countries, and flourished. In 1516 Charles V, who had been heir of the Low Countries since 1506, was declared King of Spain in St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral in Brussels. Upon the death of his grandfather, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 and it was in the Palace complex at Coudenberg that Charles V abdicated in 1555. This impressive palace, famous all over Europe, had expanded since it had first become the seat of the Dukes of Brabant. In 1695, during the Nine Years War, King Louis XIV of France sent troops to bombard Brussels with artillery, together with the resulting fire, it was the most destructive event in the entire history of Brussels
Brussels
–
A
collage with several views of Brussels, Top: View of the
Northern Quarter business district, 2nd left: Floral carpet event in the
Grand Place, 2nd right:
Brussels City Hall and
Mont des Arts area, 3rd:
Cinquantenaire Park, 4th left:
Manneken Pis, 4th middle:
St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral, 4th right:
Congress Column, Bottom:
Royal Palace of Brussels
Brussels
–
Charles of Lorraine founded what would become Brussels c. 979
Brussels
–
Grand Place after
the 1695 bombardment by the French army
Brussels
–
Episode of the
Belgian Revolution of 1830,
Wappers (1834)
22.
Belgium
–
Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a sovereign state in Western Europe bordered by France, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and the North Sea. It is a small, densely populated country which covers an area of 30,528 square kilometres and has a population of about 11 million people. Additionally, there is a group of German-speakers who live in the East Cantons located around the High Fens area. Historically, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were known as the Low Countries, the region was called Belgica in Latin, after the Roman province of Gallia Belgica. From the end of the Middle Ages until the 17th century, today, Belgium is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. It is divided into three regions and three communities, that exist next to each other and its two largest regions are the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in the north and the French-speaking southern region of Wallonia. The Brussels-Capital Region is a bilingual enclave within the Flemish Region. A German-speaking Community exists in eastern Wallonia, Belgiums linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its political history and complex system of governance, made up of six different governments. Upon its independence, declared in 1830, Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Belgium is also a member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD and WTO. Its capital, Brussels, hosts several of the EUs official seats as well as the headquarters of major international organizations such as NATO. Belgium is also a part of the Schengen Area, Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy and is categorized as very high in the Human Development Index. A gradual immigration by Germanic Frankish tribes during the 5th century brought the area under the rule of the Merovingian kings, a gradual shift of power during the 8th century led the kingdom of the Franks to evolve into the Carolingian Empire. Many of these fiefdoms were united in the Burgundian Netherlands of the 14th and 15th centuries, the Eighty Years War divided the Low Countries into the northern United Provinces and the Southern Netherlands. The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs and this was the theatre of most Franco-Spanish and Franco-Austrian wars during the 17th and 18th centuries. The reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1815, although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 and for women in 1949. The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party, French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie
Belgium
–
Charlemagne and
Charles V
Belgium
–
Flaga
Belgium
Belgium
–
Episode of the
Belgian Revolution of 1830 (1834), by
Egide Charles Gustave Wappers
23.
Industry
–
Industry is the production of goods or related services within an economy. The major source of revenue of a group or company is the indicator of its relevant industry, when a large group has multiple sources of revenue generation, it is considered to be working in different industries. Manufacturing industry became a key sector of production and labour in European and North American countries during the Industrial Revolution, upsetting previous mercantile and this came through many successive rapid advances in technology, such as the production of steel and coal. Following the Industrial Revolution, possibly a third of the economic output are derived that is from manufacturing industries. Many developed countries and many developing/semi-developed countries depend significantly on manufacturing industry, Industries, the countries they reside in, and the economies of those countries are interlinked in a complex web of interdependence. Industries can be classified in a variety of ways, at the top level, industry is often classified according to the three-sector theory into sectors, primary, secondary, and tertiary. Some authors add quaternary or even quinary sectors, over time, the fraction of a societys industry within each sector changes. Below the economic sectors there are other more detailed industry classifications. These classification systems commonly divide industries according to functions and markets. Market-based classification systems such as the Global Industry Classification Standard and the Industry Classification Benchmark are used in finance, the International Standard Industrial Classification of all economic activities is the most complete and systematic industrial classification made by the United Nations Statistics Division. ISIC is a classification of economic activities arranged so that entities can be classified according to the activity they carry out. The Industrial Revolution led to the development of factories for large-scale production, originally the factories were steam-powered, but later transitioned to electricity once an electrical grid was developed. The mechanized assembly line was introduced to parts in a repeatable fashion. This led to significant increases in efficiency, lowering the cost of the end process, later automation was increasingly used to replace human operators. This process has accelerated with the development of the computer and the robot, historically certain manufacturing industries have gone into a decline due to various economic factors, including the development of replacement technology or the loss of competitive advantage. An example of the former is the decline in manufacturing when the automobile was mass-produced. A recent trend has been the migration of prosperous, industrialized nations towards a post-industrial society and this is manifested by an increase in the service sector at the expense of manufacturing, and the development of an information-based economy, the so-called informational revolution. In a post-industrial society, manufacturing is relocated to more favourable locations through a process of off-shoring
Industry
–
A factory, a traditional symbol of the industrial development (a
paper mill in
Georgetown, the United States)
Industry
–
GDP composition of sector and labour force by occupation in the form of any component to economy. The green, red, and blue components of the colours of the countries represent the percentages for the
agriculture, industry, and
services sectors, respectively.
Industry
–
A female industrial
worker amidst heavy steel semi-products (KINEX BEARINGS,
Bytča,
Slovakia, c. 1995–2000)
Industry
–
The assembly plant of the
Bell Aircraft Corporation (
Wheatfield, New York, United States, 1944) producing Aircobra P 39 aircraft
24.
Physics
–
Physics is the natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion and behavior through space and time, along with related concepts such as energy and force. One of the most fundamental disciplines, the main goal of physics is to understand how the universe behaves. Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy, Physics intersects with many interdisciplinary areas of research, such as biophysics and quantum chemistry, and the boundaries of physics are not rigidly defined. New ideas in physics often explain the mechanisms of other sciences while opening new avenues of research in areas such as mathematics. Physics also makes significant contributions through advances in new technologies that arise from theoretical breakthroughs, the United Nations named 2005 the World Year of Physics. Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences, the stars and planets were often a target of worship, believed to represent their gods. While the explanations for these phenomena were often unscientific and lacking in evidence, according to Asger Aaboe, the origins of Western astronomy can be found in Mesopotamia, and all Western efforts in the exact sciences are descended from late Babylonian astronomy. The most notable innovations were in the field of optics and vision, which came from the works of many scientists like Ibn Sahl, Al-Kindi, Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Farisi and Avicenna. The most notable work was The Book of Optics, written by Ibn Al-Haitham, in which he was not only the first to disprove the ancient Greek idea about vision, but also came up with a new theory. In the book, he was also the first to study the phenomenon of the pinhole camera, many later European scholars and fellow polymaths, from Robert Grosseteste and Leonardo da Vinci to René Descartes, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, were in his debt. Indeed, the influence of Ibn al-Haythams Optics ranks alongside that of Newtons work of the same title, the translation of The Book of Optics had a huge impact on Europe. From it, later European scholars were able to build the devices as what Ibn al-Haytham did. From this, such important things as eyeglasses, magnifying glasses, telescopes, Physics became a separate science when early modern Europeans used experimental and quantitative methods to discover what are now considered to be the laws of physics. Newton also developed calculus, the study of change, which provided new mathematical methods for solving physical problems. The discovery of new laws in thermodynamics, chemistry, and electromagnetics resulted from greater research efforts during the Industrial Revolution as energy needs increased, however, inaccuracies in classical mechanics for very small objects and very high velocities led to the development of modern physics in the 20th century. Modern physics began in the early 20th century with the work of Max Planck in quantum theory, both of these theories came about due to inaccuracies in classical mechanics in certain situations. Quantum mechanics would come to be pioneered by Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, from this early work, and work in related fields, the Standard Model of particle physics was derived. Areas of mathematics in general are important to this field, such as the study of probabilities, in many ways, physics stems from ancient Greek philosophy
Physics
–
Further information:
Outline of physics
Physics
–
Ancient
Egyptian astronomy is evident in monuments like the
ceiling of Senemut's tomb from the
Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.
Physics
–
Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727), whose
laws of motion and
universal gravitation were major milestones in classical physics
Physics
–
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), whose work on the
photoelectric effect and the
theory of relativity led to a revolution in 20th century physics
25.
Chemistry
–
Chemistry is a branch of physical science that studies the composition, structure, properties and change of matter. Chemistry is sometimes called the science because it bridges other natural sciences, including physics. For the differences between chemistry and physics see comparison of chemistry and physics, the history of chemistry can be traced to alchemy, which had been practiced for several millennia in various parts of the world. The word chemistry comes from alchemy, which referred to a set of practices that encompassed elements of chemistry, metallurgy, philosophy, astrology, astronomy, mysticism. An alchemist was called a chemist in popular speech, and later the suffix -ry was added to this to describe the art of the chemist as chemistry, the modern word alchemy in turn is derived from the Arabic word al-kīmīā. In origin, the term is borrowed from the Greek χημία or χημεία and this may have Egyptian origins since al-kīmīā is derived from the Greek χημία, which is in turn derived from the word Chemi or Kimi, which is the ancient name of Egypt in Egyptian. Alternately, al-kīmīā may derive from χημεία, meaning cast together, in retrospect, the definition of chemistry has changed over time, as new discoveries and theories add to the functionality of the science. The term chymistry, in the view of noted scientist Robert Boyle in 1661, in 1837, Jean-Baptiste Dumas considered the word chemistry to refer to the science concerned with the laws and effects of molecular forces. More recently, in 1998, Professor Raymond Chang broadened the definition of chemistry to mean the study of matter, early civilizations, such as the Egyptians Babylonians, Indians amassed practical knowledge concerning the arts of metallurgy, pottery and dyes, but didnt develop a systematic theory. Greek atomism dates back to 440 BC, arising in works by such as Democritus and Epicurus. In 50 BC, the Roman philosopher Lucretius expanded upon the theory in his book De rerum natura, unlike modern concepts of science, Greek atomism was purely philosophical in nature, with little concern for empirical observations and no concern for chemical experiments. Work, particularly the development of distillation, continued in the early Byzantine period with the most famous practitioner being the 4th century Greek-Egyptian Zosimos of Panopolis. He formulated Boyles law, rejected the four elements and proposed a mechanistic alternative of atoms. Before his work, though, many important discoveries had been made, the Scottish chemist Joseph Black and the Dutchman J. B. English scientist John Dalton proposed the theory of atoms, that all substances are composed of indivisible atoms of matter. Davy discovered nine new elements including the alkali metals by extracting them from their oxides with electric current, british William Prout first proposed ordering all the elements by their atomic weight as all atoms had a weight that was an exact multiple of the atomic weight of hydrogen. The inert gases, later called the noble gases were discovered by William Ramsay in collaboration with Lord Rayleigh at the end of the century, thereby filling in the basic structure of the table. Organic chemistry was developed by Justus von Liebig and others, following Friedrich Wöhlers synthesis of urea which proved that organisms were, in theory
Chemistry
–
Solutions of substances in reagent bottles, including
ammonium hydroxide and
nitric acid, illuminated in different colors
Chemistry
–
Democritus ' atomist philosophy was later adopted by
Epicurus (341–270 BCE).
Chemistry
–
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier is considered the "Father of Modern Chemistry".
Chemistry
–
Laboratory, Institute of Biochemistry,
University of Cologne.
26.
Quantum mechanics
–
Quantum mechanics, including quantum field theory, is a branch of physics which is the fundamental theory of nature at small scales and low energies of atoms and subatomic particles. Classical physics, the physics existing before quantum mechanics, derives from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid only at large scales, early quantum theory was profoundly reconceived in the mid-1920s. The reconceived theory is formulated in various specially developed mathematical formalisms, in one of them, a mathematical function, the wave function, provides information about the probability amplitude of position, momentum, and other physical properties of a particle. In 1803, Thomas Young, an English polymath, performed the famous experiment that he later described in a paper titled On the nature of light. This experiment played a role in the general acceptance of the wave theory of light. In 1838, Michael Faraday discovered cathode rays, Plancks hypothesis that energy is radiated and absorbed in discrete quanta precisely matched the observed patterns of black-body radiation. In 1896, Wilhelm Wien empirically determined a distribution law of black-body radiation, ludwig Boltzmann independently arrived at this result by considerations of Maxwells equations. However, it was only at high frequencies and underestimated the radiance at low frequencies. Later, Planck corrected this model using Boltzmanns statistical interpretation of thermodynamics and proposed what is now called Plancks law, following Max Plancks solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem, Albert Einstein offered a quantum-based theory to explain the photoelectric effect. Among the first to study quantum phenomena in nature were Arthur Compton, C. V. Raman, robert Andrews Millikan studied the photoelectric effect experimentally, and Albert Einstein developed a theory for it. In 1913, Peter Debye extended Niels Bohrs theory of structure, introducing elliptical orbits. This phase is known as old quantum theory, according to Planck, each energy element is proportional to its frequency, E = h ν, where h is Plancks constant. Planck cautiously insisted that this was simply an aspect of the processes of absorption and emission of radiation and had nothing to do with the reality of the radiation itself. In fact, he considered his quantum hypothesis a mathematical trick to get the right rather than a sizable discovery. He won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, Einstein further developed this idea to show that an electromagnetic wave such as light could also be described as a particle, with a discrete quantum of energy that was dependent on its frequency. The Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr became widely accepted, in the mid-1920s, developments in quantum mechanics led to its becoming the standard formulation for atomic physics. In the summer of 1925, Bohr and Heisenberg published results that closed the old quantum theory, out of deference to their particle-like behavior in certain processes and measurements, light quanta came to be called photons. From Einsteins simple postulation was born a flurry of debating, theorizing, thus, the entire field of quantum physics emerged, leading to its wider acceptance at the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927
Quantum mechanics
–
Max Planck is considered the father of the quantum theory.
Quantum mechanics
–
Solution to
Schrödinger's equation for the hydrogen atom at different energy levels. The brighter areas represent a higher probability of finding an
electron
Quantum mechanics
–
The 1927
Solvay Conference in
Brussels.
27.
World War I
–
World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history and it was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and paved the way for major political changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved. The war drew in all the worlds great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances, the Allies versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. These alliances were reorganised and expanded as more nations entered the war, Italy, Japan, the trigger for the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. This set off a crisis when Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia. Within weeks, the powers were at war and the conflict soon spread around the world. On 25 July Russia began mobilisation and on 28 July, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia, Germany presented an ultimatum to Russia to demobilise, and when this was refused, declared war on Russia on 1 August. Germany then invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg before moving towards France, after the German march on Paris was halted, what became known as the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, with a trench line that changed little until 1917. On the Eastern Front, the Russian army was successful against the Austro-Hungarians, in November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, opening fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and the Sinai. In 1915, Italy joined the Allies and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, Romania joined the Allies in 1916, after a stunning German offensive along the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the Allies rallied and drove back the Germans in a series of successful offensives. By the end of the war or soon after, the German Empire, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, national borders were redrawn, with several independent nations restored or created, and Germanys colonies were parceled out among the victors. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Big Four imposed their terms in a series of treaties, the League of Nations was formed with the aim of preventing any repetition of such a conflict. This effort failed, and economic depression, renewed nationalism, weakened successor states, and feelings of humiliation eventually contributed to World War II. From the time of its start until the approach of World War II, at the time, it was also sometimes called the war to end war or the war to end all wars due to its then-unparalleled scale and devastation. In Canada, Macleans magazine in October 1914 wrote, Some wars name themselves, during the interwar period, the war was most often called the World War and the Great War in English-speaking countries. Will become the first world war in the sense of the word. These began in 1815, with the Holy Alliance between Prussia, Russia, and Austria, when Germany was united in 1871, Prussia became part of the new German nation. Soon after, in October 1873, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors between the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany
World War I
–
Clockwise from the top: The aftermath of shelling during the
Battle of the Somme,
Mark V tanks cross the
Hindenburg Line,
HMS Irresistible sinks after hitting a
mine in the
Dardanelles, a British
Vickers machine gun crew wears
gas masks during the Battle of the Somme,
Albatros D.III fighters of
Jagdstaffel 11
World War I
–
Sarajevo citizens reading a poster with the proclamation of the
Austrian annexation in 1908.
World War I
–
This picture is usually associated with the arrest of
Gavrilo Princip, although some believe it depicts Ferdinand Behr, a bystander.
World War I
–
Serbian Army
Blériot XI "Oluj", 1915.
28.
Weimar Republic
–
Weimar Republic is an unofficial, historical designation for the German state between 1919 and 1933. The name derives from the city of Weimar, where its constitutional assembly first took place, the official name of the state was still Deutsches Reich, it had remained unchanged since 1871. In English the country was known simply as Germany. A national assembly was convened in Weimar, where a new constitution for the Deutsches Reich was written, in its fourteen years, the Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism, and contentious relationships with the victors of the First World War. The people of Germany blamed the Weimar Republic rather than their leaders for the countrys defeat. However, the Weimar Republic government successfully reformed the currency, unified tax policies, Weimar Germany eliminated most of the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles, it never completely met its disarmament requirements, and eventually paid only a small portion of the war reparations. Under the Locarno Treaties, Germany accepted the borders of the republic. From 1930 onwards President Hindenburg used emergency powers to back Chancellors Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen, the Great Depression, exacerbated by Brünings policy of deflation, led to a surge in unemployment. In 1933, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor with the Nazi Party being part of a coalition government, the Nazis held two out of the remaining ten cabinet seats. Von Papen as Vice Chancellor was intended to be the éminence grise who would keep Hitler under control, within months the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933 had brought about a state of emergency, it wiped out constitutional governance and civil liberties. Hitlers seizure of power was permissive of government by decree without legislative participation and these events brought the republic to an end, as democracy collapsed, a single-party state founded the Nazi era. The Weimar Republic is so called because the assembly that adopted its constitution met at Weimar, Germany from 6 February 1919 to 11 August 1919, but this name only became mainstream after 1933. To the right of the spectrum the politically engaged rejected the new democratic model, the Catholic Centre party, Zentrum favoured the term Deutscher Volksstaat while on the moderate left the Chancellors SPD preferred Deutsche Republik. Only during the 1930s did the term become mainstream, both within and outside Germany, after the introduction of the republic, the flag and coat of arms of Germany were officially altered to reflect the political changes. The Weimar Republic retained the Reichsadler, but without the symbols of the former Monarchy and this left the black eagle with one head, facing to the right, with open wings but closed feathers, with a red beak, tongue and claws and white highlighting. If the Reichs Eagle is shown without a frame, the charge and colors as those of the eagle of the Reichs coat of arms are to be used. The patterns kept by the Federal Ministry of the Interior are decisive for the heraldic design, the artistic design may be varied for each special purpose. The achievements and signs of movement were mostly done away with after its downfall
Weimar Republic
–
The rebellion, November 1918.
Weimar Republic
–
Flag
Weimar Republic
–
Philipp Scheidemann addresses a crowd from a window of the
Reich Chancellery, 9 November 1918.
Weimar Republic
–
Official postcard of the
National Assembly.
29.
Electron
–
The electron is a subatomic particle, symbol e− or β−, with a negative elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, the electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton. Quantum mechanical properties of the include a intrinsic angular momentum of a half-integer value, expressed in units of the reduced Planck constant. As it is a fermion, no two electrons can occupy the same state, in accordance with the Pauli exclusion principle. Like all elementary particles, electrons exhibit properties of particles and waves, they can collide with other particles and can be diffracted like light. Since an electron has charge, it has an electric field. Electromagnetic fields produced from other sources will affect the motion of an electron according to the Lorentz force law, electrons radiate or absorb energy in the form of photons when they are accelerated. Laboratory instruments are capable of trapping individual electrons as well as electron plasma by the use of electromagnetic fields, special telescopes can detect electron plasma in outer space. Electrons are involved in applications such as electronics, welding, cathode ray tubes, electron microscopes, radiation therapy, lasers, gaseous ionization detectors. Interactions involving electrons with other particles are of interest in fields such as chemistry. The Coulomb force interaction between the positive protons within atomic nuclei and the negative electrons without, allows the composition of the two known as atoms, ionization or differences in the proportions of negative electrons versus positive nuclei changes the binding energy of an atomic system. The exchange or sharing of the electrons between two or more atoms is the cause of chemical bonding. In 1838, British natural philosopher Richard Laming first hypothesized the concept of a quantity of electric charge to explain the chemical properties of atoms. Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney named this charge electron in 1891, electrons can also participate in nuclear reactions, such as nucleosynthesis in stars, where they are known as beta particles. Electrons can be created through beta decay of isotopes and in high-energy collisions. The antiparticle of the electron is called the positron, it is identical to the electron except that it carries electrical, when an electron collides with a positron, both particles can be totally annihilated, producing gamma ray photons. The ancient Greeks noticed that amber attracted small objects when rubbed with fur, along with lightning, this phenomenon is one of humanitys earliest recorded experiences with electricity. In his 1600 treatise De Magnete, the English scientist William Gilbert coined the New Latin term electricus, both electric and electricity are derived from the Latin ēlectrum, which came from the Greek word for amber, ἤλεκτρον
Electron
–
A beam of electrons deflected in a circle by a magnetic field
Electron
–
Hydrogen atom
orbitals at different energy levels. The brighter areas are where you are most likely to find an electron at any given time.
Electron
–
Robert Millikan
Electron
–
A
lightning discharge consists primarily of a flow of electrons. The electric potential needed for lightning may be generated by a triboelectric effect.
30.
Photon
–
A photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of the electromagnetic field including electromagnetic radiation such as light, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force. The photon has zero rest mass and is moving at the speed of light. Like all elementary particles, photons are currently best explained by quantum mechanics and exhibit wave–particle duality, exhibiting properties of both waves and particles. For example, a photon may be refracted by a lens and exhibit wave interference with itself. The quanta in a light wave cannot be spatially localized, some defined physical parameters of a photon are listed. The modern concept of the photon was developed gradually by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century to explain experimental observations that did not fit the classical model of light. The benefit of the model was that it accounted for the frequency dependence of lights energy. The photon model accounted for observations, including the properties of black-body radiation. In that model, light was described by Maxwells equations, in 1926 the optical physicist Frithiof Wolfers and the chemist Gilbert N. Lewis coined the name photon for these particles. After Arthur H. Compton won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his studies, most scientists accepted that light quanta have an independent existence. In the Standard Model of particle physics, photons and other particles are described as a necessary consequence of physical laws having a certain symmetry at every point in spacetime. The intrinsic properties of particles, such as charge, mass and it has been applied to photochemistry, high-resolution microscopy, and measurements of molecular distances. Recently, photons have been studied as elements of quantum computers, in 1900, the German physicist Max Planck was studying black-body radiation and suggested that the energy carried by electromagnetic waves could only be released in packets of energy. In his 1901 article in Annalen der Physik he called these packets energy elements, the word quanta was used before 1900 to mean particles or amounts of different quantities, including electricity. In 1905, Albert Einstein suggested that waves could only exist as discrete wave-packets. He called such a wave-packet the light quantum, the name photon derives from the Greek word for light, φῶς. Arthur Compton used photon in 1928, referring to Gilbert N. Lewis, the name was suggested initially as a unit related to the illumination of the eye and the resulting sensation of light and was used later in a physiological context. Although Wolferss and Lewiss theories were contradicted by many experiments and never accepted, in physics, a photon is usually denoted by the symbol γ
Photon
–
Large Hadron Collider tunnel at
CERN
31.
Niels Bohr
–
Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research, although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity, that items could be analysed in terms of contradictory properties. The notion of complementarity dominated Bohrs thinking in science and philosophy. Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, Bohr mentored and collaborated with physicists including Hans Kramers, Oskar Klein, George de Hevesy, and Werner Heisenberg. He predicted the existence of a new element, which was named hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen. Later, the element bohrium was named after him, during the 1930s, Bohr helped refugees from Nazism. After Denmark was occupied by the Germans, he had a meeting with Heisenberg. In September 1943, word reached Bohr that he was about to be arrested by the Germans, from there, he was flown to Britain, where he joined the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons project, and was part of the British mission to the Manhattan Project. After the war, Bohr called for cooperation on nuclear energy. He had a sister, Jenny, and a younger brother Harald. Jenny became a teacher, while Harald became a mathematician and Olympic footballer who played for the Danish national team at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London. Bohr was a footballer as well, and the two brothers played several matches for the Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub, with Bohr as goalkeeper. Bohr was educated at Gammelholm Latin School, starting when he was seven, in 1903, Bohr enrolled as an undergraduate at Copenhagen University. His major was physics, which he studied under Professor Christian Christiansen and he also studied astronomy and mathematics under Professor Thorvald Thiele, and philosophy under Professor Harald Høffding, a friend of his father. This involved measuring the frequency of oscillation of the radius of a water jet, Bohr conducted a series of experiments using his fathers laboratory in the university, the university itself had no physics laboratory. To complete his experiments, he had to make his own glassware and his essay, which he submitted at the last minute, won the prize. He later submitted a version of the paper to the Royal Society in London for publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
Niels Bohr
–
Bohr in 1922
Niels Bohr
–
Niels Bohr as a young man
Niels Bohr
–
Niels Bohr and Margrethe Nørlund on their engagement in 1910.
Niels Bohr
–
The Niels Bohr Institute
32.
Nobel Prize
–
The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed in a number of categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural, or scientific advances. The will of the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel established the prizes in 1895, the prizes in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine were first awarded in 1901. Medals made before 1980 were struck in 23 carat gold, between 1901 and 2016, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences were awarded 579 times to 911 people and organisations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 23 organisations, the prize ceremonies take place annually in Stockholm, Sweden. Each recipient, or laureate, receives a medal, a diploma. The Nobel Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the fields of literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, peace, and economics. The prize is not awarded posthumously, however, if a person is awarded a prize and dies before receiving it, though the average number of laureates per prize increased substantially during the 20th century, a prize may not be shared among more than three people. Alfred Nobel was born on 21 October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden and he was a chemist, engineer, and inventor. In 1894, Nobel purchased the Bofors iron and steel mill and this invention was a precursor to many smokeless military explosives, especially the British smokeless powder cordite. As a consequence of his patent claims, Nobel was eventually involved in a patent infringement lawsuit over cordite, Nobel amassed a fortune during his lifetime, with most of his wealth from his 355 inventions, of which dynamite is the most famous. In 1888, Nobel was astonished to read his own obituary, titled The merchant of death is dead, as it was Alfreds brother Ludvig who had died, the obituary was eight years premature. The article disconcerted Nobel and made him apprehensive about how he would be remembered and this inspired him to change his will. On 10 December 1896, Alfred Nobel died in his villa in San Remo, Italy, Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime. He composed the last over a year before he died, signing it at the Swedish–Norwegian Club in Paris on 27 November 1895, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million SEK, to establish the five Nobel Prizes. Because of skepticism surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that it was approved by the Storting in Norway. The executors of Nobels will, Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, formed the Nobel Foundation to take care of Nobels fortune, Nobels instructions named a Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Peace Prize, the members of whom were appointed shortly after the will was approved in April 1897. Soon thereafter, the other prize-awarding organisations were designated or established and these were Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 11 June. The Nobel Foundation reached an agreement on guidelines for how the prizes should be awarded, and, in 1900, in 1905, the personal union between Sweden and Norway was dissolved
Nobel Prize
–
Alfred Nobel had the unpleasant surprise of reading his own obituary, which was titled The merchant of death is dead, in a French newspaper.
Nobel Prize
–
The Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
–
Alfred Nobel's
will stated that 94% of his total assets should be used to establish the Nobel Prizes.
Nobel Prize
–
Wilhelm Röntgen received the first Physics Prize for his discovery of X-rays.
33.
Scientific method
–
The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning, experiments need to be designed to test hypotheses. The most important part of the method is the experiment. The scientific method is a process, which usually begins with observations about the natural world. Human beings are naturally inquisitive, so often come up with questions about things they see or hear. The best hypotheses lead to predictions that can be tested in various ways, in general, the strongest tests of hypotheses come from carefully controlled and replicated experiments that gather empirical data. Depending on how well the tests match the predictions, the hypothesis may require refinement. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported a theory may be developed. Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features are shared in common between them. The overall process of the method involves making conjectures, deriving predictions from them as logical consequences. A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while formulating the question, the hypothesis might be very specific or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments, the purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from a hypothesis. Experiments can take anywhere from a college lab to CERNs Large Hadron Collider. There are difficulties in a statement of method, however. Though the scientific method is presented as a fixed sequence of steps. Not all steps take place in scientific inquiry, and are not always in the same order. Some philosophers and scientists have argued there is no scientific method, such as Lee Smolin. Nola and Sankey remark that For some, the idea of a theory of scientific method is yester-years debate
Scientific method
–
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). "Kepler shows his keen logical sense in detailing the whole process by which he finally arrived at the true orbit. This is the greatest piece of Retroductive reasoning ever performed." –
C. S. Peirce, c. 1896, on Kepler's reasoning through explanatory hypotheses
Scientific method
–
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), 965–1039
Iraq. A polymath, considered by some to be the father of modern scientific methodology, due to his emphasis on experimental data and reproducibility of its results.
Scientific method
–
According to Morris Kline, "Modern science owes its present flourishing state to a new scientific method which was fashioned almost entirely by
Galileo Galilei " (1564−1642). Dudley Shapere takes a more measured view of Galileo's contribution.
Scientific method
–
Flying gallop
falsified; see image below.
34.
Charles Sanders Peirce
–
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as the father of pragmatism. He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years, today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism. An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and foremost and he made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology and philosophy of science. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, in 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce the most original and versatile of American philosophers and Americas greatest logician. Websters Biographical Dictionary said in 1943 that Peirce was now regarded as the most original thinker, keith Devlin similarly referred to Peirce as one of the greatest philosophers ever. Peirce was born at 3 Phillips Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts and he was the son of Sarah Hunt Mills and Benjamin Peirce, himself a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University and perhaps the first serious research mathematician in America. At age 12, Charles read his older brothers copy of Richard Whatelys Elements of Logic, so began his lifelong fascination with logic and reasoning. At Harvard, he began lifelong friendships with Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Chauncey Wright, one of his Harvard instructors, Charles William Eliot, formed an unfavorable opinion of Peirce. This opinion proved fateful, because Eliot, while President of Harvard 1869–1909—a period encompassing nearly all of Peirces working life—repeatedly vetoed Harvards employing Peirce in any capacity. Peirce suffered from his late teens onward from a condition then known as facial neuralgia. Its consequences may have led to the isolation which made his lifes later years so tragic. That employment exempted Peirce from having to part in the Civil War, it would have been very awkward for him to do so. At the Survey, he worked mainly in geodesy and gravimetry and he was elected a resident fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in January 1867. From 1869 to 1872, he was employed as an Assistant in Harvards astronomical observatory, doing important work on determining the brightness of stars, on April 20,1877 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Also in 1877, he proposed measuring the meter as so many wavelengths of light of a certain frequency, during the 1880s, Peirces indifference to bureaucratic detail waxed while his Survey works quality and timeliness waned. Peirce took years to write reports that he should have completed in months, meanwhile, he wrote entries, ultimately thousands during 1883–1909, on philosophy, logic, science, and other subjects for the encyclopedic Century Dictionary. In 1885, an investigation by the Allison Commission exonerated Peirce, in 1891, Peirce resigned from the Coast Survey at Superintendent Thomas Corwin Mendenhalls request. He never again held regular employment, in 1879, Peirce was appointed Lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University, which had strong departments in a number of areas that interested him, such as philosophy, psychology, and mathematics
Charles Sanders Peirce
–
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
–
Peirce's birthplace. Now part of
Lesley University 's Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences
Charles Sanders Peirce
–
Juliette and Charles by a well at their home Arisbe in 1907
Charles Sanders Peirce
–
Arisbe in 2011
35.
Karl Popper
–
Sir Karl Raimund Popper CH FBA FRS was an Austrian-British philosopher and professor. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, in political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing open society possible. Karl Popper was born in Vienna in 1902, to upper middle-class parents, karls father Simon Siegmund Carl Popper was a lawyer from Bohemia and a doctor of law at the Vienna University, and mother Jenny Schiff was of Silesian and Hungarian descent. Karl Poppers uncle was the Austrian philosopher Josef Popper-Lynkeus and his father was a bibliophile who had 12, 000–14,000 volumes in his personal library and took an interest in philosophy, the classics, and social and political issues. Popper inherited both the library and the disposition from him, later, he would describe the atmosphere of his upbringing as having been decidedly bookish. Popper left school at the age of 16 and attended lectures in mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology, in 1919, Popper became attracted by Marxism and subsequently joined the Association of Socialist School Students. He also became a member of the Social Democratic Workers Party of Austria and he worked in street construction for a short amount of time, but was unable to cope with the heavy labour. Continuing to attend university as a guest student, he started an apprenticeship as cabinetmaker and he was dreaming at that time of starting a daycare facility for children, for which he assumed the ability to make furniture might be useful. After that he did service in one of psychoanalyst Alfred Adlers clinics for children. In 1922, he did his matura by way of a second chance education and he completed his examination as an elementary teacher in 1924 and started working at an after-school care club for socially endangered children. In 1925, he went to the newly founded Pädagogisches Institut and continued studying philosophy, around that time he started courting Josefine Anna Henninger, who later became his wife. In 1928, he earned a doctorate in psychology, under the supervision of Karl Bühler and his dissertation was entitled Die Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie. In 1929, he obtained the authorisation to teach mathematics and physics in secondary school and he married his colleague Josefine Anna Henninger in 1930. Fearing the rise of Nazism and the threat of the Anschluss, he started to use the evenings and he needed to publish one to get some academic position in a country that was safe for people of Jewish descent. However, he ended up not publishing the work, but a condensed version of it with some new material, Logik der Forschung. Here, he criticised psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism, in 1935 and 1936, he took unpaid leave to go to the United Kingdom for a study visit. It was here that he wrote his influential work The Open Society, in Dunedin he met the Professor of Physiology John Carew Eccles and formed a lifelong friendship with him. In 1946, after the Second World War, he moved to the United Kingdom to become reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics, Three years later, in 1949, he was appointed professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London
Karl Popper
–
Karl Popper c. 1980s
Karl Popper
–
Sir Karl Popper's gravesite in Lainzer Friedhof (de), in
Vienna,
Austria
Karl Popper
–
Sir Karl Popper, Prof.
Cyril Höschl. K. Popper received the Honorary Doctor's degree of
Charles University in Prague (May 1994)
36.
Auguste Piccard
–
Piccard and his twin brother Jean Felix Piccard were born in Basel, Switzerland on 28 January 1884. He was a member of the Solvay Congress of 1922,1924,1927,1930 and 1933, supported by the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique Piccard constructed his gondola. On 27 May 1931, Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer took off from Augsburg, Germany, during this flight, Piccard was able to gather substantial data on the upper atmosphere, as well as measure cosmic rays. An article in Popular Science in August 1931 described their journey, during the ascent, the aluminum ball began to leak. They plugged it desperately with vaseline and cotton waste, stopping the leak, in the first half hour, the balloon shot upward nine miles. Through portholes, the saw the earth through copper-colored, then bluish. It seemed a flat disk with upturned edge, at the ten mile level the sky appeared a deep, dark blue. With observations complete, the tried to descend, but couldnt. While their oxygen tanks emptied, they floated aimlessly over Germany, Austria, cool evening air contracted the balloons gas and brought them down on a glacier near Ober-Gurgl, Austria, with one hours supply of oxygen to spare. On 18 August 1932, launched from Dübendorf, Switzerland, Piccard and he ultimately made a total of twenty-seven balloon flights, setting a final record of 23,000 m. In the mid-1930s, Piccards interests shifted when he realized that a modification of his high-altitude balloon cockpit would allow descent into the deep ocean, by 1937, he had designed the bathyscaphe, a small steel gondola built to withstand great external pressure. Construction began, but was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, resuming work in 1945, he completed the bubble-shaped cockpit that maintained normal air pressure for a person inside the capsule even as the water pressure outside increased to over 46 MPa. Above the heavy steel capsule, a large tank was attached and filled with a low density liquid for buoyancy. Liquids are relatively incompressible and can provide buoyancy that does not change as the pressure increases, and so, the huge tank was filled with gasoline, not as a fuel, but as flotation. To make the now floating craft sink, tons of iron were attached to the float with a mechanism to allow resurfacing. This craft was named FNRS-2 and made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 before being given to the French Navy in 1950, there, it was redesigned, and in 1954, it took a man safely down 4,176 m. He died on 24 March 1962 of an attack at his home in Lausanne, Switzerland. Piccard held an appointment in Brussels where Hergé spotted his unmistakable figure in the street
Auguste Piccard
–
Auguste Piccard in 1932
Auguste Piccard
–
"Exploration is the sport of the scientist." (Auguste Piccard) 27 May 1931 Image courtesy of: Collection Musée du Léman, Nyon - Suisse
37.
Paul Ehrenfest
–
Paul Ehrenfest was born and grew up in Vienna in a Jewish family from Loštice in Moravia. His parents, Sigmund Ehrenfest and Johanna Jellinek, ran a grocery store, although the family was not overly religious, Paul studied Hebrew and the history of the Jewish people. Later he always emphasized his Jewish roots, Ehrenfest excelled in grade school but did not do well at the Akademisches Gymnasium, his best subject being mathematics. After transferring to the Franz Josef Gymnasium, his marks improved, in 1899 he passed the final exams. He majored in chemistry at the Institute of technology, but took courses at the University of Vienna, there he met his future wife Tatyana Afanasyeva, a young mathematician born in Kiev, then capital of the Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire, and educated in St Petersburg. In the spring of 1903 he met H. A, Lorentz during a short trip to Leiden. In the meantime he prepared a dissertation on Die Bewegung starrer Körper in Flüssigkeiten und die Mechanik von Hertz and he obtained his Ph. D. degree on June 23,1904 in Vienna, where he stayed from 1904 to 1905. On December 21,1904 he married Russian mathematician Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva and they had two daughters and two sons, Tatyana, also became a mathematician, Galinka, became an author and illustrator of childrens books, Paul, Jr. who also became a physicist, and Vassily. The Ehrenfests returned to Göttingen in September 1906 and they would not see Boltzmann again, on September 6 Boltzmann took his own life in Duino near Trieste. Ehrenfest published an obituary in which Boltzmanns accomplishments are described. Felix Klein, dean of the Göttinger mathematicians and chief editor of the Enzyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften, had counted on Boltzmann for a review about statistical mechanics, now he asked Ehrenfest to take on this task. Together with his wife, Ehrenfest worked on it for several years, in 1907 the couple moved to St Petersburg. Ehrenfest found good friends there, in particular A. F. Joffe, moreover, as an Austrian citizen and of Jewish origin, he had no prospect of a permanent position. Early in 1912 Ehrenfest set out on a tour of German-speaking universities in the hope of a position and he visited Berlin where he saw Max Planck, Leipzig where he saw his old friend Herglotz, Munich where he met Arnold Sommerfeld, then Zürich and Vienna. While in Prague he met Albert Einstein for the first time, Einstein recommended Ehrenfest to succeed him in his position in Prague, but that did not work out. This was due to the fact that Ehrenfest declared himself to be an atheist, Sommerfeld offered him a position in Munich, but Ehrenfest received a better offer, at the same time there was an unexpected turn of events. H. A. Lorentz resigned his position as professor at the University of Leiden, in October 1912 Ehrenfest arrived in Leiden, and December 4 he gave his inaugural lecture Zur Krise der Lichtaether-Hypothese. He remained in Leiden for the rest of his career, in order to stimulate interaction and exchange among physics students he organized a discussion group and a fraternity called De Leidsche Flesch
Paul Ehrenfest
–
Paul Ehrenfest
Paul Ehrenfest
–
Ehrenfest's students, Leiden 1924. Left to right:
Gerhard Heinrich Dieke,
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit,
Jan Tinbergen, Paul Ehrenfest,
Ralph Kronig, and
Enrico Fermi
Paul Ehrenfest
–
Niels Bohr and
Albert Einstein debating quantum theory at Ehrenfest's home in Leiden (December 1925)
38.
Wolfgang Pauli
–
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian-born Swiss and American theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter, Pauli was born in Vienna to a chemist Wolfgang Joseph Pauli and his wife Bertha Camilla Schütz, his sister was Hertha Pauli, the writer and actress. Paulis middle name was given in honor of his godfather, physicist Ernst Mach, Paulis paternal grandparents were from prominent Jewish families of Prague, his great-grandfather was the Jewish publisher Wolf Pascheles. Paulis father converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism shortly before his marriage in 1899, Paulis mother, Bertha Schütz, was raised in her own mothers Roman Catholic religion, her father was Jewish writer Friedrich Schütz. Pauli was raised as a Roman Catholic, although eventually he and he is considered to have been a deist and a mystic. Pauli attended the Döblinger-Gymnasium in Vienna, graduating with distinction in 1918, only two months after graduation, he published his first paper, on Albert Einsteins theory of general relativity. He attended the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, working under Arnold Sommerfeld, Sommerfeld asked Pauli to review the theory of relativity for the Encyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften. Two months after receiving his doctorate, Pauli completed the article and it was praised by Einstein, published as a monograph, it remains a standard reference on the subject to this day. From 1923 to 1928, he was a lecturer at the University of Hamburg, during this period, Pauli was instrumental in the development of the modern theory of quantum mechanics. In particular, he formulated the principle and the theory of nonrelativistic spin. In 1928, he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland where he made significant scientific progress and he held visiting professorships at the University of Michigan in 1931, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1935. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1931, at the end of 1930, shortly after his postulation of the neutrino and immediately following his divorce and the suicide of his mother, Pauli experienced a personal crisis. He consulted psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung who, like Pauli, Jung immediately began interpreting Paulis deeply archetypal dreams, and Pauli became one of the depth psychologists best students. He soon began to criticize the epistemology of Jungs theory scientifically, a great many of these discussions are documented in the Pauli/Jung letters, today published as Atom and Archetype. Jungs elaborate analysis of more than 400 of Paulis dreams is documented in Psychology, the German annexation of Austria in 1938 made him a German citizen, which became a problem for him in 1939 after the outbreak of World War II. In 1940, he tried in vain to obtain Swiss citizenship, Pauli moved to the United States in 1940, where he was employed as a professor of theoretical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1946, after the war, he became a citizen of the United States and subsequently returned to Zurich. In 1949, he was granted Swiss citizenship, in 1958, Pauli was awarded the Max Planck medal
Wolfgang Pauli
–
Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Pauli
–
Wolfgang Pauli lecturing
Wolfgang Pauli
–
Niels Bohr,
Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli, ca. 1935
Wolfgang Pauli
–
Wolfgang Pauli, ca. 1945
39.
Werner Heisenberg
–
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper, in the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, this matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. In 1927 he published his uncertainty principle, upon which he built his philosophy, Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 for the creation of quantum mechanics. He was a principal scientist in the Nazi German nuclear weapon project during World War II and he travelled to occupied Copenhagen where he met and discussed the German project with Niels Bohr. Following World War II, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and he was director of the institute until it was moved to Munich in 1958, when it was expanded and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. He studied physics and mathematics from 1920 to 1923 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, at Munich, he studied under Arnold Sommerfeld and Wilhelm Wien. At Göttingen, he studied physics with Max Born and James Franck and he received his doctorate in 1923, at Munich under Sommerfeld. He completed his Habilitation in 1924, at Göttingen under Born, at the event, Bohr was a guest lecturer and gave a series of comprehensive lectures on quantum atomic physics. There, Heisenberg met Bohr for the first time, and it had a significant, Heisenbergs doctoral thesis, the topic of which was suggested by Sommerfeld, was on turbulence, the thesis discussed both the stability of laminar flow and the nature of turbulent flow. The problem of stability was investigated by the use of the Orr–Sommerfeld equation and he briefly returned to this topic after World War II. Heisenbergs paper on the anomalous Zeeman effect was accepted as his Habilitationsschrift under Max Born at Göttingen, in his youth he was a member and Scoutleader of the Neupfadfinder, a German Scout association and part of the German Youth Movement. In August 1923 Robert Honsell and Heisenberg organized a trip to Finland with a Scout group of this association from Munich, Heisenberg arrived at Munich in 1919 as a member of Freikorps to fight the Bavarian Soviet Republic established a year earlier. Five decades later he recalled those days as youthful fun, like playing cops and robbers and so on, from 1924 to 1927, Heisenberg was a Privatdozent at Göttingen. His seminal paper, Über quantentheoretischer Umdeutung was published in September 1925 and he returned to Göttingen and with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, over a period of about six months, developed the matrix mechanics formulation of quantum mechanics. On 1 May 1926, Heisenberg began his appointment as a university lecturer and it was in Copenhagen, in 1927, that Heisenberg developed his uncertainty principle, while working on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. On 23 February, Heisenberg wrote a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in his paper on the uncertainty principle, Heisenberg used the word Ungenauigkeit. In 1927, Heisenberg was appointed ordentlicher Professor of theoretical physics and head of the department of physics at the Universität Leipzig, in his first paper published from Leipzig, Heisenberg used the Pauli exclusion principle to solve the mystery of ferromagnetism. Slater, Edward Teller, John Hasbrouck van Vleck, Victor Frederick Weisskopf, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Gregor Wentzel, in early 1929, Heisenberg and Pauli submitted the first of two papers laying the foundation for relativistic quantum field theory
Werner Heisenberg
–
Heisenberg in 1933, as professor at
Leipzig University
Werner Heisenberg
–
Heisenberg, Habilitation 1924
Werner Heisenberg
–
Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and
Wolfgang Pauli, ca. 1935
40.
R.H. Fowler
–
Sir Ralph Howard Fowler OBE FRS was a British physicist and astronomer. Fowler was initially educated at home but then attended Evans preparatory school at Horris Hill and he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge and read mathematics, becoming a wrangler in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos. In the First World War he obtained a commission in the Royal Marine Artillery and was wounded in his shoulder in the Gallipoli Campaign. The wound enabled his friend Archibald Hill to use his talents properly, as Hills second in command he worked on anti-aircraft ballistics in the Experimental Department of HMS Excellent on Whale Island. He made a contribution on the aerodynamics of spinning shells. He was awarded the OBE in 1918, in 1919, Fowler returned to Trinity and was appointed college lecturer in mathematics in 1920. Here he worked on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, bringing a new approach to physical chemistry, with Arthur Milne, a comrade during the war, he wrote a seminal work on stellar spectra, temperatures, and pressures. In 1925 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and he became research supervisor to Paul Dirac and, in 1926, worked with him on the statistical mechanics of white dwarf stars. In 1928 he published a paper that explained the physical phenomenon now known as field electron emission. In 1931, he was the first to formulate and label the zeroth law of thermodynamics, in 1932 he was elected to the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1939, when the Second World War began, he resumed his work with the Ordnance Board, despite poor health, and was chosen for scientific liaison with Canada and he knew America well, having visiting professorships at Princeton and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. For this liaison work he was knighted in 1942 and he returned to Britain later in the war and worked for the Ordnance Board and the Admiralty up until a few weeks before his death in 1944. Fifteen Fellows of the Royal Society and three Nobel Laureates were supervised by Fowler between 1922 and 1939, in addition to Milne, he worked with Sir Arthur Eddington, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Paul Dirac, Sir William McCrea. It was Fowler who introduced Dirac to quantum theory in 1923, Fowler also put Dirac and Werner Heisenberg in touch with each other through Niels Bohr. At Cambridge he supervised the studies of 64 students, including John Lennard-Jones, Paul Dirac. The Fowler Islands, in Crystal Sound, on the Antarctic Peninsular were named by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee in his honour, Fowler was a keen amateur cricketer who played as a wicket-keeper. He played for Norfolk in the Minor Counties Championship in 1908 and 1909, in 1921 he married Eileen Mary, the only daughter of Ernest Rutherford. They had four children, two sons and two daughters, Eileen died after the birth of their last child
R.H. Fowler
–
London 1934
41.
Peter Debye
–
Peter Joseph William Debye ForMemRS was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye enrolled in the Aachen University of Technology in 1901, in 1905, he completed his first degree in electrical engineering. He published his first paper, an elegant solution of a problem involving eddy currents. At Aachen, he studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, in 1906, Sommerfeld received an appointment at Munich, Bavaria, and took Debye with him as his assistant. Debye got his Ph. D. with a dissertation on radiation pressure in 1908, in 1910, he derived the Planck radiation formula using a method which Max Planck agreed was simpler than his own. In 1911, when Albert Einstein took an appointment as a professor at Prague, Bohemia, Debye took his old professorship at the University of Zurich and he was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1935. From 1937 to 1939 he was the president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, in May 1914 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and in December of the same year he became foreign member. In 1913, Debye married Mathilde Alberer and they had a son, Peter P. Debye, and a daughter, Mathilde Maria. Peter became a physicist and collaborated with Debye in some of his researches, in consequence, the units of molecular dipole moments are termed debyes in his honor. Also in 1912, he extended Albert Einsteins theory of heat to lower temperatures by including contributions from low-frequency phonons. In 1913, he extended Niels Bohrs theory of structure, introducing elliptical orbits. In 1914–1915, Debye calculated the effect of temperature on X-ray diffraction patterns of crystalline solids with Paul Scherrer, in 1923, together with his assistant Erich Hückel, he developed an improvement of Svante Arrhenius theory of electrical conductivity in electrolyte solutions. Although an improvement was made to the Debye–Hückel equation in 1926 by Lars Onsager, also in 1923, Debye developed a theory to explain the Compton effect, the shifting of the frequency of X-rays when they interact with electrons. From 1934 to 1939 Debye was director of the section of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. From 1936 onwards he was professor of Theoretical Physics at the Frederick William University of Berlin. These positions were held during the years that Adolf Hitler ruled Nazi Germany and, from 1938 onward, in 1939 Debye traveled to the United States to deliver the Baker Lectures at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. After leaving Germany in early 1940, Debye became a professor at Cornell, chaired the department for 10 years. In 1946 he became an American citizen, unlike the European phase of his life, where he moved from city to city every few years, in the United States Debye remained at Cornell for the remainder of his career
Peter Debye
–
Peter Debye
Peter Debye
–
Monument for Peter Debye in the Maastricht square that bears his name: Dipole moments (Felix van de Beek, 1998)
42.
William Lawrence Bragg
–
He was joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, For their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-ray, an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography. As of 2016, he is the youngest ever Nobel laureate in physics, Bragg was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, when the discovery of the structure of DNA was reported by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in February 1953. Bragg was born in Adelaide, South Australia and he showed an early interest in science and mathematics. His father, William Henry Bragg, was Elder Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Adelaide, shortly after starting school, William Lawrence Bragg fell from his tricycle and broke his arm. His father, who had read about Röntgens experiments in Europe and was performing his own experiments, used the newly discovered X-rays and this is the first recorded surgical use of X-rays in Australia. After beginning his studies at St Peters College, Adelaide in 1905, Bragg went to the University of Adelaide at age 16 to study mathematics, chemistry and physics, graduating in 1908. In the same year his father accepted the Cavendish chair of physics at the University of Leeds, Bragg entered Trinity College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1909 and received a major scholarship in mathematics, despite taking the exam while in bed with pneumonia. After initially excelling in mathematics, he transferred to the course in the later years of his studies. In 1914 Bragg was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College – a Fellowship at a Cambridge college involves the submission, among Braggs other interests was shell collecting, his personal collection amounted to specimens from some 500 species, all personally collected from South Australia. He discovered a new species of cuttlefish – Sepia braggi, named for him by Joseph Verco, Bragg is most famous for his law on the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. Braggs law makes it possible to calculate the positions of the atoms within a crystal from the way in which an X-ray beam is diffracted by the crystal lattice and he made this discovery in 1912, during his first year as a research student in Cambridge. He discussed his ideas with his father, who developed the X-ray spectrometer in Leeds and this tool allowed many different types of crystals to be analysed. Braggs research work was interrupted by both World War I and World War II, during both wars he worked on sound ranging methods for locating enemy guns. In this work he was aided by William Sansome Tucker, Harold Roper Robinson, for his work during WWI he was awarded the Military Cross and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He was also Mentioned in Despatches on 16 June 1916,4 January 1917 and 7 July 1919, on 2 September 1915 his brother was killed during the Gallipoli Campaign. Shortly afterwards, William Lawrence Bragg received the news that he had awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Between the wars, from 1919 to 1937, he worked at the Victoria University of Manchester as Langworthy Professor of Physics and he was director of the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington in 1937. After World War II, Bragg returned to Cambridge, splitting the Cavendish Laboratory into research groups and he believed that the ideal research unit is one of six to twelve scientists and a few assistants
William Lawrence Bragg
–
William L. Bragg in 1915
43.
Hendrik Anthony Kramers
–
Hendrik Anthony Hans Kramers was a Dutch physicist who worked with Niels Bohr to understand how electromagnetic waves interact with matter. Hans Kramers was born in Rotterdam, the son of Hendrik Kramers, a physician, and Jeanne Susanne Breukelman. In 1912 Hans finished secondary education in Rotterdam, and studied mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden, where he obtained a masters degree in 1916. Kramers wanted to obtain foreign experience during his research, but his first choice of supervisor. Because Denmark was neutral in war, as was the Netherlands, he travelled to Copenhagen. Bohr took him on as a Ph. D. candidate, although Kramers did most of his doctoral research in Copenhagen, he obtained his formal Ph. D. under Ehrenfest in Leiden, on 8 May 1919. Kramers greatly enjoyed music and could play the cello and the piano, after working for almost ten years in Bohrs group and becoming an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, Kramers left Denmark in 1926 and returned to the Netherlands. He became a professor in theoretical physics at Utrecht University. In 1934 he left Utrecht and succeeded Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden, from 1931 until his death he held also a cross appointment at Delft University of Technology. Kramers was one of the founders of the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam, in 1925, with Werner Heisenberg he developed the Kramers–Heisenberg dispersion formula. He is also credited with introducing in 1948 the concept of renormalization into quantum field theory, on 25 October 1920 he was married to Anna Petersen. They had three daughters and one son, Kramers became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1929, he was forced to resign in 1942. He joined the Academy again in 1945, Kramers won the Lorentz Medal in 1947 and Hughes Medal in 1951. Kramers – Between Tradition and Revolution, belinfante, F. J. ter Haar, D. Hendrik Anthony Kramers, 1894–1952. Casimir, Kramers, Hendrik Anthony, in Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland, J. M. Romein, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, in, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde te Leiden, 1951–1953, pp. 83–91
Hendrik Anthony Kramers
–
Hans Kramers in c. 1928
44.
Paul Dirac
–
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac OM FRS was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions, Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory. He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics and he was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. Albert Einstein said of him This balancing on the path between genius and madness is awful. He is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents home in Bristol, England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice, Switzerland and his mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, née Holten, the daughter of a ships captain, was born in Cornwall, England, and worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library. Paul had a sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix. Dirac later recalled, My parents were terribly distressed, I didnt know they cared so much I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew. Charles and the children were officially Swiss nationals until they became naturalised on 22 October 1919, Diracs father was strict and authoritarian, although he disapproved of corporal punishment. Dirac had a relationship with his father, so much so that after his fathers death, Dirac wrote, I feel much freer now. Charles forced his children to speak to him only in French, when Dirac found that he could not express what he wanted to say in French, he chose to remain silent. Dirac was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers Technical College, the school was an institution attached to the University of Bristol, which shared grounds and staff. It emphasised technical subjects like bricklaying, shoemaking and metal work and this was unusual at a time when secondary education in Britain was still dedicated largely to the classics, and something for which Dirac would later express his gratitude. Dirac studied electrical engineering on a City of Bristol University Scholarship at the University of Bristols engineering faculty, shortly before he completed his degree in 1921, he sat the entrance examination for St Johns College, Cambridge. He passed, and was awarded a £70 scholarship, but this short of the amount of money required to live. Instead he took up an offer to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics at the University of Bristol free of charge and he was permitted to skip the first year of the course owing to his engineering degree. In 1923, Dirac graduated, once again with first class honours, along with his £70 scholarship from St Johns College, this was enough to live at Cambridge. From 1925 to 1928 he held an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and he completed his PhD in June 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere
Paul Dirac
–
Paul Dirac
Paul Dirac
–
Paul Dirac with his wife in
Copenhagen, July 1963
Paul Dirac
–
Dirac's grave in Roselawn Cemetery,
Tallahassee, Florida. Also buried is his wife Manci (Margit Wigner). Their daughter Mary Elizabeth Dirac, who died 20 January 2007, is buried next to them but not shown in the photograph.
Paul Dirac
–
The commemorative marker in
Westminster Abbey.
45.
Arthur Compton
–
It was a sensational discovery at the time, the wave nature of light had been well-demonstrated, but the idea that light had both wave and particle properties was not easily accepted. He is also known for his leadership of the Manhattan Projects Metallurgical Laboratory, in 1919, Compton was awarded one of the first two National Research Council Fellowships that allowed students to study abroad. He chose to go to Cambridge Universitys Cavendish Laboratory in England, further research along these lines led to the discovery of the Compton effect. During World War II, Compton was a key figure in the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapons and his reports were important in launching the project. Compton oversaw Enrico Fermis creation of Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor, the Metallurgical Laboratory was also responsible for the design and operation of the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Plutonium began being produced in the Hanford Site reactors in 1945, after the war, Compton became Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. Arthur Compton was born on September 10,1892, in Wooster, Ohio, the son of Elias and Otelia Catherine Compton, Elias was dean of the University of Wooster, which Arthur also attended. Arthurs eldest brother, Karl, who also attended Wooster, earned a PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1912, all three brothers were members of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. Compton was initially interested in astronomy, and took a photograph of Halleys Comet in 1910, around 1913, he described an experiment where an examination of the motion of water in a circular tube demonstrated the rotation of the earth. That year, he graduated from Wooster with a Bachelor of Science degree and entered Princeton, where he received his Master of Arts degree in 1914. Compton then studied for his PhD in physics under the supervision of Hereward L. Cooke, writing his dissertation on The intensity of X-ray reflection, and the distribution of the electrons in atoms. When Arthur Compton earned his PhD in 1916, he, Karl, later, they would become the first such trio to simultaneously head American colleges. Their sister Mary married a missionary, C. Herbert Rice, in June 1916, Compton married Betty Charity McCloskey, a Wooster classmate and fellow graduate. They had two sons, Arthur Alan and John Joseph Compton, during World War I he developed aircraft instrumentation for the Signal Corps. In 1919, Compton was awarded one of the first two National Research Council Fellowships that allowed students to study abroad and he chose to go to Cambridge Universitys Cavendish Laboratory in England. Working with George Paget Thomson, the son of J. J. Thomson, Compton studied the scattering and he observed that the scattered rays were more easily absorbed than the original source. Compton was greatly impressed by the Cavendish scientists, especially Ernest Rutherford, Charles Galton Darwin and Arthur Eddington, for a time Compton was a deacon at a Baptist church. Science can have no quarrel, he said, with a religion which postulates a God to whom men are as His children
Arthur Compton
–
Arthur Compton in 1927
Arthur Compton
–
Arthur Compton and
Werner Heisenberg in 1929 in Chicago
Arthur Compton
–
Arthur Holly Compton on the cover of Time Magazine on January 13, 1936, holding his cosmic ray detector
Arthur Compton
–
Compton at the University of Chicago in 1933 with graduate student
Luis Alvarez next to his cosmic ray telescope.
46.
Louis, 7th duc de Broglie
–
Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond, 7e duc de Broglie was a French physicist who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis he postulated the wave nature of electrons and this concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics. De Broglie won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929, after the behaviour of matter was first experimentally demonstrated in 1927. The 1925 pilot-wave model, and the behaviour of particles discovered by de Broglie was used by Erwin Schrödinger in his formulation of wave mechanics. The pilot-wave model and interpretation was abandoned, in favor of the quantum formalism. Louis de Broglie was the sixteenth member elected to occupy seat 1 of the Académie française in 1944, De Broglie became the first high-level scientist to call for establishment of a multi-national laboratory, a proposal that led to the establishment of the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Louis de Broglie was born to a family in Dieppe, Seine-Maritime, younger son of Victor. He became the 7th duc de Broglie in 1960 upon the death without heir of his brother, Maurice, 6th duc de Broglie. When he died in Louveciennes, he was succeeded as duke by a distant cousin, Victor-François, De Broglie had intended a career in humanities, and received his first degree in history. Afterwards, though, he turned his attention toward mathematics and physics, with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he offered his services to the army in the development of radio communications. His 1924 thesis Recherches sur la théorie des quanta introduced his theory of electron waves and this included the wave–particle duality theory of matter, based on the work of Max Planck and Albert Einstein on light. This research culminated in the de Broglie hypothesis stating that any moving particle or object had an associated wave, De Broglie thus created a new field in physics, the mécanique ondulatoire, or wave mechanics, uniting the physics of energy and matter. For this he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929, the theory has since been known as the De Broglie–Bohm theory. In addition to scientific work, de Broglie thought and wrote about the philosophy of science. De Broglie became a member of the Académie des sciences in 1933 and he was asked to join Le Conseil de lUnion Catholique des Scientifiques Francais, but declined because he was non-religious and an atheist. On 12 October 1944, he was elected to the Académie française, in an event unique in the history of the Académie, he was received as a member by his own brother Maurice, who had been elected in 1934. UNESCO awarded him the first Kalinga Prize in 1952 for his work in popularizing scientific knowledge, in 1961 he received the title of Knight of the Grand Cross in the Légion dhonneur. De Broglie was awarded a post as counselor to the French High Commission of Atomic Energy in 1945 for his efforts to bring industry and he established a center for applied mechanics at the Henri Poincaré Institute, where research into optics, cybernetics, and atomic energy were carried out
Louis, 7th duc de Broglie
–
Louis de Broglie
47.
Max Born
–
Max Born was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research in Quantum Mechanics. He wrote his Ph. D. thesis on the subject of Stability of Elastica in a Plane and Space, in 1905, he began researching special relativity with Minkowski, and subsequently wrote his habilitation thesis on the Thomson model of the atom. In the First World War, after originally being placed as a radio operator, in 1921, Born returned to Göttingen, arranging another chair for his long-time friend and colleague James Franck. Under Born, Göttingen became one of the worlds foremost centres for physics, in 1925, Born and Werner Heisenberg formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. The following year, he formulated the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation and his influence extended far beyond his own research. Max Delbrück, Siegfried Flügge, Friedrich Hund, Pascual Jordan, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim, Robert Oppenheimer, in January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, and Born, who was Jewish, was suspended. Max Born became a naturalised British subject on 31 August 1939 and he remained at Edinburgh until 1952. He retired to Bad Pyrmont, in West Germany, and died in a hospital in Göttingen on 5 January 1970. Max Born was born on 11 December 1882 in Breslau, which at the time of Borns birth was part of the Prussian Province of Silesia in the German Empire and she died when Max was four years old, on 29 August 1886. Max had a sister, Käthe, who was born in 1884, Wolfgang later became Professor of Art History at the City College of New York. Initially educated at the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Breslau, Born entered the University of Breslau in 1901, the German university system allowed students to move easily from one university to another, so he spent summer semesters at Heidelberg University in 1902 and the University of Zurich in 1903. Fellow students at Breslau, Otto Toeplitz and Ernst Hellinger, told Born about the University of Göttingen, at Göttingen he found three renowned mathematicians, Felix Klein, David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. Very soon after his arrival, Born formed close ties to the two men. Being class scribe put Born into regular, invaluable contact with Hilbert, Hilbert became Borns mentor after selecting him to be the first to hold the unpaid, semi-official position of assistant. Borns introduction to Minkowski came through Borns stepmother, Bertha, as she knew Minkowski from dancing classes in Königsberg, the introduction netted Born invitations to the Minkowski household for Sunday dinners. In addition, while performing his duties as scribe and assistant, Borns relationship with Klein was more problematic
Max Born
–
Max Born (1882–1970)
Max Born
–
Solvay Conference, 1927. Born is second from the right in the second row, between
Louis de Broglie and
Niels Bohr.
Max Born
–
Born's gravestone in Göttingen is inscribed with the uncertainty principle, which he put on rigid mathematical footing.
48.
Irving Langmuir
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Irving Langmuir /ˈlæŋmjʊr/ was an American chemist and physicist. The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research near Socorro, New Mexico, was named in his honor as was the American Chemical Society journal for Surface Science, Irving Langmuir was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 31,1881. He was the third of the four children of Charles Langmuir and Sadie, during his childhood, Langmuirs parents encouraged him to carefully observe nature and to keep a detailed record of his various observations. When Irving was eleven, it was discovered that he had poor eyesight, when this problem was corrected, details that had previously eluded him were revealed, and his interest in the complications of nature was heightened. During his childhood, Langmuir was influenced by his older brother, Arthur was a research chemist who encouraged Irving to be curious about nature and how things work. Arthur helped Irving set up his first chemistry lab in the corner of his bedroom, Langmuirs hobbies included mountaineering, skiing, piloting his own plane, and classical music. In addition to his professional interest in the politics of atomic energy, Langmuir attended his early education at various schools and institutes in America and Paris. Langmuir graduated high school from Chestnut Hill Academy, a private school located in the affluent Chestnut Hill area in Philadelphia. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the Columbia University School of Mines in 1903. He earned his Ph. D. degree in 1906 under Nobel laureate Walther Nernst in Göttingen, for research using the Nernst glower. His doctoral thesis was entitled “On the Partial Recombination of Dissolved Gases During Cooling. ”He later did work in chemistry. Langmuir then taught at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, until 1909 and his initial contributions to science came from his study of light bulbs. His first major development was the improvement of the diffusion pump and he also discovered that twisting the filament into a tight coil improved its efficiency. These were important developments in the history of the incandescent light bulb and his assistant in vacuum tube research was his cousin William Comings White. As he continued to study filaments in vacuum and different gas environments and he was one of the first scientists to work with plasmas and was the first to call these ionized gases by that name, because they reminded him of blood plasma. Langmuir and Tonks discovered electron density waves in plasmas that are now known as Langmuir waves, the current of a biased probe tip is measured as a function of bias voltage to determine the local plasma temperature and density. He also discovered atomic hydrogen, which he put to use by inventing the atomic hydrogen welding process, plasma welding has since been developed into gas tungsten arc welding. In 1917, he published a paper on the chemistry of oil films that became the basis for the award of the 1932 Nobel Prize in chemistry
Irving Langmuir
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Irving Langmuir
Irving Langmuir
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Langmuir (center) in 1922 in his lab at GE, showing radio pioneer
Guglielmo Marconi (right) a new 20 kW triode tube
Irving Langmuir
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General Electric Company Pliotron
Irving Langmuir
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Irving Langmuir – chemist and physicist
49.
Charles Eugene Guye
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Charles-Eugène Guye was a Swiss physicist. He was born in Champvent and died in Geneva, Guye studied physics at the University of Geneva, where he received his doctorate in 1889, studying the phenomenon of optical rotary dispersion. From 1890 to 1892 Charles-Eugène worked as a Privatdozent in Geneva, albert Einstein was one of his students. From 1900 to 1930 he was professor and director of the Physics Institute of the University of Geneva and his research focus was in the fields of electric currents, magnetism, and electrical discharges in gases. His older brother, Philippe-Auguste, was a distinguished chemist, Guye, Charles-Eugène in the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz
Charles Eugene Guye
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Charles-Eugène Guye at the 1927 Solvay Conference
50.
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
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Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, CH, FRS was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cloud chamber. Wilson was born in the parish of Glencorse, Midlothian to Annie Clark Harper and John Wilson, after his father died in 1873, he moved with his family to Manchester. With financial support from his step-brother he studied biology at Owens College, now the University of Manchester, in 1887, he graduated from the College with a BSc. He won a scholarship to attend Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge where he interested in physics. In 1892 he received 1st class honours in both parts of the Natural Science Tripos, Wilson was made Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, and University Lecturer and Demonstrator in 1900. He thereafter became interested in meteorology, and in 1893 he began to study clouds. He worked for some time at the observatory on Ben Nevis and he then tried to reproduce this effect on a smaller scale at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, expanding humid air within a sealed container. He later experimented with the creation of trails in his chamber caused by ions. Wilson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1900, for the invention of the cloud chamber he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927. Despite this great contribution to physics, he remained interested in atmospheric physics, specifically atmospheric electricity. For example, his last research paper, published in 1956 when he was in his eighties, was on atmospheric electricity. The Wilson crater on the Moon is named for him, Alexander Wilson, the Wilson Condensation Cloud formations that occur after large explosions, such as nuclear detonations, are named after him. The archives of Charles Thomson Rees Wilson are maintained by the Archives of the University of Glasgow, in 1908, Wilson married Jessie Fraser, the daughter of a minister from Glasgow. The couple had 2 daughters and one son and he died at his home in Carlops on 15 November 1959, surrounded by his family
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
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Wilson in 1927
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