60 Fun Facts About Famous Physicists

Which 1687 book by Isaac Newton set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation?

Principia Mathematica reached print only because Edmond Halley paid for it himself. The Royal Society had approved the book but had no money left to publish it.

With which German mathematician does Newton share credit for inventing calculus?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz reached calculus independently. Newton's supporters accused him of plagiarism, yet the notation used today, dx and the integral sign, is his.

What government post did Isaac Newton hold from 1699 until his death in 1727?

Master of the Mint could have been a comfortable reward for past work, but Newton treated it as a real job, overseeing the coinage and pursuing counterfeiters.

Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize was awarded specifically for which discovery?

The photoelectric effect was the only discovery the citation named. The committee found no 1921 nominee worthy, so the prize was held over and he received it a year late, in 1922.

Where was Einstein working when he published his four groundbreaking papers of 1905?

The Swiss Patent Office in Bern took him on as a technical assistant because he could not find a teaching post. He wrote the four papers there in his spare time.

Galileo announced his first telescope discoveries in 1610 in which short book?

The Starry Messenger reported four moons circling Jupiter. Galileo named them after the Medici family, and the flattered grand duke of Tuscany made him his court mathematician and philosopher.

After his trial, Galileo spent his final years under house arrest at his villa where?

Arcetri, near Florence, put Galileo close to his daughter, a nun in a nearby convent. Going blind there, he completed a last book on motion that was spirited out of Italy and printed in Leiden.

Marie Curie is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?

Physics and Chemistry. The 1903 physics nomination at first left her out; her husband Pierre protested, her name was added, and in 1911 she won the chemistry prize on her own.

Which element did Marie Curie name after her homeland?

Polonium honoured a country missing from the map: when she named it in 1898, Poland had been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria for about a century.

Which element, discovered at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, is named after the city's Latin name?

Hafnium comes from Hafnia, the Latin for Copenhagen. A French chemist had claimed the missing element in 1911 but described it wrongly; the Copenhagen pair isolated the real thing in 1923.

Which principle of Niels Bohr's holds that quantum objects behave as waves or as particles, but never both at once?

Complementarity mattered so much to Bohr that, on receiving Denmark's Order of the Elephant in 1947, he put a yin-yang symbol on his coat of arms with a motto meaning 'opposites are complementary'.

Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for work on which theory?

Quantum electrodynamics describes how charged particles and radiation interact. Feynman tamed its calculations by drawing each interaction as a simple diagram, a shorthand physicists still use.

Richard Feynman sat on the presidential commission that investigated what?

The Challenger disaster. At a televised hearing Feynman dunked a piece of the booster's rubber seal in ice water, showing how it stiffened in the cold of launch morning.

Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize for the discovery of what?

Energy quanta were, in Planck's own words, 'an act of despair' to make his radiation formula work. A reluctant revolutionary, he then spent years trying to fit them back into the old physics.

Maxwell's equations unified electricity, magnetism and what?

Light. Around 1862 Maxwell calculated how fast an electric and magnetic disturbance should travel, found it matched the measured speed of light, and refused to call that a coincidence.

The farad, named after Michael Faraday, is the SI unit of which quantity?

Capacitance is measured in farads. Faraday himself had little schooling: apprenticed to a bookbinder at 14, he educated himself by reading the books that passed through the shop.

Which Cambridge chair, once held by Newton and Dirac, did Stephen Hawking occupy from 1979 to 2009?

Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was Isaac Newton's old chair. Hawking held it for thirty years and stepped down in 2009 only because its holder must retire at 67.

Which 1988 book by Stephen Hawking stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks?

A Brief History of Time made a worldwide celebrity of a man who, in his early twenties, had been told he had about two years to live; he was 46 when it came out.

Which Austrian physicist coined the term 'entanglement' in 1935 and has quantum theory's central equation named after him?

Erwin Schrödinger meant his famous cat, alive and dead at once in a sealed box, as a 'quite ridiculous' case: he was arguing that the prevailing reading of quantum theory led to absurdity.

Werner Heisenberg is famous for the uncertainty principle, but his 1932 Nobel cited 'the creation of' what?

Quantum mechanics began to take shape in 1925 on Heligoland, a tiny North Sea island where the 23-year-old Heisenberg had fled to escape a severe bout of hay fever.

Paul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted the existence of what?

Antimatter came out of extra solutions to Dirac's equation, which he read as a new kind of particle with the opposite charge. In 1932 Carl Anderson caught the first one crossing a cloud chamber.

Enrico Fermi's team built which world first beneath the stands of a Chicago football stadium in 1942?

A nuclear reactor, stacked from graphite blocks and uranium in a squash court. The project's head never asked the university president for permission, reasoning that he could only have said no.

J. Robert Oppenheimer directed which wartime laboratory, earning the label 'father of the atomic bomb'?

Los Alamos stood in the New Mexico high country Oppenheimer had loved since horseback trips in his youth; he and General Groves picked the site of a remote boys' school there for the secret lab.

At which German university did J. Robert Oppenheimer earn his doctorate in 1927, studying under Max Born?

Göttingen. Max Born invited him there from Cambridge, where Oppenheimer had realised his talent lay in theory rather than laboratory work; he left Germany with his doctorate in 1927.

Ernest Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honoured his work on what?

Radioactive decay. Atoms were thought to be stable and unchanging until Rutherford showed that radioactive ones break down into other elements, which the citation called 'the disintegration of the elements'.

Which two assistants performed Rutherford's gold foil experiment?

Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, the latter still an undergraduate, saw a few alpha particles bounce straight back. Rutherford said it was like firing a 15-inch shell at tissue paper and having it hit you.

Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to which system of electricity supply?

Alternating current proved itself in 1893, when Westinghouse, which held the rights to Tesla's patents, used his system to illuminate the Chicago World's Fair and then won the contract to harness Niagara Falls.

Which Austrian-Swedish physicist helped explain nuclear fission yet never won a Nobel Prize?

Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and, within months, worked out with her nephew Otto Frisch how the uranium nucleus had split. The Nobel Prize for the discovery went to Otto Hahn alone.

Emmy Noether's famous theorem connects conservation laws to what?

Symmetries. When Noether proved it, her university would not let a woman lecture, so for years her courses were advertised under the name of the mathematician David Hilbert.

Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment overturned the conservation of which quantity?

Parity, the rule that nature treats a process and its mirror image alike, fell to her experiment. The theorists who proposed the test, Lee and Yang, won the 1957 Nobel Prize; she was left out.

Which nickname did a 1993 book give the Higgs boson?

The God particle. Its author, the physicist Leon Lederman, joked that he had wanted 'the Goddamn Particle', for all the trouble it was causing, but his publisher would not allow it.

Murray Gell-Mann introduced which concept as the building blocks of strongly interacting particles?

Quarks. Gell-Mann said the sound came to him first; he then found the spelling in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, in the line 'Three quarks for Muster Mark'.

Legend says Archimedes ran naked through the streets after realising how to measure what?

The volume of a golden crown. In the tale, told two centuries later by Vitruvius, the king suspected his goldsmith of slipping in silver, and the rising bathwater showed Archimedes how to check.

Ludwig Boltzmann's gravestone in Vienna is carved with his formula for which quantity?

Entropy. The carved equation, S = k log W, ties it to the number of ways a system's atoms can be arranged, though it was Max Planck who first wrote it in that form.

Lord Kelvin was professor at which university for 53 years?

Glasgow. Kelvin won its chair of natural philosophy at just 22, helped by his father, the university's mathematics professor, and turned down offers from elsewhere to stay for the rest of his career.

Christiaan Huygens invented which timekeeper, the most accurate for almost 300 years?

The pendulum clock. Galileo, blind and near the end of his life, had designed one around 1640, but his son failed to build it; Huygens patented the first working clock in 1657.

Wolfgang Pauli proposed which particle in 1930 to save energy conservation in beta decay?

The neutrino is so elusive that 26 years passed before one was detected, in 1956. Its name, coined in Fermi's circle in Rome, is Italian for 'little neutral one'.

Einstein translated which Indian physicist's 1924 paper into German himself and had it published?

Satyendra Nath Bose had found a new way of counting particles of radiation. Einstein extended it to atoms, and Paul Dirac later named every particle that follows those rules a boson in his honour.

C. V. Raman's 1930 Nobel Prize was for discovering that light passing through transparent material does what?

Changes wavelength when scattered. A tiny share of the beam trades energy with the molecules it strikes, so the size of the shift works as a fingerprint that tells chemists what a substance is.

Hideki Yukawa won the 1949 Nobel Prize for predicting which particles?

Mesons. In the 1930s Yukawa reasoned that a middleweight particle must carry the force holding an atom's nucleus together; one was found in 1947, and the prize followed two years later.

Which designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb went on to win the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize?

Andrei Sakharov turned from building the bomb to campaigning for human rights. Soviet leaders refused to let him travel to Oslo, so his wife, Yelena Bonner, accepted the prize for him.

Louis de Broglie's 1924 thesis postulated what?

That matter has wave properties. De Broglie, a French aristocrat, had taken his first degree in history before turning to science; five years after the thesis, the idea won him the Nobel Prize.

Heinrich Hertz is remembered for first conclusively proving the existence of what?

Electromagnetic waves. Hertz produced and detected them across his laboratory in the late 1880s, proving Maxwell's theory; first called Hertzian waves, they are what we now know as radio waves.

Who received the very first Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1901, for discovering X-rays?

Wilhelm Röntgen refused to patent his discovery, so that anyone could use it. As a student he had been expelled from school over a caricature of a teacher that someone else had drawn.

J. J. Thomson showed in 1897 that cathode rays were made of which previously unknown particles?

Electrons. Thomson himself called them 'corpuscles' and kept to the word for years; the name that stuck had been coined in 1891, before his discovery, by the Irish physicist George Stoney.

James Chadwick won the 1935 Nobel Prize for discovering what?

The neutron. Carrying no charge, it can slip into the heaviest atomic nuclei and split them, so its discovery opened the road to the atomic bomb; Chadwick later led the British Mission to the Manhattan Project.

The Chandrasekhar limit gives the maximum mass of what, at about 1.44 solar masses?

A white dwarf. When Chandrasekhar presented the limit in 1935, the renowned astrophysicist Arthur Eddington publicly rejected it; Chandrasekhar's Nobel Prize came only in 1983.

Kip Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize for the observation of what?

Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime itself, first caught in 2015 by LIGO, the project Thorne helped to found. He also served as the science consultant on the 2014 film Interstellar.

Robert Millikan won the 1923 Nobel Prize for measuring what?

The elementary charge of electricity. Millikan watched tiny charged oil droplets hover between electric plates and found that every one carried a whole-number multiple of the same basic unit.

Which German-born physicist became the second woman to win the physics Nobel, in 1963, for her model of the atomic nucleus?

Maria Goeppert Mayer did much of her work unpaid, because rules against nepotism stopped American universities hiring a professor's wife.

Hans Bethe won the 1967 Nobel Prize for explaining what?

How stars produce energy. Bethe worked out the chains of nuclear reactions that fuse hydrogen into helium inside stars, including a cycle in heavier ones where carbon, nitrogen and oxygen do the work.

Which Soviet theorist is credited with laying the foundations of 20th-century condensed matter physics?

Lev Landau spent a year in Stalin's prisons and was freed in 1939 only after Pyotr Kapitsa wrote to Stalin and threatened to stop work; he went on to win the 1962 Nobel Prize for explaining superfluid helium.

Which physicist gave his name to the effect that makes a passing siren drop in pitch?

Christian Doppler proposed the effect in 1842 to explain the colours of double stars. It was first tested three years later, with musicians playing on a moving train.

Which American polymath gave electricity the terms 'battery', 'positive' and 'negative'?

Benjamin Franklin called a linked set of charged glass plates or jars a 'battery', perhaps borrowing the gunners' word, and his electrical experiments won him the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1753.

Which Italian physicist built the first battery to give a steady electric current, around 1800?

Alessandro Volta built it to settle an argument: Luigi Galvani thought twitching frogs' legs revealed 'animal electricity', and Volta showed that two different metals alone were enough.

Which physicist's law relates the current in a circuit to its resistance and the potential difference across it?

Georg Ohm worked it out as a schoolteacher in Cologne and published it in 1827, but recognition was slow: the Royal Society's Copley Medal reached him only in 1841.

Who became the first Pakistani Nobel laureate, sharing the 1979 physics prize for electroweak unification?

Abdus Salam belonged to Pakistan's Ahmadi community, which the state has declared non-Muslim. His gravestone read 'First Muslim Nobel Laureate' until the word 'Muslim' was erased.

Robert Hooke coined which biological term in his 1665 book Micrographia?

Cell. Peering at a thin slice of cork, Hooke wrote that it was 'much like a Honey-comb' and called its tiny pores cells, a word that then meant small rooms.

Roger Penrose's share of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics honoured his proof that general relativity predicts what?

Black hole formation. As a student Penrose saw an exhibition of M. C. Escher's prints and devised an 'impossible' triangle and staircase with his father, which Escher then worked into two famous pictures.

Which French physicist gave his name to the SI unit of electric current?

André-Marie Ampère heard in September 1820 that an electric current can deflect a compass needle; before the month was out he had shown that two current-carrying wires attract or repel each other.