60 Fun Facts About Famous Physicists

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

Its full title is Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica; it achieved the first great unification in physics.

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

Newton developed it years earlier but the bitter priority dispute poisoned relations between British and continental mathematics for a century.

What government post did Newton hold for the last 30 years of his life?

He took the job in 1699 on the death of Thomas Neale and pursued counterfeiters with relish.

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

Relativity was still too controversial for the committee; the photoelectric work helped launch quantum theory.

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

The 'annus mirabilis' papers came from a patent clerk who had just submitted his PhD to Zurich.

Galileo published his first telescopic discoveries in 1610 in a treatise called what?

The Starry Messenger reported the moons of Jupiter, lunar craters and the stars of the Milky Way.

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

He had defended Copernicanism in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems; the Inquisition had first investigated him in 1615.

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

Physics in 1903 with Pierre and Becquerel, Chemistry alone in 1911 for radium and polonium.

Marie Curie died in 1934 of what, most likely caused by her years of radiation exposure?

In 1995 she became the first woman entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon.

The Copenhagen institute of the atomic-model pioneer predicted the properties of which element, named for the city?

Hafnia is the Latin name for Copenhagen; the institute opened in 1920.

Which principle, that things behave as waves or particles but not both at once, dominated Bohr's thinking?

It shaped his philosophy as much as his physics.

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

He shared it with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga; his diagrams are still the standard way to draw particle interactions.

Feynman became known to the wider public in the 1980s as a member of the commission investigating what?

On the Rogers Commission he famously dunked an O-ring in ice water on live television; he also played bongos in pit orchestras.

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

The Kaiser Wilhelm Society he twice led was renamed the Max Planck Society in 1948.

Maxwell's equations unified electricity, magnetism and what?

He also correctly argued that Saturn's rings are made of countless small particles, winning the 1859 Adams Prize.

Which quantity has an SI measure named after Michael Faraday?

The self-taught bookbinder's apprentice discovered electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and benzene.

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

His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey between the graves of Newton and Darwin.

How long did A Brief History of Time stay on the Sunday Times bestseller list?

Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21 and later spoke through a device controlled by a single cheek muscle.

Which physicist coined 'quantum entanglement' in 1935 and is known for a cat thought experiment?

His equation calculates a system's wave function; his book What Is Life? inspired a generation of molecular biologists.

Werner Heisenberg received the 1932 Nobel Prize 'for the creation of' what?

He published the uncertainty principle in 1927 and later led the German nuclear programme during the war.

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

It married special relativity to quantum mechanics; his 1926 doctorate was the first ever thesis on quantum mechanics.

Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on which date?

It was built under the stands of a disused football stadium; particles obeying the exclusion principle are called fermions after him.

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

He read the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, and lost his security clearance in a 1954 hearing.

Under whom did Oppenheimer earn his doctorate at Göttingen in 1927?

The Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions came out of that partnership.

Ernest Rutherford, the 'father of nuclear physics', won his 1908 Nobel Prize in which subject?

The New Zealander discovered half-life and radon, named alpha and beta radiation, and proposed the atomic nucleus in 1911.

Which two assistants performed Rutherford's gold foil experiment?

Geiger later gave his name to the radiation counter.

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

His AC induction motor patents, licensed by Westinghouse in 1888, became the cornerstone of the polyphase system.

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

Element 109, meitnerium, was named for her in 1997; she lost her Berlin post in 1935 under the Nuremberg Laws.

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

Einstein and Weyl called her the most important woman in the history of mathematics.

Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment proved that what is not conserved?

Her colleagues Lee and Yang got the 1957 Nobel; she received the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.

In which year did CERN announce the discovery of the boson predicted by Peter Higgs?

Higgs's single-author 1964 paper was one of three proposing the mechanism that gives particles mass.

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

He won the 1969 Nobel Prize for classifying elementary particles.

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

The Syracusan also anticipated calculus with his method of exhaustion.

Ludwig Boltzmann's 1877 definition of entropy involves the logarithm of what?

S = k ln Ω is carved on his gravestone in Vienna.

Lord Kelvin was professor at which university for 53 years?

Born in Belfast, he helped formulate the first and second laws of thermodynamics and in 1892 became the first scientist elevated to the peerage.

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

He also discovered Saturn's moon Titan and worked out that light travels as waves.

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

Fermi gave it its name; it was not detected until 1956. Pauli won the 1945 Nobel for his exclusion principle.

Which Indian physicist's statistics gave bosons their name, coined by Paul Dirac?

His 1920s work with Einstein predicted the Bose–Einstein condensate.

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

He and his student K. S. Krishnan found the effect with a spectrograph Raman built himself.

Hideki Yukawa won Japan's first Nobel Prize in 1949 for predicting which particles?

He proposed them to explain the nuclear force binding protons and neutrons.

Which Soviet physicist who oversaw thermonuclear weapons won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize?

His human-rights activism made him a dissident and led to internal exile.

Louis de Broglie's 1924 thesis postulated what?

The wave nature of electrons was confirmed in 1927 and he won the Nobel Prize in 1929.

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

He confirmed Maxwell's prediction; the SI unit of frequency bears his name.

Who received the very first Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1901?

It recognised his discovery of X-rays; element 111, roentgenium, is named after him.

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

The electron was the first subatomic particle discovered; Thomson also found the first evidence for stable isotopes in 1912.

James Chadwick won the 1935 Nobel Prize for discovering what?

A Rutherford pupil, he later wrote the MAUD Report and led the British team on the Manhattan Project.

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

Above it a stellar remnant collapses to a neutron star or black hole; the Chandra X-ray Observatory is named for him.

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

He shared it with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for LIGO, and advised on the film Interstellar.

Robert Millikan won the 1923 Nobel Prize for measuring what?

His oil-drop experiment pinned down the charge on the electron; he then built Caltech into a research powerhouse.

Who was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1963, for the nuclear shell model?

Sixty years passed between Marie Curie's prize and hers.

Hans Bethe won the 1967 Nobel Prize for explaining what?

His 1939 paper established the CNO cycle as the power source of heavier stars.

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

He co-discovered the density matrix method alongside John von Neumann.

Which physicist mentored Heisenberg at the Copenhagen institute now bearing his name?

Rutherford had invited him to Manchester in 1912, which led to the Bohr model of the atom.

Which physicist's mass–energy equation has been called 'the world's most famous equation'?

E = mc² falls out of special relativity, published in 1905.

Which Italian physicist invented the voltaic pile, an early electric battery, around 1800?

He found zinc and copper the most effective metal pair, and Napoleon was so impressed he invited him to demonstrate it at the Institute of France.

Which physicist's law states that current through a conductor is proportional to the voltage across it?

He made the discovery as a school teacher using Volta's new electrochemical cell and equipment he built himself.

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

He shared it with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, and hung the medal around the neck of his old Lahore mathematics teacher.

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

Hooke was the Royal Society's first Curator of Experiments and built the vacuum pumps behind Boyle's gas-law work.

Roger Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing what is a robust prediction of general relativity?

He also devised the impossible Penrose triangle and corresponded with M. C. Escher, inspiring Waterfall and Ascending and Descending.

Which French physicist coined the term 'solenoid' and gave his name to the SI unit of electric current?

Largely self-taught in his father's library, he is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.