Curated playlist
20th-century American physicists
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer stood in a control bunker near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of the 16th of July, 1945, holding a post to steady himself. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell watched him grow tenser as the final…
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- John Archibald WheelerJohn Archibald Wheeler spent decades trying to describe a dying star in plain language, and the best he could manage was "gravitationally completely collapsed object." Then, during a lecture in 1967, someone in the audience grew tired of…
- Nathan RosenNathan Rosen published a paper on the structure of the atomic nucleus in Physical Review in 1931. James Chadwick wouldn't formally discover the neutron until the following year. That gap is a signature of how Rosen worked. He was…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee put it there for contributions that had reshaped physics over three decades. Born…
- Bruria KaufmanBruria Kaufman spent five years working alongside Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, co-authoring two articles with him and contributing to his book on relativity. She was a research associate there from 1948…
- James HansenJames Hansen stood before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on the 23rd of June 1988, and told the assembled lawmakers that NASA was ninety-nine percent certain the Earth was warmer than at any point in the…
- George GamowGeorgiy Antonovich Gamow was born in Odessa, Russian Empire, now Odesa, Ukraine. His father taught Russian language and literature while his mother taught geography and history at a girls' school. He learned French from his mother and…
- Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra was born on the 1st of February 1939 in Vienna, Austria. He pursued his doctoral studies at the University of Vienna and earned a PhD in theoretical physics by 1966. His early research career took him across Europe and into…
- Boris PodolskyBoris Podolsky earned one of history's more remarkable endorsements in 1933. Albert Einstein called him "one of the most brilliant of the younger men" to have worked with Paul Dirac. Einstein made that observation in a letter to Abraham…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose…
- Gilbert PlassGilbert Norman Plass stood at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in 1942. He worked as an associate physicist during those critical war years until 1945. The Manhattan District project demanded his expertise in…
- Otto SternOtto Stern, born on the 17th of February 1888 in Sohrau, in the German province of Silesia, became one of the most influential experimental physicists of the twentieth century. He earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943, yet his path to…