Curated category
20th-century American physicists
- Albert EinsteinWhen Albert Einstein was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. The trembling needle, always pointing the same way, convinced the boy that…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Nathan RosenNathan Rosen was born on the 22nd of March 1909 into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. The Great Depression shaped his early years as he attended…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- George GamowGeorgiy Antonovich Gamow was born in Odessa, Russian Empire, now Odesa, Ukraine. His father taught Russian language and literature while his mother taught…
- 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…
- Boris PodolskyBoris Yakovlevich Podolsky entered the world on the 29th of June 1896 in Taganrog. This port city sat within the Don Host Oblast of the Russian Empire.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…