Curated playlist
20th-century American physicists
- Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer gripped a post to steady himself as the first nuclear bomb went off.
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize partly for new elements that were really fission products.
- John Archibald WheelerJohn Archibald Wheeler spent decades calling a dying star a "gravitationally completely collapsed object."
- Nathan RosenNathan Rosen co-authored the first known wormhole paper in July 1935. He was Albert Einstein's assistant at the time.
- Richard FeynmanRichard Feynman's last words, spoken after a long coma, were "This dying is boring." The remark suited an American theoretical physicist who never lost his taste for blunt, irreverent honesty. He was a man who treated authority, ceremony…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann's father asked Theodore von Kármán to talk his son out of mathematics.
- Katherine JohnsonKatherine Johnson was the mathematician an astronaut asked for by name. NASA was using electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit of the Earth. Officials turned to Johnson to verify the machine's numbers,…
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- Bruria KaufmanBruria Kaufman spent five years working alongside Albert Einstein in Princeton. She co-wrote two articles with him.
- James WatsonJames Watson put his name to a scientific paper that fills just two pages of the journal Nature, pages 737 and 738 of volume 171. Watson, an American molecular biologist, wrote it with Francis Crick in 1953. Its subject was DNA, and its…
- James HansenOn June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Senate global warming had already been detected.
- George GamowGeorge Gamow added Hans Bethe's name to a physics paper as a prank. Bethe had not written a word of it.
- Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics was finished one month after a discovery it missed.
- Boris PodolskyPhysicist Boris Podolsky may have sold Soviet agents a public science law for $300.
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun's V-2 rocket cost more lives to build than it took as a weapon.
- Gilbert PlassGilbert Plass was a Canadian physicist who warned a magazine audience about a warming planet in 1953. He told Time that "for centuries to come, if man's industrial growth continues, the earth's climate will continue to grow warmer." Plass…
- Otto SternOtto Stern and Walther Gerlach fired silver atoms through a magnetic field in 1922. The atoms landed in two bands.
- John G. TrumpJohn G. Trump died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 21st of February 1985, six days before a White House ceremony in his honor. His son John Jr. accepted the National Medal of Science on his behalf. President Ronald Reagan had awarded…
- Subrahmanyan ChandrasekharSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar sailed from India to England in 1930, and on that first sea voyage he worked out a number that would outlive him. The number was 1.44. It is the greatest mass, counted in suns, that a white dwarf star can have. A…