Curated playlist
21st-century American physicists
- Walter CunninghamWalter Cunningham sat in the lunar module pilot seat on a spacecraft with no lunar module. It was Apollo 7.
- Yang Chen-NingYang Chen-Ning, the theoretical physicist also known as C.N. Yang and Franklin Yang, died in Beijing on the 18th of October 2025. He was 103 years old. The day after his death was announced, people gathered at Tsinghua University and…
- 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,…
- Carl WiemanAfter a Nobel Prize in physics, Carl Wieman turned to why students learn so little in science class.
- Eric Allin CornellIn 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman made the first Bose-Einstein condensate. It is a new state of matter.
- 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.
- Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics was finished one month after a discovery it missed.
- Gerald HoltonGerald Holton was labeled an "Enemy Alien" in America, yet Harvard hired him. He taught naval officers to use radar.
- Lee SmolinLee Smolin dropped out of high school and took up Einstein's unfinished work. He called it his mission.
- Kip ThorneKip Thorne is an American astrophysicist whose life's work converged on a single announcement. On the 11th of February 2016, four physicists speaking for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration said that their instrument had recorded two black…