Curated playlist
American relativity theorists
- 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."
- 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…
- Gilbert N. LewisChemist Gilbert N. Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize 41 times and never won. He discovered the covalent bond.
- Peter BergmannPeter Bergmann's mother wrote to Einstein in 1933 asking him to take her son as a student.
- Kurt GödelIn 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful math system contains true statements it cannot prove.
- 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…