Curated playlist
British Nobel laureates
- J. J. ThomsonSeven of J. J. Thomson's students went on to win Nobel Prizes. His son George Paget Thomson won one too.
- James ChadwickJames Chadwick signed up for physics by mistake. He meant to study mathematics, then found the neutron.
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot compared an evening sky to a patient on a surgical table.
- George Bernard ShawBernard Shaw accepted the 1925 Nobel Prize but rejected the money. He said his audiences gave him enough.
- Ernest RutherfordErnest Rutherford scoffed at atomic power in 1933. Leó Szilárd later said that speech inspired his chain reaction idea.
- Friedrich HayekThree days before the 1929 Wall Street crash, Friedrich Hayek wrote that no sudden collapse was expected.
- Alexander FlemingAlexander Fleming, a Scottish physician and microbiologist, walked back into his London laboratory on the 3rd of September 1928 after a family holiday in Suffolk. Before leaving, he had spread staphylococci across culture plates and left…
- Paul DiracPaul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted antimatter, and the positron appeared in 1932.
- Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis changed one letter to turn a Greek word for butcher into his surname. He later won a Nobel Prize.
- John HicksEconomist John Hicks called his own famous diagram a classroom gadget. He made the IS-LM model in 1937.
- Austen ChamberlainAusten Chamberlain won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 but never became prime minister. His half-brother Neville did.
- Ronald CoaseRonald Coase faced twenty skeptical senior economists in 1960 and gradually won them over.
- Bertrand RussellAt 89, philosopher Bertrand Russell went to jail for an anti-nuclear protest. Asked to behave, he said, "No, I won't."
- Roger PenroseRoger Penrose received half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that the formation of black holes is a robust prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The citation sounds like the summit of a single, tidy career.…