Curated playlist
Fellows of the American Physical Society
- 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 the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- 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 collapsed object." Then, during a lecture in 1967, someone in the audience grew tired of…
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those parents who set him on a path that would eventually lead hundreds of millions of…
- American Physical SocietyThe American Physical Society was born on the 20th of May, 1899, when thirty-six physicists gathered at Columbia University and declared they would advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics. That founding phrase has never changed. More…
- Erwin SchrödingerErwin Schrödinger was born on the 12th of August 1887 in Vienna, and by the time he died on the 4th of January 1961, he had left behind an equation that altered how humanity understands the fabric of reality. He had also coined a phrase -…
- Nathan RosenNathan Rosen published a paper on the structure of the atomic nucleus in Physical Review in 1931. James Chadwick wouldn't formally discover the neutron until the following year. That gap is a signature of how Rosen worked. He was…
- 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. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- John SingletonJohn Daniel Singleton walked into the Cannes Film Festival in 1991 as a 23-year-old first-time director, his debut feature Boyz n the Hood already drawing the world's attention to a neighborhood most of Hollywood preferred to ignore. A…
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark…
- Eric Allin CornellEric Allin Cornell was born on the 19th of December, 1961, in Palo Alto, California, to parents who were finishing graduate degrees at Stanford University. Within two years, the family had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his…
- 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 put it there for contributions that had reshaped physics over three decades. Born…
- Sally RideSally Kristen Ride was born on the 26th of May, 1951, in Santa Monica, California, and died on the 23rd of July, 2012, having spent more than 343 hours in space and nearly three decades of her private life hidden from the world. She was…
- Hermann WeylWhenever Michael Atiyah turned his attention to a mathematical topic, he kept running into the same name. He found that Hermann Weyl had already been there before him. Freeman Dyson placed Weyl in a category almost no one else could enter.…
- George GamowGeorgiy Antonovich Gamow was born in Odessa, Russian Empire, now Odesa, Ukraine. His father taught Russian language and literature while his mother taught geography and history at a girls' school. He learned French from his mother and…
- Andrei SakharovAndrei Sakharov was the man who built the Soviet Union's most devastating weapon and then spent the rest of his life trying to limit the damage it could do. Born in Moscow on the 21st of May 1921, he grew up in a household shaped by…
- Boris PodolskyBoris Podolsky earned one of history's more remarkable endorsements in 1933. Albert Einstein called him "one of the most brilliant of the younger men" to have worked with Paul Dirac. Einstein made that observation in a letter to Abraham…
- Gerald HoltonGerald James Holton was born on the 23rd of May 1922, in Berlin, Germany. He grew up in a Jewish family where his father worked as an attorney specializing in international law and his mother practiced physiotherapy. The rise of fascism in…
- Peter BergmannPeter Gabriel Bergmann was born in Berlin on the 24th of March 1915, into a family that would scatter across the globe under the weight of Nazi persecution. His father Max was a biochemist who later became a professor at the Rockefeller…
- Linus PaulingLinus Carl Pauling stands alone in the history of Nobel Prizes. He is the only person ever to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry in 1954 and one for Peace in 1962. Scientific American named him one of the twenty…
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been attached to a unit of measurement, a lunar crater, a minor planet, and more than a…
- Lee SmolinLee Smolin dropped out of Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. That might seem like an unlikely starting point for one of the most provocative theoretical physicists of the past half century. But the story of that dropout threads…