Curated playlist

Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences

J. J. ThomsonSeven of J. J. Thomson's students went on to win Nobel Prizes. His son George Paget Thomson won one too.
James Prescott JouleJames Joule used a falling weight to spin a paddle wheel in water. The rising temperature showed work turning into heat.
Francis CrickFrancis Crick was editing a manuscript on his death bed. He co-deciphered the DNA double helix in 1953.
Ernest RutherfordErnest Rutherford scoffed at atomic power in 1933. Leó Szilárd later said that speech inspired his chain reaction idea.
Robert KochRobert Koch announced the cause of tuberculosis in 1882, and hardly anyone reacted.
Jean PiagetMarking intelligence tests in Paris, Jean Piaget noticed that young children's errors followed patterns.
Hendrik LorentzWhen Hendrik Lorentz was buried in 1928, the Dutch phone network fell silent. It stayed quiet for three minutes.
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…
Max PlanckMax Planck called his quantum idea "an act of despair." The cautious physicist launched quantum physics reluctantly.
Werner HeisenbergA spy once carried a pistol to a Werner Heisenberg lecture, ready to shoot him. Moe Berg did not fire.
Lord KelvinIn 1845, at the University of Cambridge, an examiner named Robert Leslie Ellis is said to have sized up a graduating student. He reportedly told a fellow examiner, "You and I are just about fit to mend his pens." The student was William…
Louis PasteurIn 1885, Louis Pasteur treated a boy mauled by a rabid dog despite holding no medical license.
Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
Paul DiracPaul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted antimatter, and the positron appeared in 1932.
Stephen HawkingDoctors gave Stephen Hawking two years to live at age 21, but he died at 76.
John HicksEconomist John Hicks called his own famous diagram a classroom gadget. He made the IS-LM model in 1937.
Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré won a royal prize for a problem he did not solve. His entry still revealed the first chaotic system.
Max BornMax Born won his 1954 Nobel Prize for work he finished nearly three decades earlier.
Homi J. Bhabha"I am burning with a desire to do physics." A student at Cambridge wrote those words to his father, and he meant every one of them. The student was Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the Indian theoretical physicist who is widely credited as the father…
Dmitri MendeleevDmitri Mendeleev missed a Nobel Prize in 1906 by a single vote. The Swedish academy chose Henri Moissan instead.
Michael FaradayMichael Faraday turned down a knighthood to stay plain Mr Faraday. He also twice declined to lead the Royal Society.
Amos TverskyAmos Tversky ran toward a live explosive to save a frozen soldier. The shrapnel stayed in his body for life.
Svante ArrheniusSvante Arrhenius nearly failed his doctorate, then won a Nobel Prize for it.
Niels BohrNiels Bohr passed out in the bomb bay of a British plane over Norway. His flying helmet was too small for him to wear.
Arthur EddingtonArthur Eddington photographed stars during a 1919 eclipse to test Einstein's theory.
Lev LandauPhysicist Lev Landau was jailed in 1938 over a leaflet comparing Stalinism to Nazism. A letter to Stalin freed him.
Ivan PavlovIvan Pavlov spent his early career studying how a dog's stomach works. His famous discovery came almost by accident.
Fritz HaberFritz Haber, the German chemist born in 1868, devised a method that now underpins roughly a third of the world's annual food production. The method turns nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas into ammonia, the raw material for both fertilizers and…
Karl PopperSir Karl Raimund Popper was born in Vienna on the 28th of July 1902 and died on the 17th of September 1994. In between, he built a philosophy of science on an odd idea. The strongest theories, he argued, are the ones most exposed to being…
Louis de BroglieCould matter behave like a wave, as light can behave like a particle? Louis de Broglie asked this in 1924.
Santiago Ramón y CajalAt eleven, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was jailed for destroying a neighbor's gate with a homemade cannon.
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.…
Terence TaoTerence Tao scored 760 on the math section of the SAT when he was only eight years old. Only two other children in the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program have ever reached 700 or more at that age. That boy grew up to be an…
Paul ErdősPaul Erdős, the Hungarian mathematician born in 1913, spent most of his adult life living out of a suitcase. Time magazine called him "The Oddball's Oddball". His biographer Paul Hoffman went further and described him as "probably the most…
Joseph ListerJoseph Lister was born on the 5th of April 1827, and he would later be called the father of modern surgery. Yet the surgeons of his youth spoke fondly of what they called the good old surgical stink. They wore operating gowns crusted with…