Curated playlist
Foreign members of the Royal Society
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer stood in a control bunker near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of the 16th of July, 1945, holding a post to steady himself. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell watched him grow tenser as the final…
- 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…
- Sigmund FreudSigmund Freud was born with a caul, the thin membrane that sometimes covers a newborn's head, and his mother read it as an omen of a great future. The year was 1856, the place a rented room in a locksmith's house in the Moravian town of…
- Robert KochRobert Koch announced the cause of tuberculosis before the German Physiological Society in Berlin on the 24th of March 1882. There was no particular reaction. Eminent scientists like Rudolf Virchow stayed skeptical, clinging to the idea…
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to answer. His mother Charlotte was a schoolteacher. His father Nathaniel sold…
- 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 -…
- Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem. At the stroke of noon, the entire State telegraph and telephone network of the Netherlands fell silent…
- Max PlanckMax Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on the 23rd of April 1858 in Kiel, and he would go on to crack open one of the most stubborn problems in all of physics by proposing an idea that, at the time, he himself could barely believe. That…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- Louis PasteurOn the 6th of July 1885, Louis Pasteur faced a choice that could have ended in his prosecution. A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister had been badly mauled by a rabid dog. Pasteur held a rabies vaccine he had tested in dogs, but he held no…
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt stood at the top of the volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador in 1802 at 19,286 feet above sea level, higher than any Westerner had ever climbed. He was gasping for air, bleeding from his gums, and still taking measurements.…
- 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…
- Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916, in a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, and by the time he died on the 24th of February 2001, he had done something almost no individual in history can claim: he invented an entirely…
- Gilbert N. LewisGilbert Newton Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 41 times, and he never won it once. On the 23rd of March 1946, a graduate student found his lifeless body under a laboratory workbench at the University of California,…
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré was born on the 29th of April 1854 in the Cité Ducale neighborhood of Nancy, and by the time he died on the 17th of July 1912, he had touched nearly every branch of mathematics that existed in his lifetime. His peers called…
- 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.…
- Evgeny LifshitzEvgeny Lifshitz was the second of only 43 people ever to pass Lev Landau's Theoretical Minimum examination. Born on the 21st of February 1915 in Kharkov, Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, Lifshitz came from a Jewish family. The…
- Nikolai VavilovNikolai Vavilov carried a pet lizard in his pocket through the halls of the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy. That small, eccentric detail captures something essential about the man: a scientist who moved through the world with an…
- Dmitri MendeleevDmitri Mendeleev claimed he saw the answer in a dream. "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required," he recalled. "Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction…
- Joseph FourierJoseph Fourier fell down a flight of stairs on the 4th of May 1830. He had been living with a heart condition since his days in Egypt and Grenoble, but that fall aggravated the malady beyond what anyone had feared. Twelve days later, he…
- Svante ArrheniusSvante Arrhenius taught himself to read at age three, not because anyone encouraged him, but because he decided to. By watching his father add numbers in account books, he became an arithmetical prodigy before most children can tie their…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth. It was a conflict he never entirely resolved, and it drove him to build an entirely new picture of…
- Lev LandauLev Davidovich Landau was born on the 22nd of January 1908, in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, and before he was old enough to attend university he had already taught himself both differential and integral calculus. What kind of…
- Ivan PavlovIvan Petrovich Pavlov was born on the 26th of September 1849 in Ryazan, a city in the Russian Empire, the eldest of ten children born to a village Orthodox priest. The name Pavlov is today shorthand for an automatic, almost mechanical…
- Pafnuty ChebyshevPafnuty Chebyshev limped through his entire life, leaning on a stick because of a condition called Trendelenburg's gait. As a child in the village of Okatovo, in the province of Kaluga, that limp kept him off the playing fields where other…
- Élie MetchnikoffÉlie Metchnikoff inserted tiny citrus thorns into the larvae of starfish and then waited. What he saw in 1882 would alter the course of medicine. Unusual cells had gathered around the thorns, surrounding them, as if mounting a defence.…
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little that his death certificate listed the cause as "malnutrition and inanition caused by…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and philosopher, born in Tel Aviv on the 4th of September, 1936. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery gave Pearl the Turing Award, computing's highest…
- 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…
- Louis de BroglieLouis de Broglie was born on the 15th of August 1892 in Dieppe, France, into a noble family that had sent soldiers and statesmen to French courts for centuries. He arrived in the world as the youngest son of the 5th duc de Broglie, heir to…
- 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…
- Santiago Ramón y CajalSantiago Ramón y Cajal was once imprisoned at the age of eleven for destroying a neighbor's yard gate with a homemade cannon. That was 1863, in the small Spanish town of Petilla de Aragón, Navarre. His father responded by apprenticing the…
- Walther NernstWalther Nernst drove a car with a cylinder of nitrous oxide bolted to it, injected directly into the carburetor for extra power. This was not a stunt. It was the natural behavior of a man who sold a lightbulb patent for one million marks…
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his wife who had prayed to St. Theodosius of Chernigov for a child. That unusual name…