Curated playlist
Foreign members of the Royal Society
- 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."
- Sigmund FreudBefore Sigmund Freud studied dreams, he dissected hundreds of eels. He was searching for their male reproductive organs.
- Robert KochRobert Koch announced the cause of tuberculosis in 1882, and hardly anyone reacted.
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz explained why wages stay high in recessions even when workers are desperate for jobs.
- Erwin SchrödingerErwin Schrödinger formulated his wave equation at a Swiss sanatorium in Arosa. He was ill with tuberculosis.
- Hendrik LorentzWhen Hendrik Lorentz was buried in 1928, the Dutch phone network fell silent. It stayed quiet for three minutes.
- 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…
- 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.
- Louis PasteurIn 1885, Louis Pasteur treated a boy mauled by a rabid dog despite holding no medical license.
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt climbed Chimborazo in 1802, gasping and bleeding from his gums.
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- James WatsonJames Watson put his name to a scientific paper that fills just two pages of the journal Nature, pages 737 and 738 of volume 171. Watson, an American molecular biologist, wrote it with Francis Crick in 1953. Its subject was DNA, and its…
- Claude ShannonClaude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that learned its way through a maze. He named the 1950 machine Theseus.
- Gilbert N. LewisChemist Gilbert N. Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize 41 times and never won. He discovered the covalent bond.
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré won a royal prize for a problem he did not solve. His entry still revealed the first chaotic system.
- Hermann WeylMathematician Hermann Weyl fled Germany in 1933 after once refusing to leave. His wife was Jewish.
- Evgeny LifshitzEvgeny Lifshitz was only the second person to pass Lev Landau's Theoretical Minimum exam. Just 43 people ever did.
- Nikolai VavilovBotanist Nikolai Vavilov set out to end famine but was arrested in 1940 and died in a Soviet prison.
- Dmitri MendeleevDmitri Mendeleev missed a Nobel Prize in 1906 by a single vote. The Swedish academy chose Henri Moissan instead.
- Joseph FourierJoseph Fourier's heat research led to the first scientific proposal of the greenhouse effect.
- 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.
- 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.
- Pafnuty ChebyshevA limp kept Pafnuty Chebyshev off the playing fields and steered him toward mathematics.
- Élie MetchnikoffÉlie Metchnikoff poked citrus thorns into starfish larvae in 1882 and watched cells swarm them.
- Donald KnuthDonald Knuth, an American computer scientist born in 1938, pays $2.56 to anyone who finds a mistake in one of his books. The number is deliberate. As he explains it, 256 pennies make one hexadecimal dollar. A smaller reward of $0.32 goes…
- Kurt GödelIn 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful math system contains true statements it cannot prove.
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl gave computers a way to reason when facts are incomplete.
- Linus PaulingLinus Pauling left high school without a diploma. He later won two unshared Nobel Prizes, a first in history.
- Louis de BroglieCould matter behave like a wave, as light can behave like a particle? Louis de Broglie asked this in 1924.
- Peter DebyeA unit of measurement, a lunar crater and a minor planet all carry Peter Debye's name.
- Santiago Ramón y CajalAt eleven, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was jailed for destroying a neighbor's gate with a homemade cannon.
- Walther NernstChemist Walther Nernst also invented an electric piano. He built it in 1930 with Bechstein and Siemens.
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky went from collecting butterflies in Kiev to writing a landmark book on evolution.
- 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…