Curated playlist
German Nobel laureates
- Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
- Robert KochRobert Koch announced the cause of tuberculosis in 1882, and hardly anyone reacted.
- Hermann HesseHermann Hesse's biggest audience came after he died. His novels became U.S. paperback bestsellers by the mid-1960s.
- 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.
- Willy BrandtWilly Brandt, later West Germany's chancellor, fled Nazi Germany under a false name. He made it legal in 1948.
- Max BornMax Born won his 1954 Nobel Prize for work he finished nearly three decades earlier.
- 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…
- Theodor MommsenTheodor Mommsen insisted on checking every Latin inscription against the original stone.
- Otto SternOtto Stern and Walther Gerlach fired silver atoms through a magnetic field in 1922. The atoms landed in two bands.
- Walther NernstChemist Walther Nernst also invented an electric piano. He built it in 1930 with Bechstein and Siemens.