Curated playlist
Honorary members of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin once trained to be a Russian Orthodox priest. He later led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death.
- Ernest RutherfordErnest Rutherford scoffed at atomic power in 1933. Leó Szilárd later said that speech inspired his chain reaction idea.
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison clamped his teeth into a piano to hear it. He was deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other.
- Vyacheslav MolotovFinns named the Molotov cocktail after Vyacheslav Molotov, who called bombing raids food deliveries.
- Marie CurieMarie Curie's cookbooks are still highly radioactive. They are sealed in lead-lined boxes.
- 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.
- Max PlanckMax Planck called his quantum idea "an act of despair." The cautious physicist launched quantum physics reluctantly.
- Gilbert N. LewisChemist Gilbert N. Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize 41 times and never won. He discovered the covalent bond.
- Max BornMax Born won his 1954 Nobel Prize for work he finished nearly three decades earlier.
- 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.
- 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…