Curated playlist
Nobel laureates in Physics
- Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
- J. J. ThomsonSeven of J. J. Thomson's students went on to win Nobel Prizes. His son George Paget Thomson won one too.
- James ChadwickJames Chadwick signed up for physics by mistake. He meant to study mathematics, then found the neutron.
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize partly for new elements that were really fission products.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- Paul DiracPaul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted antimatter, and the positron appeared in 1932.
- Carl WiemanAfter a Nobel Prize in physics, Carl Wieman turned to why students learn so little in science class.
- Eric Allin CornellIn 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman made the first Bose-Einstein condensate. It is a new state of matter.
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- Max BornMax Born won his 1954 Nobel Prize for work he finished nearly three decades earlier.
- Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton left Google in May 2023 to warn the world about AI. He had helped build the field for decades.
- 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.
- Alexander ProkhorovWhile studying ruby in 1957, physicist Alexander Prokhorov realized it could serve as a laser's active medium.
- C. V. RamanC. V. Raman, the Indian physicist, bought two steamship tickets to Stockholm in July 1930. One was for himself and one was for his wife. The Nobel Prize announcements were not due until November. Raman knew that the voyage to Sweden by sea…
- Louis de BroglieCould matter behave like a wave, as light can behave like a particle? Louis de Broglie asked this in 1924.
- Otto SternOtto Stern and Walther Gerlach fired silver atoms through a magnetic field in 1922. The atoms landed in two bands.
- 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.…
- Subrahmanyan ChandrasekharSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar sailed from India to England in 1930, and on that first sea voyage he worked out a number that would outlive him. The number was 1.44. It is the greatest mass, counted in suns, that a white dwarf star can have. A…