Curated playlist
Recipients of the Copley Medal
- J. J. ThomsonJ. J. Thomson, born on the 18th of December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, grew up in a household shaped by antiquarian books and a mother rooted in the local textile trade. He never became the locomotive engineer his parents once…
- James ChadwickIn February 1932, after only about two weeks at the laboratory bench, James Chadwick sent a letter to the journal Nature with a deliberately tentative title: "Possible Existence of a Neutron." Three months later, the hedging was gone. His…
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Under the case for marriage he wrote that a wife would be a "constant companion and a friend in old…
- James CookOn the 14th of February 1779, on a beach at Kealakekua Bay, James Cook fell among the Hawaiians he had come to know. He was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer, and cartographer, born in a Yorkshire village in 1728. He died far from it,…
- James Prescott JouleJames Prescott Joule was born on the 24th of December 1818, the son of a wealthy brewer, in Salford. The unit of energy that powers every calculation in modern physics, every kilowatt-hour on an electricity bill, and every equation in…
- Francis CrickOn his death bed, Francis Crick was editing a manuscript. "He was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end," said his colleague Christof Koch. Crick died of colon cancer on the morning of the 28th of July…
- Ernest RutherfordErnest Rutherford was born on the 30th of August 1871 in Brightwater, New Zealand, the fourth of twelve children, and he died with a burial spot beside Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey. That journey from a farm in rural…
- Joseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley was born on the 24th of March 1733 in Birstall, near Batley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a family of English Dissenters who refused to conform to the Church of England. By the time he died on the 6th of February…
- 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…
- 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…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years. He proved that a regular seventeen-sided polygon, the heptadecagon, could be drawn with nothing…
- 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.…
- Paul DiracPaul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on the 8th of August 1902 in Bristol, England, and died on the 20th of October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida. In the eighty-two years between those dates, he wrote an equation that predicted the existence…
- Stephen HawkingStephen Hawking spent his final years communicating at roughly one word per minute, twitching a single cheek muscle to select letters from a screen. Yet from that near-total stillness he produced papers on black hole entropy, co-developed…
- Humphry DavyIn 1799, Humphry Davy breathed sixteen quarts of a gas for nearly seven minutes, and it absolutely intoxicated him. He called it laughing gas, and he laughed. He was a chemist working at a medical research facility in Bristol, and he was…
- 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…
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned his findings into equations, called him a mathematician of a very high order, one…
- Arthur EvansArthur Evans knelt in a flower-covered hill on the Greek island of Crete in March 1900, and within a few months he had uncovered one of the most complex structures the ancient world had ever produced. The site at Knossos contained more…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.…
- John SmeatonJohn Smeaton called himself a civil engineer at a time when that phrase did not yet exist. Born on the 8th of June 1724 in Austhorpe, Leeds, he would spend his life insisting that engineering was a discipline worthy of serious scientific…