Curated category
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…
- 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…
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry".
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned…
- 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…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…