Curated playlist
Recipients of the Matteucci Medal
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize partly for new elements that were really fission products.
- John Archibald WheelerJohn Archibald Wheeler spent decades calling a dying star a "gravitationally completely collapsed object."
- 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.
- 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.
- Werner HeisenbergA spy once carried a pistol to a Werner Heisenberg lecture, ready to shoot him. Moe Berg did not fire.
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré won a royal prize for a problem he did not solve. His entry still revealed the first chaotic system.
- 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.
- 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…