Curated playlist
Theoretical physicists
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize partly for new elements that were really fission products.
- Isaac NewtonIsaac Newton was born so small, he said, that he could have fit inside a quart mug.
- Erwin SchrödingerErwin Schrödinger formulated his wave equation at a Swiss sanatorium in Arosa. He was ill with tuberculosis.
- Yang Chen-NingYang Chen-Ning, the theoretical physicist also known as C.N. Yang and Franklin Yang, died in Beijing on the 18th of October 2025. He was 103 years old. The day after his death was announced, people gathered at Tsinghua University and…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann's father asked Theodore von Kármán to talk his son out of mathematics.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller stood and watched the Trinity test while nearly everyone else lay face-down.
- 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.
- 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.
- Abdul Qadeer KhanAbdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer, appeared on Pakistan Television on the 4th of February 2004 and confessed to running a nuclear proliferation ring. At home, he was known as the father of…