Browse the index

Founded optics and the experimental method in the Book of Optics.

Pointed a telescope upward and broke the authority of the ancients.

Probability theory, hydrostatics, and a mechanical calculator at nineteen.

Wave theory of light, the pendulum clock, Saturn's rings.

Showed that one law governs the apple and the Moon alike.

Translated Newton into French and established kinetic energy as mv².

Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.

Proposed an atomic force theory two centuries early.

Built the first battery; the volt is his.

The Prince of Mathematicians; number theory, geodesy, magnetism.

A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.

Four equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light — hence radio and Wi-Fi.

Alternating current, induction motors and radio principles.

Quantised energy and started quantum theory.

The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Found the atomic nucleus and split the atom.

Made radio a transatlantic reality.

Explained nuclear fission; passed over by the Nobel committee. Element 109 is meitnerium.

Rewrote space, time, gravity and light in a single year of work.

Noether's theorem links symmetry to conservation laws — the backbone of modern physics.

Quantum atom and the Copenhagen interpretation.

Wave mechanics and What Is Life?, which inspired the DNA hunters.

Raman scattering, now the basis of a ubiquitous laboratory spectroscopy.

Bose–Einstein statistics; the boson is named after him.

The uncertainty principle.

Predicted the meson and the nuclear strong force.

Worked out at nineteen why some stars must collapse into black holes.

Shared the DNA structure Nobel.

QED, nanotechnology's founding lecture, and the Challenger diagnosis.

Unified the electromagnetic and weak forces; first Muslim science laureate.

Predicted the boson that gives particles mass, found 48 years later.

Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.