field list
A course in Physics
The people who built physics as we practise it, in the order they arrived.
Ibn al-Haytham
965 – 1040Founded optics and the experimental method in the Book of Optics.
Galileo Galilei
1564 – 1642Pointed a telescope upward and broke the authority of the ancients.
Blaise Pascal
1623 – 1662Probability theory, hydrostatics, and a mechanical calculator at nineteen.
Christiaan Huygens
1629 – 1695Wave theory of light, the pendulum clock, Saturn's rings.
Isaac Newton
1643 – 1727Showed that one law governs the apple and the Moon alike.
Émilie du Châtelet
1706 – 1749Translated Newton into French and established kinetic energy as mv².
Benjamin Franklin
1706 – 1790Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.
Ruđer Bošković
1711 – 1787Proposed an atomic force theory two centuries early.
Alessandro Volta
1745 – 1827Built the first battery; the volt is his.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
1777 – 1855The Prince of Mathematicians; number theory, geodesy, magnetism.
Michael Faraday
1791 – 1867A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.
James Clerk Maxwell
1831 – 1879Four equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light — hence radio and Wi-Fi.
Nikola Tesla
1856 – 1943Alternating current, induction motors and radio principles.
Max Planck
1858 – 1947Quantised energy and started quantum theory.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
1867 – 1934The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Ernest Rutherford
1871 – 1937Found the atomic nucleus and split the atom.
Guglielmo Marconi
1874 – 1937Made radio a transatlantic reality.
Lise Meitner
1878 – 1968Explained nuclear fission; passed over by the Nobel committee. Element 109 is meitnerium.
Albert Einstein
1879 – 1955Rewrote space, time, gravity and light in a single year of work.
Emmy Noether
1882 – 1935Noether's theorem links symmetry to conservation laws — the backbone of modern physics.
Niels Bohr
1885 – 1962Quantum atom and the Copenhagen interpretation.
Erwin Schrödinger
1887 – 1961Wave mechanics and What Is Life?, which inspired the DNA hunters.
C. V. Raman
1888 – 1970Raman scattering, now the basis of a ubiquitous laboratory spectroscopy.
Satyendra Nath Bose
1894 – 1974Bose–Einstein statistics; the boson is named after him.
Werner Heisenberg
1901 – 1976The uncertainty principle.
Hideki Yukawa
1907 – 1981Predicted the meson and the nuclear strong force.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
1910 – 1995Worked out at nineteen why some stars must collapse into black holes.
Maurice Wilkins
1916 – 2004Shared the DNA structure Nobel.
Richard Feynman
1918 – 1988QED, nanotechnology's founding lecture, and the Challenger diagnosis.
Abdus Salam
1926 – 1996Unified the electromagnetic and weak forces; first Muslim science laureate.
Peter Higgs
1929 – 2024Predicted the boson that gives particles mass, found 48 years later.
Stephen Hawking
1942 – 2018Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.