The international physics conference that was convened in Brussels by Belgian chemical magnate Ernest Solvay in 1911 was perhaps the most formidable gathering of scientists ever. Most of those pictured are Nobel laureates. Left to right, standing: Victor Goldschmidt, Max Planck, Rubens, Somerfeld, Lindemann, Louis Victor De Broglie, Knudsen, Hasenohrl, Hostelet, Herzen, James Hopwood Jeans, Ernest Rutherford, Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, Albert Einstein and Paul Langevin. Left to right, seated at table: Walther Nernst, Marcel Louis Brillouin, Ernest Solvay, Hendrik Lorentz, Otto Heinrich Warburg, Jean Baptiste Perrin, Wilhelm Wien, Madame Marie Curie and Jules Henri Poincare..
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Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was an Italian scientist, and most recognize him as one of the most famous astronomers in history. He built some of the first powerful telescopes and promoted the heliocentric solar system in a hostile environment, and he also made many important observations about the heavens. However, he was also a prominent physicist in his time, known for his experimental work with the motion of bodies, studying the motion of pendulums and falling objects.
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Many people consider English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) one of the greatest minds of all time. Most famous from his law of gravitation and laws of motion, Newton also invented calculus, without which the field of physics wouldn't exist. Newton was also interested in the field of optics and discovered that white light could be split into all the colors of the rainbow by a prism. The SI unit of force is named after him. This portrait of Newton was painted in January 1754, years after his death.
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This is a view of the magnet core of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet at the European Organization for Nuclear Research's Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2007. The solenoid was invented by Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836), who is most famous for his investigation of the magnetic fields produced by wires carrying electric current. The law that governs those magnetic fields is called Ampere's Law, and the SI unit of electric current was named after him in 1881.
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Fans entering Pittsburgh's PNC Park in 2006 passed through magnetometers in a security measure surrounding the activities around Major League Baseball's All-Star Game. Carl Friederich Gauss (1777-1855), who made several important contributions to physics, invented the magnetometer. Though he's been called "the prince of mathematics," he's also known for his work with electric fields. Gauss's Law, which is the electrical analogue to Ampere's Law, states that the electric flux through any closed surface is proportional to the enclosed electric charge.
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David Brewster (1781-1868), a Scottish physicist, was actually a minister for a short time before he left the profession in 1798 and began experimenting with optics, the branch of physics related to light and vision. Brewster's Law, named for him, relates to the polarization of light. In 1816, he invented the kaleidoscope, which he patented the following year, and he also designed the Fresnel lens, which was used in lighthouses.
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Inventor and scientist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) lectures at the Royal Institution, Dec. 27, 1855. Faraday was one of the greatest experimental physicists, yet he had no formal training -- he actually learned everything he knew about physics and chemistry while assisting Sir Humphrey Davey. Faraday is credited with the discovery of electromagnetic induction (called Faraday's Law), the invention of the electric motor and the laws of electrolysis. The SI unit of capacitance, the farad, is named after him.
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The work of Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) is considered to have paved the way for Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Maxwell worked as a Professor of Natural Philosophy in Aberdeen and King's College in London, before establishing the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. During his career, he wrote about the kinetic theory of gases, investigated the perception of color and demonstrated color photography with a piece of tartan ribbon in 1861. He's best known for suggesting that electromagnetic waves could be reproduced in a laboratory and for his mathematical rationale of Faraday's electromagnetic theories.
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James Prescott Joule (1818-1889) worked with heat and energy, and he demonstrated that heat and work are equivalent. He wasn't the first to demonstrate the concept, but his demonstration was the one that was commonly accepted. The SI unit of energy is named after him.
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British physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), proposer of the absolute (Kelvin) temperature scale, is associated with establishing the second law of thermodynamics. Educated at Glasgow and Cambridge, he published important papers on the conservation and dissipation of energy, made contributions to the field of fluid mechanics and directed work on the first successful trans-Atlantic cable telegraph in 1866, which brought him considerable wealth.
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Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) founded statistical mechanics, which describes large numbers of atoms by using averages. His most important contributions were to the study of kinetic energy, including the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for molecular speeds in a gas. In his day, most physicists didn't believe that atoms and molecules were real, but Maxwell and Boltzmann accepted this as fact and worked forward from there. Boltzmann also showed that a system's entropy is a measure of its disorder, and that the amount of disorder in the universe tends to increase.
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German physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) was the originator of quantum theory, and his work earned him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918. Planck introduced a fundamental physical constant used to relate the energy of radiation to its wavelength or frequency. He used the term "quanta" for the tiny particles of energy he was studying, hence the term quantum physics. Planck also wrote extensively on the philosophy of physics.
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Women have also been important in the evolution of physics over the years. Working with her husband, Pierre, Marie Curie helped discover and extract the radioactive elements of polonium and radium from an ore called pitchblende. Marie Curie was a two-time Nobel Prize winning physicist, but unfortunately, she died from anemia, which was the result of radiation poisoning after a lifetime of working with the two radioactive materials she discovered.
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Known primarily for her research on nuclear energy and radioactivity, Austrian physicist Lise Meitner (1878-1968) worked with Otto Hahn to discover protactinium and research transuranic elements. Before Meitner began her 30-year research partnership with Hahn, she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and studied with Max Planck. Although Meitner was the first to discover nuclear fission, it was her partner, Hahn, who won the Nobel Prize for the accomplishment in 1944.
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This photo shows Meitner's partner Otto Hahn (1879-1968), a German physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, with his colleagues Fritz Strassmann and Professor Haber (right), at a museum in Munich. Here, the three are working on reconstructing an experiment demonstrating the parting of uranium by neutrons. The original experiment was a demonstration of nuclear fission that indicated that it may be possible to manufacture an atomic bomb.
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German-born American physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) sticks out his tongue for the camera on March 14, 1951. Einstein is most famous for his Special Theory of Relativity, which correctly describes the motion of particles traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light. In his 1905 publication of this theory, he included his famous formula E=mc². He also developed a theory of gravitation known as the General Theory of Relativity, and he contributed to the development of quantum theory. In 1905, he published a paper that explained the photoelectric effect that proposed that light consists of particles (what we now call photons). For his extensive contribution to the field of physics, Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics.
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In 1913, Danish scientist Neils Bohr (1885-1962) developed a quantum theoretical model of the hydrogen atom in which the electrons orbit the nucleus. His model predicted the frequencies of spectral lines that other physicists had only observed, and he received the 1922 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work. Bohr also helped develop the atomic bomb. In this photo, he discusses an equation at Princeton University, N.J., on March 21, 1950.
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Louis Victor Broglie, the Duke of Broglie (1892-1987), was a French winner of a 1929 Nobel Prize for Physics. He theorized that all particles move in waves, just as Einstein thought that light had particles. Broglie came up with his theory while he was working toward his Ph.D., and it was such a radical idea that his examiners didn't believe it could be true. They wrote to Einstein, who agreed with Broglie, and the examiners granted him his Ph.D. The wave-like nature of particles (electrons) was confirmed in the 1920s by physicists George Thomson and Clinton Davisson, who shared the 1937 Nobel Prize.
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German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) created quantum mechanics in 1925. The next year, Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli showed that Heisenberg's theory accurately predicted the hydrogen spectrum. In 1927, Heisenberg published his Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can't measure the position and momentum of a particle with arbitrary precision. He won the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work. Heisenberg is shown here, on Oct. 9, 1970, chatting with King Frederick and Queen Ingrid of Denmark after being formally presented with the Niels Bohr Gold Medal for his work developing the Quantum Theory.
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Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) was an Austrian physicist who created a version of quantum mechanics that involved waves in 1926 and received the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics, which he shared with Paul Dirac. This was different from Heisenberg's theory, which involved abstract constructs called matrices. Like Heisenberg, Schrodinger also correctly predicted the hydrogen spectrum. This eventually led to the development of spectrum analyzers, like the one shown here. In this image, blue and yellow tracers are seen on a spectrum analyzer, representing atomic hydrogen emission from two positions in the Milky Way galaxy Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2007, in the signal processing room at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, Calif., where scientists search for intelligent life in the universe. Spectrum analyzers help them determine the elemental composition of objects in space.
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English mathematical physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984) contributed to quantum electrodynamics, but he is well known for his electron equation that encompassed both quantum mechanics and special relativity. This equation led to the discovery of antimatter. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with Erwin Schrodinger for this work. He's shown here in conversation with Professor Dr. Heisenberg (right) at the 18th convention of Nobel Prize winners at Lindau (Bodensee), Germany.
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Sometimes known as the father of the atomic bomb, American nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) helped make the state of California a powerhouse in the world of theoretical physics. Oppenheimer was also the director of the laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., which was where the first atomic bomb was designed and built. Los Alamos was the central hub of the Manhattan Project, which was the code name for the United States' plan to create atomic weapons to use in war. In this photo, Oppenheimer, left, is shown with Major General Leslie Groves beside the remains of a tower at the site of the Trinity atomic bomb test.
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American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988), seen here speaking at Cal Tech University in 1959, is credited with the theory of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology can be described simply as human engineering at the atomic or molecular level. Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of modern quantum electrodynamics, which involves the interaction of subatomic particles. Basically, Feynman was responsible for describing the behavior of electrons much more accurately than his predecessors. During his lifetime, he was also on the staff of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, and he taught at both Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology.
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Scientist Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) of "Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking" speaks via satellite during the Science Channel portion of the 2010 Television Critics Association Press Tour at the Langham Hotel on Jan. 14, 2010, in Pasadena, Calif. Hawking is an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose many books and public appearances have made him something of an academic celebrity. In 1970, he worked with Einstein's theory of general relativity and proved that general singularities of space-time were common. Much of his work has been concerned with the behavior of black holes, and he is almost certain that extraterrestrial life exists.
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Another modern-day scientist, Brian Greene (b. 1963) is one of America's foremost theoretical physicists, studying the subject of string theory. Greene is known as a contributor to the knowledge of abstract symmetry in string theory. He also studies string cosmology, which may help to explain why the space around us has three large dimensions. Greene has helped the general public understand physics and string theory by publishing a number of popular books on the subject, and he has made many appearances on talk shows and television series, both in cameo roles and as a consultant.
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