My Science School

             George Bernard Shaw was born on 26th July 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. He was a renowned playwright, critic and polemicist. When Shaw was 15-years-old, his mother left him and his father.

            Later, Shaw’s plays, including ‘Misalliance’, are filled with problematic parent-child relationships: with children who are brought up in isolation from their parents.

            He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as ‘Widowers’ Houses’, ‘Pygmalion’ and ‘Candida’. George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 1925.

            Over a decade later in 1938 he earned an Academy Award for the film adaptation of ‘Pygmalion’. In the final decade of his life, he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death. Bernard Shaw refused all state honours including the Order of Merit in 1946.

          Bernard Shaw’s complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950.

          Today he is considered as one of the greatest wits of English language. Film adaptations of his plays are considered classics.

Picture credit: google

       

 

             A chemist and physicist, Ernest Rutherford was the central figure in the study of radioactivity who led the exploration of nuclear physics. Ernest Rutherford was born on 30th August 1871, in New Zealand. He is considered be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday.

               After studying at the Cavendish Laboratory, Rutherford became a professor at McGill University in Canada. Being the first to split the atom, Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of atomic structure. Working with Frederick Soddy, Rutherford advanced the hypothesis that helium gas could be formed from radioactive substances.

               He discovered that radioactive preparations gave rise to the formation of gases. Rutherford had an enormous influence in the field of nuclear physics and mentored scientists, including Chadwick, Niels Bohr, and Otto Hahn. He died on October 19th, 1937.

Picture credit: google

               Sir William Ramsay was a Scottish physical chemist who at the end of the 19th century discovered four new elements. These were the noble gases, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon; they added a whole new group to the Periodic Table of the elements.

               William Ramsay was born on 2nd October 1852, and received his basic education in Glasgow before traveling to Germany to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of this achievement.

               The remarkable inertness of the newly found elements resulted in their use for special purposes, for example, helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen for lighter-than-air craft and argon to conserve the filaments in light bulbs.

               Upon the outbreak of war in 1914, he became involved in efforts to secure the participation of scientific experts in the creation of government science policy. He died on 23rd July, 1916.

Picture credit: google

            Hermann Emil Louis Fischer was a renowned German chemist of the 19th century, who did pioneering work in the field of organic chemistry. He was born on 9th October 1852, in Germany.

            In 1874, he received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg, under Adolph von Baeyer.

            Fischer demonstrated the structure of biological compounds for instance sugars, proteins and purines. He also worked on the organic synthesis of glucose. This work showed that various substances, little known at that time, such as adenine, xanthine, caffeine all belonged to one homogeneous family and could be derived from one another.

            This parent substance, which at first he regarded as being hypothetical, he called purine in 1884, and he synthesized it in 1898.

            In 1902 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on sugar and purine syntheses. Fischer died in Berlin on July 15th, 1919. 

Picture credit: google

          Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff was the first person to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was a Dutch physicist and organic chemist, who became the first to propose a three-dimensional model for the structure of simple carbon compounds. His pioneering work helped found the modern theory of chemical affinity, chemical equilibrium, and chemical thermodynamics.

          He is also widely considered as one of the founders of physical chemistry as the discipline is known today.

          Jacobus Henricus was born in Netherlands, and earned his doctorate in Utrecht in 1874. In 1885, van’t Hoff was appointed as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

          Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901. Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff died on 1st March, 1911.

Picture credit: google

            Italian physicist Enrico Fermi built the prototype of a nuclear reactor and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. Enrico Fermi was born in Rome  on 29th September, 1901.

            Enrico Fermi has been called ‘the architect of the nuclear age’, and ‘the architect of the atomic bomb’. He was one of the very few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally.

            In 1934, Fermi began his most important work with the atom, discovering that nuclear transformation could occur in nearly every element. One of the elements’ atoms he split was uranium. This work led to the discovery of slowing down neutrons, which led to nuclear fission, and the production of new elements beyond the traditional Periodic Table.

            In 1938, Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with artificial radioactivity produced by neutrons, and for nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.

            During the last years of his life Fermi occupied himself with the problem of the mysterious origin of cosmic rays. He died in Chicago on 28th November, 1954.

Picture credit: google

 

          The Nobel Prize in Physics 1935 was awarded to James Chadwick for the discovery of the neutron. Chadwick was born in England on 20th October 1891. He attended Manchester High School prior to entering Manchester University in 1908. He graduated with first class honours in 1911.

          When Herbert Becker and Walter Bothe directed alpha particles (helium nuclei) at beryllium in 1930, a strong, penetrating radiation was emitted. One hypothesis was that this could be high-energy electromagnetic radiation.

          In 1932, Chadwick made the fundamental discovery that it actually consisted of a neutral particle about the same mass as a proton, and proved the existence of neutrons. Ernest Rutherford had earlier proposed that such a particle might exist in atomic nuclei.

          He was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1932, and subsequently the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935. James Chadwick died on 24th July, 1974.

Picture credit: google

 

               Erwin Schrodinger is a renowned Austrian physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter, and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics, which formed the basis of wave mechanics. He formulated the wave equation.

               He was born on 12th August 1887 in Austria. Schrodinger proposed an original interpretation of the physical meaning of the wave function. The Schrodinger equation, which he formulated to describe the quantum state of a system, is his biggest achievement.

               In Niels Bohr’s theory of the atom, electrons absorb and emit radiation of fixed wavelengths when jumping between fixed orbits around a nucleus.

               In 1926, Erwin Schrodinger formulated a wave equation that accurately calculated the energy levels of electrons in atoms.

               Schrodinger died on 4th January, 1961.

Picture credit: google

          Paul Dirac was a British theoretical physicist who is particularly known for his attempts to unify the theories of quantum mechanics, and the relativity theory.

          Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on 8th August 1902 in Bristol, England. He became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1932, a post he held for the next 37 years.

          In 1933, he published a pioneering paper on Lagrangian quantum mechanics. The importance of Dirac’s work lies essentially in his famous wave equation, which introduced special relativity into Erwin Schrodinger’s equation. The equation is a mathematical formulation for studying quantum mechanical systems.

          The Nobel Prize in Physics 1933 was awarded jointly to Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.

          He was also awarded the Royal Medal in 1939, the Copley Medal, and the Max Planck Medal both in 1952, among other honours, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930 and of the American Physical Society in 1948.

          Dirac died on 20th October 1984, in Florida, US where he is buried.

Picture credit: google

               German physicist Gustav Hertz, born on 22nd July 1887 in Hamburg, won the Nobel Prize in 1925, for the Franck-Hertz Experiment conducted in 1914 with James Franck, who shared the Nobel honour.

               Gustav Ludwig Hertz and James Frank established the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom through their ground-breaking experiment.

               After the publication of Niels Bohr’s theory on the structure of the atom, Gustav Hertz and James Franck studied the movements of free electrons in various gases, and the impacts these electrons have on an atom’s functions. They conducted an experiment in 1913 to verify Bohr’s theory. A potential difference was applied to a tube containing a low-pressure gas. The potential difference increased the free electrons’ mobility until, at a certain energy level; they jumped to a higher-energy orbit instead.

               Hertz was a Member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Corresponding Member of the Gottingen Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Gustav Hertz died in 1975 and James Franck in 1964.

Picture credit: google

            Niels Bohr was a Nobel prize-winning physicist and   humanitarian who made revolutionary theories on atomic structures.

            Bohr was born on 7th October 1885, in Copenhagen. He earned a doctorate in physics in 1911 from the Copenhagen University. The discoveries of the electron and radioactivity at the end of the 19th century led to different models for the structure of the atom.

            In 1913, Bohr developed his model of atomic structure, known as the Bohr model, which depicts the atom as a small, positively-charged nucleus, surrounded by negatively-charged electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus, similar in structure to the Solar System.

            In 1921, Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute. The element bohrium (Bh) was named after him. Niels Bohr died on 18th November, 1962.

Picture credit: google