My Science School

Robert Boyle was a famous Anglo Irish scientist who transformed chemistry in the 17th century. Till then, chemistry was confined to alchemy and mysticism.

       Alchemy was the study of how to change basic substances such as metals into other more valuable substances. Boyle made chemistry a science based on measurement.

       He defined elements, compounds and mixture and he coined the new term ‘chemical analysis,’ a field in which he made several contributions. Robert Boyle is most famous for Boyle’s law. It was the first of the gas laws linking the pressure of a gas to its volume. He established that electrical forces are transmitted through a vacuum, but sound is not.

       Boyle also stated that the movement of particles is responsible for heat. He was the first person to write specific experimental guidance for other scientists, telling them the importance of achieving reliable results. He was indeed a ‘mighty chemist.’

      Robert Boyle is regarded as the first modern chemist, and is referred to as one of the founders of modern chemistry.

Alexander Graham Bell was an influential scientist engineer, and inventor who is considered to be the inventor of the first practical telephone. Bell’s mother and wife were both deaf, and this motivated his research on hearing and speech.

         Bell experimented with sound, working with devices such as ‘harmonic telegraph,’ that is used to send multiple messages over a single wire. While trying to discover the secret to transmitting multiple messages on a single wire, Bell heard the sound of a plucked string along some of the electrical wire. This was caused because one of Bell’s assistants, Thomas A. Watson, was trying to reactivate a transmitter. It made Bell believe he could send the sound of a human voice over the wire.

        After receiving a patent on March 7th, 1876, for transmitting sound along a single wire, he successfully transmitted human speech on March 10.

        Bell’s first words with the working telephone were spoken to his assistant Watson. They were “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”

        Bell also had a strong interest in other scientific fields, conducting medical research, searching for alternative fuel sources, developing hydrofoil watercraft and much more.

J.J. Thomson, an English physicist, took science to new heights with his 1897 discovery of the electron the subatomic particle.

     When Thomson began his research career, it was thought that atoms were the smallest particles. Nobody had a clear picture of how atoms might look. It was already known that atoms were associated in some way with electric charges.

   In 1897, aged40, Thomson carried out a now famous experiment with a cathode ray tube. His experiment proved the existence of a new fundamental particle that was much smaller than the atom. It was named the electron.

     In discovering the electron, Thomson also moved toward the invention of an immensely important new tool for chemical analysis the mass spectrometer.

      Then, in 1912, Thomson discovered that stable elements could exist as isotopes. Isotopes are different forms of the same element that exist with different atomic masses.

    J.J. Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1906

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist. He is best known for developing the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis.

       Psychoanalysis is a method of treatment through which an analyst uncovers unconscious conflicts based on the free associations, dreams, and fantasies of the patient.

     All of Freud’s work revolved around the mind how it worked, and how to diagnosis and treat certain maladies of the mind. He analyzed himself as well. He began to pick apart his dreams, and tried to decipher their meaning.

    In doing so, he provided an incredible account of how dreams originate and why. He explored what would become known as Freudian slips, where one has a slip of the tongue and either misreads something, or forgets a name.

    Freud established a theory as to why this happens often to some people. Sigmund Freud’s greatest achievement was in the area of the unconscious mind.

    Although many before him were aware of its existence, he was the one who was finally able to achieve scientific recognition in the area of psychoanalysis.

Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist, who made significant contributions. He changed our understanding of physics when he discovered that hot objects do not radiate a smooth, continues range of energies as was earlier believed.

      Instead, he found that the energies radiated by hot objects have distinct values. His discovery was the beginning of the Quantum theory an entirely new type of physics that revolutionized our understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. In fact, we can say that the quantum theory grew from the ideas of Max Planck.

    A quantum is the smallest possible amount of energy. Planck’s constant a fixed number is used to calculate the energy of quanta. The theory has been developed to explain the behavior of particles and the energy they emit. Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918.

Henri Becquerel was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity through his investigations of uranium and other substances.

       Becquerel had become a highly respected physicist by 1896. After the discovery of the x-ray in 1895, Becquerel began to investigate whether there was a fundamental connection between this form of invisible radiation and visible light.

      His expertise with phosphorescent materials, his familiarity with uranium compounds, and his general skill in laboratory techniques, including photography, all played a key role in his discovery of radioactivity. Becquerel experimented by placing phosphorescent crystals on a sealed photographic plate that had been wrapped in opaque paper, and never exposed to direct light.

    After the plate was developed, images were visible on it. He passed the results on to Madame Curie, who named this phenomenon radioactivity. In 11903, Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize for physics with the chemists Pierre and Marie Curie.

Emil Hermann Fischer, more commonly known as Emil Fischer, was an eminent German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1902 in recognition of his work in the sugar and purine groups.

        Emil Fischer helped to reorganize the teaching of chemistry, and to establish research facilities. His work in organic chemistry was primarily on the constitution and synthesis of substances present in organisms.

       Fischer laid the chemical foundations for biochemistry by his study of sugars, enzymes, purines, and proteins. He was also instrumental in the discovery of barbiturates, a class of sedative drugs used for insomnia, epilepsy, anxiety, and anaesthesia.

       Fischer’s keen understanding of scientific problems, his intuition and love of truth, and his insistence on experimental proof of hypotheses, marked him as one of the truly great scientists of all time.

 

Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, is an iconic figure who was the first to offer a scientific approach to psychology.

     Pavlov studied medicine under a famed physiologist of the time, S.P. Botkin, who taught him a great deal about the nervous system. Pavlov is known primarily for his work in conditioned response.

     He conducted a legendary experiment in which he trained hungry dogs to drool at the sound of a bell, or buzzer. Moments before feeding, a bell was rung to measure the dogs’ saliva production when they heard the bell.

     Pavlov found out that once the dogs had been trained to associate the sound of the bell with food, they would produce saliva, whether or not food followed. Pavlov became fully convinced that human behavior could be understood and explained best in physiological terms, rather than in mentalist terms. He won the 1904 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

Thomas Edison’s story is truly an inspiring one. He struggled at school, but loved reading and conducting experiments.

      This American inventor began sending and receiving messages via Morse code an electronically conveyed alphabet using different clicks for each letter at the age of 15. Later, he invented a version of the telegraph that could send four messages at once. In 1877, Edison invented the phonograph. The phonograph was a machine that recorded and played back sounds. He perfected the phonograph by recording ‘Mary had a little Lamb’ on a piece of tin foil!

     In 1878, Edison invented the light bulb, as well as the power grid system, which could generate electricity, and deliver it to homes through a network of wires.

    Edison registered 1,093 patents in the US, as he continued to invent products. He made significant contributions to storage batteries and motion pictures. His inventions changed the world forever, and Edison remains a colossus in the field of science to this day.

Wilhelm Rontgen, a German scientist, was the recipient of the first Nobel Prize in physics. Rontgen carried out research in several fields, but his main claim to fame is the discovery of X-rays.

        In 1895, Rontgen was conducting an experiment by passing an electric current through a gas at extremely low pressure. He noticed that even though the room was dark, and the tube was covered with black carbon, a screen covered with fluorescent material was being lit up.

      By placing a photographic plate at the other end, Rontgen was able to capture the image that was being lit up by these unknown rays. Since he did not know the nature of these rays, he called them X-rays. The first X-ray ever taken was an image of Rontgen’s wife’s hand. His discovery of X-rays ushered in a great revolution in the fields of physics and medicine.

Robert Koch was a famous German physician who gained renown as one of the founders of bacteriology and microbiology. Koch was very much interested in how the disease known as anthrax spread from cattle to humans.

           He laid down four criteria in 1890 for establishing the cause of an infectious disease. These rules are known as ‘Koch’s postulates’. Many of the basic principle and techniques of modern bacteriology were adapted, or devised by Robert Koch, who therefore is often regarded as the chief founder of that science.

        Robert Koch’s brilliant contributions were acknowledged in 1905, and he won the Nobel Prize for medicine for his groundbreaking work on tuberculosis. Directly or indirectly, Koch has influenced authorities in many countries to introduce public health legislation based on knowledge of the origin of various infections.

     He is also responsible for a more enlightened attitude towards the measure for controlling such disease, and the hygiene that must be observed for preventing, as well as treating them.

August Weismann was a German biologist and one of the founders of the science of genetics. He is best known for his ‘germ plasm’ theory. Weismann’s early studies were on the hydrozoa, which are small predatory animals which live mostly in the sea.

      Weismann’s research on hydrozoa convinced him that the germ cells of animals contain ‘something essential for the species, something which must be carefully preserved and passed on from one generation to another’.

      Thus was born the theory of the germ plasm, which he embodied in a book first published in German and then in English. Its essence was the notion that all living things contain a special hereditary substance, the germ plasm.

     The general idea is still accepted as valid today, though in place of germ plasm one speaks of chromosomes, genes, and DNA. Weismann’s ideas made him one of the leading biologists of the world.

James Maxwell, a Scottish physicist and mathematician, was a remarkable scientist. He brought together a large number of equations, experiments, and observations related to electricity and magnetism, and showed them to be different manifestations of the same phenomenon.

       Maxwell produced a set of equations that explain the properties of magnetic and electric fields, and help show that light is an electromagnetic wave. He also described the nature of Saturn’s rings as numerous small particles, rather than a solid or fluid ring.

      Maxwell’s contributions in the fields of kinetic theory and thermodynamics are many. He is even believed to have created the first true colour photograph. His contributions played an important role in the advances made in 20th century physics.

Wilhelm Wundt, a German doctor and philosopher, is acknowledged as one of the greatest and most influential psychologists of all time.

       As one of the early pioneers of scientific psychology, Wundt introduced the usage of experimental methods in psychology. He developed psychology as an independent field of science, and set up a laboratory to explore the nature of religious beliefs, identify mental disorders and abnormal behavior, and find damaged part of the brain.

      He also published the first journal of psychology, ‘philosophische studies’ or ‘philosophical studies’ in 1881. Wilhelm Wundt was in fact, the first person to ever call himself a ‘psychologist’.

Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, made surgery safer for generations of patients by introducing sterilization techniques in the operation theatre. His greatest contribution to medicine was to promote the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic.

     He lived in an era when surgeons wore dirty aprons, surgical instruments were unclean, and surgeons didn’t even wash their hands before carrying out operations. Lister soon realized that urgent changes were needed to prevent so many people dying after surgery, due to infection. He tested what would happen if the surgical instruments and bandages were treated with carbolic acid, and he was pleased to see that infection was significantly reduced.

     Other surgeons soon followed his example. Carbolic acid was used on bandages, and was even sprayed into the air during operations to kill bacteria, and reduce the risk of the wound becoming infected.

    Lister is often called the ‘father of modern surgery’ because of the life saving precautions he introduced in the field of surgery.