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Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. His views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance. -
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Democritus
Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher who formulated an atomic theory for the universe. Many consirder Democritus to be the "father of modern science". -
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician that was born on December 25, 1642. He proposed a mechanical universe with small solid masses in motion. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution. Newton died on March 20, 1727. -
John Dalton
John Dalton was an English chemist that was born on September 6, 1776. He is best known for his contribution to the development of modern atomic theory, Law of Multiple Proportions, Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures, and Daltonism. He died on July 27, 1844. -
Amadeo Avogadro
Amadeo Avogadro was an Italian scientist that was born on on August 9, 1776. He is chiefly remembered for his molecular hypothesis, first stated in 1811, in which he claimed that equal volumes of all gases at the same temperature and pressure contain the same number of molecules. He died on July 9, 1856. -
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday was an English scientist that was born on September 22, 1791. He studied the effect of electricity on solutions; coined the term "electrolysis" as a splitting of moleclues with electricity and develeopled laws of electrolysis. Faraday died on August 25, 1867. -
Julius Plücker
Julius Plücker was a German mathematician and a physicist that was born on July 16, 1801. He made fundamental contributions to the field of analytical geometry and was a pioneer in the investigations of cathode rays that eventually led to the discovery of the electron. He died on May 22, 1868. -
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russin chemist and inventor that was born on February 8, 1834. He arranged elements into 7 groups with simliar properties. He discovered that the properties of the elements "were periodic functions of their atomic weights". This soon became known as the Periodic Law. Mendeleev died on February 2, 1907. -
Wilhelm Röntgen
Wilhelm Röntgen was a German physicist that was born on November 8, 1895. Using a CRT he observed that nearby chemicals glowed. Further experiments found very penetrating rays coming from the CRT that were not deflected by a magnetic field. He named them "X-rays". Röntgen died on February 8, 1923. -
Henri Becquerel
Henry Becquerel was a French physicist that was born on December 15, 1852. In 1896, while investigating fluorescence in uranium salts, acidentally discovered radioactivty, the spontaneous emission of radiation by a material. He received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 along with Marie and Pierre Curie. Becquerel died on August 25, 1908. -
Joseph John "J.J." Thomson
Joseph John "J.J." Thomson was a British physicist that was born on December 18, 1856. In 1897, his research on cathode rays led to the discovery of electrons. He used a CRT to experimentally determine the charge to mass ratio (e/m) of an electron. Thomson won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics. He died on August 30, 1940. -
Marie and Pierre Curie
Marie Sklodowska Curie was a Polish-French chemist that was born on November 7, 1867. Pierre Curie was a French chemist that was born on May 15, 1859. In 1898, they discovered the radioactive element radium (in the form of readium chloride), extracting it from uraninnite. Five years after that, they together won a Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery, making Marie the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. -
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German physicist that was born on March 14, 1879. He published the famous equation E = mc2. -
Lord Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford was a British physicist and chemist that was born on August 30, 1871. In 1911,Rutherford proposed that almost all mass of an atom - and it's postive charges - were concentrated in a central atomic nucleus surrounded by electrons. He died on October 19, 1937. -
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr was a Danish physiscist that was born on October 7, 1885. He studied under J.J. Thomson, who discouraged his ideas, and under Ernest Rutherford, whose work was expanded by Bohr into a new theory on the structure of the atom in 1913. Bohr hypothesized that electrons traveled in fixed orbits around the atom's nucleus. On November 18, 1962, Bohr died of a stroke. -
Henry Moseley
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was an English physicist that was born on November 23,1887. Using x-ray tubes, he determined the charges on the nuclei of most atoms. This work was used to reorganize the periodic table based on the atomic number instead of atomic mass. Moseley died on August 10, -
Louis de Broglie
Louis de Broglie was a French physicist who was born on August 15, 1892. 1892. He postulated that matter has properties of both waves and particles and he said that any moving particle has a wave associated with it. He died on March 19, 1987. -
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist that was born on August 12, 1887. He invented wave mechanics in 1926. He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933. Schrödinger died on January 4, 1961. -
James Chadwick
James Chadwick was an Enlgish physicist that was born on October 20, 1891. In 1932, while working under Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge, James Chadwick proved the existence of neutrons, the elementary particle without any electrical charge and a fundamental building block of the atom's nucleus. He died on July 24, 1974. -
Electron Cloud of Probability
The Electron Cloud of Probability was a way to describe where electrons are when they go around the nucleus of the atom. Using quantum mechanics, chemists can use the electron cloud to assign electrons to different atomic orbits.
