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Thomas Young was born in 1773 in England and made important contributions in several areas of physics and also did significant work in many other fields, including: music, Egyptology and physiology. Grimaldi collected some of the earliest observations of the diffraction, or bending of light as it passes an obstacle. Newton studied this, but concluded [...]

Welcome to The Physics of Superheroes By James Kakalios! – [physicsofsuperheroes.com] In The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition, Professor James Kakalios explains in a fun and accessible manner a broad range of physics, from Isaac Newton to the transistor — but there’s not an inclined plane or pulley in sight! Rather, all of the [...]

Erwin Schrodinger was born in Vienna, Austria in 1887 and was a physicist who made major contributions to quantum mechanics. The Schrodinger wave equation describes the state of an atom, including the electrons as mathematical waves. It was later demonstrated that Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and the wave function were describing the same thing. PRECURSOR: 1777 [...]

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France. He is mostly known as being an outstanding mathematician, but also was a physicist and philosopher. He made significant contributions to the areas of conic sections and projective geometry. Pascal’s triangle is a number matrix in the shape of a triangle with the numbers staggered so [...]

Born near Hamburg, Germany in 1885, Hermann Weyl was a mathematician whose work had a strong influence on both physics and number theory. He worked on combining general relativity and the laws of electromagnetism. He worked with Lie algebras, symmetry and created the first version of gauge theory which attempted to describe both electromagnetic and [...]

Born in Damascus, Syria in 1521, Taqi al-Din was an all around scientist, exelling at astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine, botany, and a wide variety of engineering applications. He was also a judge and religious philospher. He described a steam turbine engine in a book called, “The Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machines” in 1551. He invented [...]

Niels Henrik David Bohr was born in 1885 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied under Ernest Rutherford and expanded Rutherford’s theories into a model of atomic structure that included electrons circling the atomic nucleus. Bohr created the idea that an electron could drop to a lower energy level by emitting a quantum of light known as [...]

Albert Einstein was born in Wurttemburg, Germany in 1879 and become known as one of the greatest physicists and thinkers. PRECURSOR: -0300 – Euclid 1564 – Galileo 1642 – Newton 1777 – Gauss 1826 – Riemann 1831 – Maxwell 1838 – Mach 1849 – Klein 1853 – Lorentz 1854 – Poincare 1858 – Planck 1862 [...]

In 1926, inspired by Louis de Broglie’s wave equation for an electron, Erwin Schrodinger published a series of equations that described wave mechanics. PRECURSOR: 1873 – electromagnetic waves – Maxwell 1913 – quantum theory CONCURRENT: 1924 – wave particle duality – de Broglie 1925 – matrix mechanics – Heisenberg 1927 – pilot wave theory – [...]

James Clerk Maxwell was a mathematician and physicist who was born in Scotland in 1831. His differential equations that describe the electromagnetic process are now known as “Maxwells Equations”. They were able to build upon the work of Gauss with electric charge and magnetism and the work of Faraday with induction and the work of [...]