Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian theoretical physicist who achieved fame for his contributions to quantum mechanics. The philosophical issues raised by his 1935 “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment perhaps remains his best-known legacy, but the Schrödinger equation, which he formulated in 1926 to describe the quantum state of a system, is his most enduring achievement at […]

Andrei Sakharov was an eminent Soviet Russian nuclear physicist, although he is perhaps better known as a dissident, human rights activist, advocate of civil liberties and reforms in the Soviet Union and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Although much of his early career was spent contributing to the military might of the Soviet Union through the […]

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson was a New Zealand chemist who has become known as the “father of nuclear physics.” In 1911, he was the first to discover that atoms have a small charged nucleus surrounded by largely empty space, and are circled by tiny electrons, which became known as the Rutherford model […]

Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist, considered to be the initial founder of quantum theory and one of the most important physicists of the 20th Century. Around the turn of the century, he realized that light and other electromagnetic waves were emitted in discrete packets of energy that he called “quanta” – “quantum” in […]

Wolfgang Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted for his work on spin theory and quantum theory, and for the remarkable discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle, which underpins the structure of matter and the whole of chemistry. Education and Influences Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was born on 25 April 1900 in Vienna, Austria (then Austria-Hungary). […]