Category Personalities

               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.

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          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.

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               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.

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            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.

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               Albert Einstein, born on 14th March 1879, in Germany, was one of the most well-known and influential physicists of the 20th century.

               The Nobel Prize awarding institution, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, decided to reserve the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, and therefore awarded no physics prize that year. According to the statutes, a reserved prize can be awarded the year after, and Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for 1921 one year later, in 1922. Einstein was unable to attend the December 10th Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. He presented his Nobel speech on 11th July 1923, in Gothenburg.

               Einstein developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. The second pillar is considered as the quantum theory. Einstein is best known by the general public for his mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc2, which is considered “the world’s most famous equation”.

               He died on 18th April 1955, at Princeton, US.

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          Max Planck was born on 23rd April 1858 in Germany. Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family.

          Planck’s fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of the quantum theory. Planck’s theory, won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. He was elected to foreign membership of the Royal Society in 1926, and was awarded the Society’s Copley Medal in 1928.

          Max Planck led an unfortunate, tragic life after he was 50. In 1909, his first wife, Marie Merck died after 22 years of happy marriage, leaving Planck with two sons and twin daughters. The elder son Karl was killed in 1916. His two daughters Margarete and Emma died during childbirth.

          World War II brought further tragedy. Planck’s house in Berlin was completely destroyed by bombs in 1944. His younger son Erwin died a horrible death. Max Planck died on 4th October 1947.

          In 1948, the German scientific institution the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed as the Max Planck Society, which now includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific fields.

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