Eminent physicist Albert Einstein was born in the year 1879. Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace, was born in 1869 and Adolf Hitler, the epitome of terror, in 1889. Hence the expression that Einstein was born between peace and terror. Einstein admired Mahatma Gandhi. He even expressed this admiration in a letter written in 1931 addressed to the Indian…
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German physicist. In 1895 he was working with cathode rays when he discovered a different kind of electromagnetic radiation. Since the radiation was unknown at that time, he called it the X-rays. He received the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901 for this discovery.
Leonhard Euler is considered one of the finest mathematicians and physicists of the eighteenth century. He became visually impaired in the last two decades of his life. He was able to do prodigious calculations in his head, which allowed him to publish many of his 886 papers and books.
It is said that Galileo Galilei determined the time taken by a pendulum to swing and complete one cycle by comparing its swing to his own pulse beat. He did this one day by observing the bronze chandelier in the Cathedral of Pizza when it started swinging due to a storm. He found that his pulse…
Both in respect of his laws of motion and law of gravitation, Newton got a platform which was already built by many stalwarts, the most conspicuous among them being Galileo. Thus, it is an interesting coincidence that Newton was born in the same year 1642 in which Galileo died. Galileo died on 8 January and…
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist and philosopher whose greatest achievement was the development of statistical thermodynamics. The formula S=klnΩ engraved on his memorial tombstone connects entropy with the natural logarithm of thermodynamic probability. The proportionality constant k is called the Boltzmann’s constant. He committed suicide on 5 September 1906.
