Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle (384 BC - March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote many books about physics, poetry, zoology, logic, rhetoric, government, and biology.

Aristotle, along with Plato and Socrates, are generally considered the three most influential ancient Greek philosophers in Western thought. Among them they transformed Presocratic Greek philosophy into the foundations of Western philosophy as we know it. The writings of Plato and Aristotle form the core of Ancient philosophy.

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was an Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the scientific method.

His formulation of (circular) inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the study of motion.

His insistence that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which experimentation became a recognized method for discovering the facts of nature.

Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized astronomy and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system, but his advocacy of that system eventually resulted in an Inquisition process against him.

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society,] was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history.

Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism.

Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realised that the spectrum of colours observed when white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had claimed in the thirteenth century), and notably argued that light is composed of particles.

Maria CurieMaria Curie, one of the most famous scientists in the world, dedicated her life to physics and chemistry. Maria Curie was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland.

Maria discovered radioactivity, she was the first woman to win the Nobel prize for physics. She was the first female lecturer and professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris. She received another Nobel award, this time for chemistry, becoming the first person ever to win 2 Nobel awards. She also received 15 gold medals, 19 degrees, and many other honors.

James Clerk Maxwell

Maxwell was a physicist who lived in the last century. He was particularly interested in how electricity and magnetism worked. One of his major accomplishments was providing the mathematical equations that describe how these two separate natural phenomena work together to make light and radio waves. The equations he discovered allowed other scientists to understand several facts about light:

light is made of electric and magnetic fields that change very, very rapidly

as the electric field in a light wave changes, it changes the magnetic field; as the magnetic field changes, it changes the electric field; both fields work together to make up the light wave

if we know the electric and magnetic properties of space, we can calculate the speed of light

Max Planck

Max Planck was a German physicist who lived between 1858-1947. His theories changed our understanding of atomic processes and started the field of quantum physics, which studies energy inside atoms. Many of Planck's ideas were later used by Einstein when he developed his theory of relativity.

Planck believed that the physical universe exists independently of humans and that we have no control over the laws of nature. He claimed that we can observe and try to understand such laws, but we can't change them.

Schwarzschild, Karl

German astronomer and physicist who developed the use of photography for measuring variable stars. He also investigated the geometrical aberrations of optical systems using ray optics by introducing a perturbation equation which he called the Seidel eikonal. Schwarzschild volunteered for military service and, while on the Russian front, completed the first two exact solutions of the Einstein field equations of general relativity, one in static isotropic empty space surrounding a massive body (such as a black hole), and one inside a spherically symmetric body of constant density. Shortly after this work, Schwarzschild died of a rare metabolic disorder.

Benjamin Franklin

An extraordinary man who started his working career as a printer. He retired at about thirty five to devote his life to improving the lives of the people around him. He was world famous as a scientist, inventor, and diplomat. The "Franklin stove" that he invented worked by improving the flow of radiation from the stove throughout the room.

Benjamin Franklin became interested in what people wore and if they were comfortable in their clothes. In his autobiography, Franklin describes an experiment using different colored pieces of cloth that he placed on top of snow in the sunlight. Franklin observed which colors penetrated into the snow more quickly than other colors.

Jule Gregory Charney

JULE CHARNEY WAS ONE of the dominant figures in atmo-spheric science in the three decades following World War II. Much of the change in meteorology from an art to a science is due to his scientific vision and his thorough commitment to people and programs in this field.

In 1946 he married Elinor Kesting Frye, a student of logic and semantics with H. Reichenbach at the University of California at Los Angeles. They had two children, Nora and Peter. Nicolas, Elinor's son from her previous marriage, assumed the last name of Charney. Their marriage lasted almost twenty-one years. In 1967 Jule married Lois Swirnoff. Lois is a painter and color theorist and was a professor at UCLA and Harvard. Their marriage lasted almost ten years. Jule shared the last years of his life with Patricia Peck, a photographic artist with roots in New York City and Venice. His last illness was lung cancer, from which he died in Boston on June 16, 1981.

Samuel Pierpont Langley

Langley started his scientific career as an astronomer in Ohio, where he became interested in measuring how much energy the Sun was radiating. He built instruments, called calorimeters, to make these measurements. He built others, called bolometers, designed to make similar measurements on stars. Interestingly, the bolometers Langley built are very similar to the detectors scientists at NASA's Langley Research Center use to measure the Earth's radiation budget.

Langley also became interested in heavier-than-air flight. He convinced the United States Navy to sponsor airplane building and testing, using his design. He competed with the Wright Brothers to build the first manned airplane that could fly under its own power. Unfortunately, Langley lost this contest.

Rene Descartes

While the great philosophical distinction between mind and body in western thought can be traced to the Greeks, it is to the seminal work of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) , French mathematician, philosopher, and physiologist, that we owe the first systematic account of the mind/body relationship. Descartes was born in Touraine, in the small town of La Haye and educated from the age of eight at the Jesuit college of La Fleche.

At La Flche, Descartes formed the habit of spending the morning in bed, engaged in systematic meditation. During his meditations, he was struck by the sharp contrast between the certainty of mathematics and the controversial nature of philosophy, and came to believe that the sciences could be made to yield results as certain as those of mathematics.

Benjamin Franklin

Ben Franklin - born Jan.17 [Jan. 6, Old Style], 1706, Boston d. April 17, 1790, Philadelphia - pseudonym Richrd Saunders - American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat.

Franklin, next to George Washington possibly the most famous 18th-century American, by 1757 had made a small fortune, established the Poor Richard of his almanacs (written under his pseudonym) as an oracle on how to get ahead in the world, and become widely known in European scientific circles for his reports of electrical experiments and theories.

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born on Feb. 12, 1809, The Mount, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng. d. April 19, 1882, Down House, Downe, Kent. His full name is Charles Robert Darwin.

Darwin was an English naturalist renowned for his documentation of evolution and for his theory of its operation, known as Darwinism. His evolutionary theories, propounded chiefly in two works--On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)--have had a profound influence on subsequent scientific thought.

Darwin was the son of Robert Waring Darwin, who had one of the largest medical practices outside of London, and the grandson of the physician Erasmus Darwin, the author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, and of the artisan-entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin thus enjoyed a secure position in the professional upper middle class that provided him with considerable social and professional advantages.

Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison - born February 11, 1847, Milan, Ohio, U.S. d. Oct. 18, 1931, West Orange, N.J. American inventor who, singly or jointly, held a world record 1,093 patents. In addition, he created the world's first industrial research laboratory.

Edison was the quintessential American inventor in the era of Yankee ingenuity.

He began his career in 1863, in the adolescence of the telegraph industry, when virtually the only source of electricity was primitive batteries putting out a low-voltage current.

Leonardo da Vinci

It may seem unusual to include Leonardo da Vinci in a list of paleontologists and evolutionary biologists. Leonardo was and is best known as an artist, the creator of such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa, Madonna of the Rocks, and The Last Supper. Yet Leonardo was far more than a great artist: he had one of the best scientific minds of his time. He made painstaking observations and carried out research in fields ranging from architecture and civil engineering to astronomy to anatomy and zoology to geography, geology and paleontology. In the words of his biographer Giorgio Vasari:

Leonardo knew well the rocks and fossils (mostly Cenozoic mollusks) found in his native north Italy. No doubt he had ample opportunity to observe them during his service as an engineer and artist at the court of Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, from 1482 to 1499: Vasari wrote that "Leonardo was frequently occupied in the preparation of plans to remove mountains or to pierce them with tunnels from plain to plain." He made many observations on mountains and rivers, and he grasped the principle that rocks can be formed by deposition of sediments by water, while at the same time the rivers erode rocks and carry their sediments to the sea, in a continuous grand cycle.