At the Fifth Solvay International Conference, held in Brussels in October 1927, 29 physicists gathered for a group photograph. Back row: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Léon Brillouin. Middle: Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr. Front: Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Sklodowska Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans Richardson.
Seventeen of the 29 were or became Nobel Prize winners. Marie Curie, the only woman, is also the only person who has won the prize in two scientific disciplines.
The only character I don't see is Schrodinger's famous cat!
Maybe the cat was taking the picture?
ReplyDeleteOr maybe the cat wasn't. We'd have to open the box and look to see!
Delete"Seventeen of the 29 were or became Nobel Prize winners"...only to be followed by Algore and The Won. Talk about degrading the currency!
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year, by the way. Thanks for the daily fun in 2014.
Some of them were wildly wrong but they remain legends none-the-less. They lived in a time in which 'settled science' was some kind of Platonic myth.
ReplyDelete