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Superstars of Sceince & Technology

Some minds are so exceptional that they change the world around them. We don’t know what exactly makes these extra ordinary people soar above the rest of us.

Albert Einstein:
Time magazine named him the ‘Person of the Century‘. Einstein remains the last, and perhaps the only physicist at Touson University in Maryland. Born in Germany in 1879, Einstein was a precocious child. As a teenager, he wrote a paper on magnetic fields. Though scientist, he worked as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office, after being denied an academic position. By the age 42, Einstein won his Nobel Prize for his numerous accomplishments, viz. theory of relativity, photoelectric effect, astronomy and gravitation. In an interview he used the words : “Knowledge is limited; imagination encircles the world.”

Marie Curie:

Curie was born as Maria Sklodowska in 1867 in Poland facing hurdles because of her family’s poverty and her gender. When curie and her 3 sisters found regular schooling, they couldn’t carry on with higher education. Curie would work as a governess and support her sisters’ education. In 1891, she packed her bags and headed to Paris. At the University of Paris, Curie was inspired by the French Physicist Becquerel, working on radioactive metals. Joined by her husband Pierre, the two were instrumental in discovering the 3 important elements -- Uranium, Polonium and Radium. In 1903, Curie and her husband won the Nobel in Physics for their work on radioactivity, making Curie the first woman to win a Nobel. Soon after her husband’s death she won her second Nobel Prize – the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. She died in 1934, probably from exposition to massive radiation during research.

Isaac Newton:

was born on Christmas Day of 1642. Just 23 years later, Newton discovered the laws that now bear his name. He had to invent a new kind of math along the way : Calculus. Persuaded by Halley, Newton united the heaven and earth with his gravitation laws. After languishing on a Professor’s post salary at Cambridge University for a decade, in 1696, Newton received a cushy royal appointment to be Master of the Mint in London where he had to oversee the re-coinage of the English currency. Newton was known by his peers as an unpleasant person. He had few close friends who called him insidious, ambitious and excessively covetous of praise. With German scientist Leibnitz he fended mainly over who invented Calculus first. Newton didn’t spare even the scientist Robert Hooke. However the unit of force was conceded to the stubborn, persistent, amazing Newton – himself a force of nature.

Charles Darwin:

As a young man his main interests were collecting beetles and studying geology in the countryside, skipping out on his classes at the Edinburgh Medical School. A chance journey in 1831 around the world made Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology. Abroad the HMS Beagle, Darwin spent his 5-year trip study geological formations and myriad habitats throughout much of the southern hemisphere. Most people in Darwin’s time still adhered to creationism – the idea that a divine being was responsible for the diversity of life we find on earth. This suggested that species could change by environmental factors, instead of divine intervention. Though Darwin’s theory was logically sound and backed by evidence, his ideas faced sharp criticism, till 1930s.

Nikola Tesla:

We owe much of our modern electrified life to the lab. experiments of the Serbian-American engineer, born in 1856. His designs advanced alternating current at the start of the electric age and allowed utilities to send current over vast distances, powering homes across the country. He developed a high-voltage-transformer and techniques to transmit power wirelessly. The world’s most famous electric car bears his name. His ceaseless theories, inventions and patents made Tesla a household name a century ago.

Galileo Galilei:

On Dec. 1, 1609, Italian mathematician, Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the moon and created modern astronomy. His subsequent observations turned up four satellites – massive moons—orbiting Jupiter. Galileo also found sunspots upon the surface of our star and confirmed that the planet Venus circles Sun inside Earth’s orbit. Galileo also used gravity to say that all objects fall to the ground at the same time irrespective of size. His law of inertia allows for earth itself to rotate . His Sun-Centered model was declared heretical by the church. As such, he was placed under house arrest until his death in 1642.

Pythagoras:

Pythagoras a 6th century BC Greek philosopher and mathematician, is credited with inventing his namesake theorem. Pythagoras was one of the great mathematicians of antiquity. His influence was widespread. Einstein, whose work on curving space and time was called gravity, had inspiration from Pythagoras. Pythagorean theorem proof does work most of the time when stars align.