Download Front Poster 1 - Perimeter Institute

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13-11-07
By Prateek Lala, MD. Unauthorized reproduction of this poster is prohibited.
Front Poster 1.pdf
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13-11-06
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Anaximander (c. 610-546 BCE) is widely regarded
as the world’s first physicist – the first to record his
belief that nature followed fixed laws. He conducted
the earliest recorded experiment, and introduced the
sundial and other instruments.
Pythagoras (c. 570-495 BCE) discovered the
Pythagorean Theorem: that a square laid along the
long side of a triangle covers the same area as the
two squares laid along the two shorter sides.
Euclid (c. 325-265 BCE) built up a complete
description of space from a handful of axioms, such
as “two parallel lines never cross.” He’s remembered
as the “father of geometry,” and the particular kind of
space he described, where parallel lines never cross,
is now called “Euclidian space.”
Archimedes (c. 287-212 BCE) was an early scientist and
engineer, maybe one of the most brilliant mathematicians
of all time. He designed a number of innovative machines
and discovered the principle of displacement: that the
weight of an object floating in water is equal to the weight
of the water it shoves aside.
Hypatia (c. 360-415) was the headmaster of the
Platonist school at Alexandria, where she taught
mathematics and astronomy. She invented the
astrolabe and perhaps the hydrometer, and wrote
several major books on geometry.
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Aryabhatta (476-550) was a pioneer of
mathematics and astronomy in India. He is believed
to have devised the concept of zero and worked on
the approximation of pi.
Abū Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham
(965-1040) was a mathematician, astronomer, and
philosopher, sometimes known in Europe as simply
“the physicist.” He invented the camera obscura and
is the father of modern optics.
Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1250) is the namesake
of Fibonacci’s sequence, a series of integers closely
connected with ideas such as the golden ratio and
the golden spiral. The Fibonacci numbers are still
used to describe everything from computer search
techniques to uncurling ferns.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the first person
to turn a telescope on the moon, the planets, and
the stars. His marriage of observation to
mathematics and theory earned him the title
“the father of modern science.”
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a
mathematician and astronomer, best known for
discovering three mathematical rules that describe
the orbits of planets. The second law states that a
line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal
areas during equal intervals of time.
René Descartes (1596-1650) was a broad thinker
who developed (among many other things) Cartesian
(or analytic) geometry. If you’ve ever graphed
equations on a plane with an x and y axis, you can
thank Descartes.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a polymath who
advanced geometry and probability theory, built the
first calculating machines, and invented roulette. His
experiments with fluids in open and sealed tubes
proved that a vacuum was possible – an idea the
scientific establishment had always dismissed.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is one of the most
famous scientists who ever lived. He invented
calculus (see Leibniz), formulated the laws of motion,
and proposed the new idea of universal gravitation –
he said it occurred to him when watching
an apple fall from a tree.
Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) invented calculus,
though Isaac Newton independently developed
calculus and is more widely credited as the field’s
founder. They were contemporaries, and feuded over
the matter. Leibniz’s last laugh: it’s his notation we
use today.
Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) is best known for his
work in fluid mechanics, in particular for his discovery
that pressure decreases as flow speed increases –
a fact that today keeps carburetors running and
fixed-wing planes in the air.
Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), sometimes called
“the Galileo of mathematical physics,” did
ground-breaking work across many fields. He
discovered Euler’s number, e, the second most
important constant in physics, after pi.
Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) was a pioneer in
theories of heat and vibration. The technique he
invented for this work – representing complex waves
by adding together simpler waves – is now used
everywhere in science and engineering.
Thomas Young (1773-1829) pioneered the
“double-slit” experiment: shining a light through two
narrow slits, he produced a pattern akin to the one
produced by two overlapping water waves. This
demonstration of the wave nature of light later
became central to quantum mechanics.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), called “the
prince of mathematicians” by his contemporaries,
is now best remembered for his “normal”
(or Gaussian) distributions, which plot how likely
things are to vary from average.
Georg Ohm (1789-1854), one of the first to
experiment with the newly invented battery, discovered
that the voltage applied across a conductor is directly
proportional to the resulting current. Today, this is
known as Ohm’s law.
Michael Faraday (1791-1867) proposed the idea
of electromagnetic fields extending through space –
at the time a radical notion – after conducting
research into the relationships between
electricity and magnetism.
William Hamilton (1805-1865) reformulated
Newtonian mechanics into what is now known as
Hamiltonian mechanics. In doing so, he wrote the
mathematical language in which modern physics,
especially quantum theory, is expressed.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) formulated the
equations that describe electricity, magnetism, and
optics as manifestations of the same phenomenon –
the electromagnetic field. He’s also the namesake of
Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment in which a
hypothetical demon violates the Second Law of
Thermodynamics.
Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1932) was the first person
to produce and detect X-rays. The first X-ray image in
history was of his wife’s hand, with a heavy ring about
her top knuckle. He was awarded the very first Nobel
Prize in Physics.
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was a physicist, electrical
engineer, and possible mad scientist who designed
the modern AC electrical supply system – and also
investigated how to send electricity wirelessly through
the air through the use of Tesla coils that produced
giant lightning bolts.
Max Planck (1858-1947) is best remembered for his
solution to the problem of black-body radiation: he
showed that the theory fit the data if light could only
come in packets of certain sizes – no half-packets
allowed. It was the first step on the road to quantum
mechanics. The size of those packets, or “quanta,”
are now calculated using Planck’s constant.
William Henry Bragg (1862-1942) and William
Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971) were the father-son
team behind Bragg’s law, which describes how X-rays
diffract inside crystals. This discovery launched the
field of X-ray crystallography.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934) developed
the theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined),
learned to isolate radioactive isotopes, and
discovered two new elements, radium and polonium.
She also won two Nobel Prizes in science, the only
person ever to do so.
Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) theorized that atoms
have their charge concentrated in a very small
nucleus. By bombarding atoms with high energy
particles and mapping how some bounced back, he
discovered (and named) the proton. He’s
remembered as the “father of nuclear physics.”
Emmy Noether (1882-1935) is remembered for
Noether’s theorem, which shows the precise mathematical
relationship between symmetries in the laws of nature and
conserved quantities. For example, the fact that the laws of
nature don’t change with time (time symmetry) implies that
energy doesn’t come from nowhere (energy conservation).
Niels Bohr (1885-1962) did foundational work in
developing subatomic physics and quantum
mechanics. His Bohr model of the atom was the first
to place a large atomic nucleus at the centre
and the small electrons in orbit.
Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) famously proposed
a thought experiment, now known as Schrödinger’s
Cat, to point out the apparent paradox of the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: if
a particle can really be in two states at once, what of
a cat whose fate depends on the particle’s state?
Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) was one of the most
important observational astronomers of the 20th
century. By measuring the red shift of distant objects,
he showed that the universe was expanding. The
Hubble Space Telescope is named for him.
Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) was the first to
suggest that all matter has wave properties. This
concept is known as wave-particle duality, or the de
Broglie hypothesis, and became central to quantum
mechanics. De Broglie won a Nobel Prize.
Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974) is remembered
for Bose-Einstein statistics – which explain, among
other things, how lasers work. He is the namesake of
the “boson,” a class of particles that obey these
statistical laws.
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) discovered the
exclusion principle, or Pauli principle, which says that
no two identical fermions can occupy the same
quantum state at the same time. If there are two
electrons in the same atomic shell, for instance, one
must be spin up and the other down.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) was the
first person to understand the chemical composition
of stars. In particular, she concluded that hydrogen
and helium are the most abundant elements in stars
and, therefore, in the universe.
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) is best known for his work
leading to the development of Chicago Pile 1, the
world’s first nuclear reactor. He used different
materials to control the release of neutrons, creating
the first self-sustaining artificial chain reaction.
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) is best
remembered for the uncertainty principle in
quantum mechanics, which says that there’s a
fundamental limit to how much we can know
about a subatomic particle.
Paul Dirac (1902-1984) wrote the first general
theory of quantum mechanics and discovered the
relativistic equation for the electron, which now bears
his name. The remarkable notion of antimatter stems
from this equation – which led Dirac to predict the
existence of positively charged anti-electrons
(positrons) years before they were found.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906-1972) developed a
mathematical model for the structure of nuclear
shells, work which won her a Nobel Prize.
Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), a mathematician and
logician, is remembered for his two incompleteness
theorems, which say (among other things) that there
will always be truths about numbers that no single
mathematical system can prove.
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997), known as “the first
lady of physics,” designed and conducted the Wu
Experiment, which proved that parity is not a
conserved quantity – that is, that the universe
can tell its right hand from its left.
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a
larger-than-life figure who made ground-breaking
contributions to many branches of physics. He’s
enshrined in physics via Feynman diagrams, a
pictorial system for figuring out what happens when
particles interact. Feynman painted them on his van.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a biophysicist
who used X-ray diffraction data to determine the
structures of complex minerals and living tissues,
including – famously – DNA.
Ralph Alpher (1921-2007), Hans Bethe (1906-2005),
and George Gamow (1904-1968) are the supposed
co-authors of a foundational paper on the big bang
(though Bethe’s name was only added in jest in order to
create an author list alluding to the Greek letters α, β,
and γ: alpha, beta, gamma).
John Stewart Bell (1928-1990) proposed a statistical test,
known as Bell’s inequality, for distinguishing between a
quantum world (a world with true unknowable,
indeterminate properties) and a classical world (a world
where what looks like indeterminacy is just stuff that we
don’t fully understand).
Vera Rubin (born 1928) realized, while studying
galaxy rotation rates, that spiral galaxies were
spinning faster than they should be, given the amount
of visible matter in them. This discrepancy is one of
the key pieces of evidence for dark matter.
Peter Higgs (born 1929) was one of several
physicists to propose that elementary particles acquire
mass by interacting with a new kind of field. After
decades of search, the Large Hadron Collider finally
found the Higgs boson in 2013, proving the existence
of the Higgs field.
Roger Penrose (born 1931) is a mathematical
physicist. His Penrose tilings are an entirely new
way to tile – that is, to cover a surface with regular
shapes – and the first tilings to exhibit five-fold
rotational symmetry.
Stephen Hawking (born 1942) is the world’s
most famous living physicist and has done
wide-ranging work in cosmology. Hawking
radiation – the radiation thought to be emitted by
black holes – is named after him.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943), as a postgraduate
student, was key to the discovery of radio pulsars. Her
work earned her graduate supervisor a Nobel Prize.
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Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Lise Meitner
(1878-1968) added extra neutrons to atomic nuclei
in an attempt to create heavier elements. When
lighter elements began to turn up instead, Meitner
realized they had split the atom.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is synonymous with
scientific genius, thanks largely to his general theory
of relativity, one of the pillars of modern physics
(alongside quantum mechanics).