20th Century Physicists

He created a model of the atom in which electrons resided in specific energy levels at specific stable radii.

• de Broglie

• Bohr

• Einstein

• Fermi

His work quantifying the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics earned him the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics. His doctoral thesis, which proposed that all particles have a characteristic wavelength dependent on their momentum, was so groundbreaking that the reviewers passed it directly to Albert Einstein, who endorsed it.

• de Broglie

• Bohr

• Feynman

• Gamow

In 1905, he had his annus mirabilis, or “miracle year” — he wrote four papers that revolutionized modern physics. The first explained the photoelectric effect in terms of quantized electromagnetic radiation. The second formed the foundation for modern statistical physics by explaining the seemingly-random motion of particles in a fluid, a behavior called Brownian motion.

• de Broglie

• Bohr

• Fermi

• Einstein

In 1905, he wrote 4 papers that revolutionized physics. The third argued that light traveled at a constant speed, a theory now known as special relativity. The fourth paper contained his statement that the energy of a body is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared (that is, E = mc2.

• Einstein

• Fermi

• Galileo

• Gamow

He is best known to the public as a main contributor to the Manhattan Project. He was able to accurately predict the low-temperature behavior of electrons.

• Feynman

• Fermi

• Einstein

• Heisenberg

He essentially created quantum electrodynamics and earned the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. He created namesake diagrams which illustrate the interaction of subatomic particles.

• Feynman

• Einstein

• Fermi

• Planck

He was one of the first to explain the implications of the Big Bang theory of cosmology. He correctly predicted the abundance of hydrogen and helium in the early universe,

• Einstein

• Heisenberg

• Bohr

• Gamow

His famous uncertainty principle (better translated, however, as “indeterminacy principle”) states that the more accurately an object’s position can be observed, the less accurately its momentum can.

• Plancki

• Einstein

• Rutherford

• Heisenberg

He allowed quantum theory to move forward in the early 20th century by correctly modeling how an object radiates heat. His Law of Radiation suggested that electromagnetic energy could only be emitted in specific packages, called quanta and argued that the energy of this photon was equal to its frequency times a fixed value h.

• Rutherford

• Bohr

• Planck

• Schrodinger

His gold foil experiment provided the first evidence that each atom is made up of a large, positively-charged nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of negatively-charged electrons. He won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work and an element (#104) is named for him.

• Einstein

• Fermi

• Rutherford

• Schrodinger