Project in Science

Submitted by: Mary Jean A. Marbella

 1. Marie Curie (1867 – 1934)
“One never notices what has been done; one can
only see what remains to be done.”

Polish physicist and chemist, Marie Curie was

a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, the only person
honored with Nobel Prizes in two different sciences,
and the first female professor at the University of
Paris. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and
Warsaw. Her husband Pierre Curie was also a Nobel
laureate, as were her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie and
son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie. Her achievements
include the creation of a theory of radioactivity (a term
coined by her), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two new
elements, radium and polonium. It was also under her personal direction that the world’s first
studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms (“cancers”), using radioactive isotopes.
While an actively loyal French citizen, she never lost her sense of Polish identity. She named
the first new chemical element that she discovered (1898) “polonium” for her native country, and
in 1932 she founded a Radium Institute in her hometown Warsaw, headed by her physician-
sister Bronisawa.

2. Alan Turing (1912-1954)

“Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary
condition.”

English mathematician and logician, Turing is often

considered to be the father of modern computer science. He
provided an influential formalization of the concept of the
algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. With the
Turing test, meanwhile, he made a significant and
characteristically provocative contribution to the debate
regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible
to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical
Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE, although it
was never actually built in its full form. In 1948, he moved to the University of Manchester to
work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world’s earliest true computers.
During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, the UK’s code breaking center,
and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He
devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the
bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
 3. Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943)
“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly.
One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think
deeply and be quite insane.”
Tesla was a Serbian engineer and inventor who
is often described as the most important scientist and
inventor of the modern age, a man who “shed light over
the face of Earth”. He is best known for many
revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and
magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of
modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems,
including the polyphase power distribution systems and
the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second
Industrial Revolution. Contemporary biographers of Tesla have regarded him as “The Father of
Physics”, “The man who invented the twentieth century” and “the patron saint of modern
electricity.” Aside from his work on electromagnetism and electromechanical engineering, Tesla
has contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and
computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In
1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio.
Many of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various
pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early New Age occultism.

4. Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should
be.”
Einstein, a German physicist, is best known for his theory
of relativity and specifically mass–energy equivalence,
expressed by the equation E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921
Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics,
and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric
effect. Einstein’s many contributions to physics include his
special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with
electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity, which was
intended to extend the principle of relativity to non-uniform
motion and to provide a new theory of gravitation. His other
contributions include advances in the fields of relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical
opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum
theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities,
the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density
(which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated
emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics. Einstein
published over 300 scientific works and over 150 non-scientific works. The physics community
reveres Einstein, and in 1999 Time magazine named him the “Person of the Century”. In wider
culture the name “Einstein” has become synonymous with genius.

5. Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727)

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach,
while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”
Newton was an English physicist, mathematician,
astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian
and one of the most influential men in human history.
His Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,
published in 1687, is considered to be the most
influential book in the history of science. In this work,
Newton described universal gravitation and the three
laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical
mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the
physical universe for the next three centuries and is
the basis for modern engineering. Newton showed that
the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies
are governed by the same set of natural laws by
demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of
gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific
revolution. In mechanics, Newton enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and
angular momentum. In optics, he built the first “practical” reflecting telescope and developed a
theory of color based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible
spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In
mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the
differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem,
developed the so-called “Newton’s method” for approximating the zeroes of a function, and
contributed to the study of power series. Newton’s stature among scientists remains at the very
top rank, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain’s Royal Society asking who
had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton was deemed much more influential than
Albert Einstein.