~ Famous Scientists ~

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Abdul Qadeer Khan



Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan is a famous Pakistani nuclear scientist and a metallurgical engineer. He is widely regarded as the founder of gas-centrifuge enrichment technology for Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent program. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is a source of extreme national pride. As its “father”, A.Q. Khan, who headed Pakistan’s nuclear program for some 25 years, is considered a national hero.

Early life and Career:

Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in 1936 in Bhopal, India. He immigrated with his family to Pakistan in 1947. After studying at St. Anthony’s High School, Khan joined the D. J. Science College of Karachi, where he took physics and mathematics. His teacher at the college was famous solar physicist Dr. Bashir Syed. Khan earned a B.Sc. degree in physical metallurgy at the University of Karachi in 1960.

Khan accepted a job as an inspector of weight and measures in Karachi after graduation. He later resigned and went to work in Netherlands in the 1970’s. Khan gained fame as a talented scientist at the nuclear plant he worked in. He had special access to the most restricted areas of the URENCO facility. He could also read the secret documentation on the gas centrifuge technology.

In December, 1974, he came back to Pakistan and tried to convince Bhutto to adopt his Uranium route rather than Plutonium route in building nuclear weapons. According to the media reports, A.Q. Khan had a close and cordial relationship with President General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq and the Military of Pakistan. He also maintained a close relationship with the Pakistan Air Force.

After his role in Pakistan’s nuclear program, Khan re-organized the Pakistani’s national space agency, SUPARCO. In the late of 1990s, Khan played an important role in Pakistan’s space program, patricularly the Pakistan’s first Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) project and the Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV). Khan’s unrestricted publicity of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities brought humiliation to the Pakistan’s government. The United States began to think that Pakistan was giving nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, to get ballistic missile technology in exchange. Khan also came under renewed scrutiny following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. He allegedly sold nuclear technology to Iran. However, he was pardoned in 2004, but placed under house arrest.

On the 22nd of August 2006, the Pakistani government declared that Khan had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was undergoing treatment. He was released from house arrest in Februray 2009.

Other Contributions:

Khan was also a key figure in the establishment of several engineering universities in Pakistan. He set up a metallurgy and material science institute in Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology. The place, where Khan served as both executive member and director, has been named as Dr. A. Q. Khan Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Material Sciences. Another school, Dr. A. Q. Khan Institute of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering at Karachi University, has also been named in his honor. Khan thus played a vital role in bringing metallurgical engineering courses in various universities of Pakistan.

Despite his international image, Khan remains widely popular among in Pakistanis and he is considered domestically to be one of the most-influential and respected scientists in Pakistan.

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Abu Nasr Al-Farabi



Abu Nasr Muhammad al- Farabi, one the earliest Islamic intellectuals who were instrumental in transmitting the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle to the Muslim world, had a considerable influence on the later Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna. He was an outstanding linguist who translated the Greek works on Aristotle and Plato and made a considerable addition to them of his own. He earned the nickname Mallim-e-Sani, which is translated as “second master” or “second teacher”.

Early Life:

Al-Farabi completed his earlier education at Farab and Bukhara but, later on, he went to Baghdad for higher studies, where he studied and worked for a long time. During this period he acquired mastery over several languages as well as various branches of knowledge and technology. Farabi contributed considerably to science, philosophy, logic, sociology, medicine, mathematics and music, but the major ones are in philosophy, logic and sociology and for which he stands out as an Encyclopedist.

Contributions and Achievements:

As a philosopher, Farabi was the first to separate philosophy from theology. It is difficult to find a philosopher both in Muslim and Christian world from Middle Ages onwards who has not been influenced by his views. He believed in a Supreme Being who had created the world through the exercise of balanced intelligence. He also asserted this same rational faculty to be the sole part of the human being that is immortal, and thus he set as the paramount human goal the development of that rational faculty. He considerably gave more attention to political theory as compared to any Islamic philosopher.

Later in his work, Al-Farabi laid down in Platonic fashion the qualities necessary for the ruler, he should be inclined to rule by good quality of a native character and exhibit the right attitude for such rule. At the heart of Al-Farabi’s political philosophy is the concept of happiness in which people cooperate to gain contentment. He followed the Greek example and the highest rank of happiness was allocated to his ideal sovereign whose soul was ‘united as it were with the Active Intellect’. Therefore Farabi served as a tremendous source of aspiration for intellectuals of the middle ages and made enormous contributions to the knowledge of his day, paving the way for the later philosopher and thinkers of the Muslim world.

Farabian epistemology has both a Neoplatonic and an Aristotelian dimension. The best source for al-Farabi’s classification of knowledge is his Kitab ihsa al-ulum. This work neatly illustrates Al-Farabi’s beliefs, both esoteric and exoteric. Through all of them runs a primary Aristotelian stress on the importance of knowledge. Thus al-Farabi’s epistemology, from what has been described may be said to be encyclopedic in range and complex in articulation, using both a Neoplatonic and an Aristotelian voice.

Farabi also participated in writing books on early Muslim sociology and a notable book on music titled Kitab al-Musiqa (The Book of Music) which is in reality a study of the theory of Persian music of his day, although in the West it has been introduced as a book on Arab music. He invented several musical instruments, besides contributing to the knowledge of musical notes. It has been reported that he could play his instrument so well as to make people laugh or weep at will. Al-Farabi’s treatise Meanings of the Intellect dealt with music therapy, where he discussed the therapeutic effects of music on the soul.

Later Life:

Farabi traveled to many distant lands throughout his life and gained many experiences a lot, due to which he made so many contributions for which he is still remembered and acknowledged. Inspite of facing many hardships, he worked with full dedication and made his name among the popular scientists of history. He died a bachelor in Damascus in 339 A.H. /950 A.D. at the age of 80 years.

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Ada Lovelace



Ada Lovelace is a metaphysician, analyst, and the founder of scientific computing, and described what she did as “poetical science”. Also known as the “Enchantress of Numbers”, her passion and contributions have served as inspiration to modern women around the world.

Life and Education

Born Augusta Ada Byron in London on December 10, 1815, she was the daughter the well-known romantic poet Lord George Byron and Anne Isabella “Annabella” Milbanke. Their marriage was brief and Lord Byron left shortly after Ada was born. English law stated that the father is granted full custody of children in the event of separation, but he did not show any interest in exercising his parental rights. He left England and died in Greece in 1823 when Ada was just 8 years old, never seeing his daughter again. Ada on the other hand, was not allowed to even view a portrait of her father until she turned twenty.

Annabella did not want her to end up as a poet like her father, as she could not bear that unpredictable nature that Lord Byron had. She was slightly distant to her child and would often leave Ada with Hon. Lady Milbanke, who spoiled her grandchild. However, she kept up with the appearance of being a loving mother because it was what society expected of her. In fact, Annabella frequently sent letters to Lady Milbanke asking about how Ada was doing in case she would eventually need evidence that she deeply cared about her child.

Ada was a sickly child, and would often have terrible bouts of headache. She suffered from measles and was left paralyzed, and was under bed rest for almost a year. She regained to ability to walk in 1831, with the help of crutches.

Ada was exposed to rigorous tutoring in logic, Mathematics and science, and Ada’s inclination towards complex things became apparent when she came up with a design for a flying machine in 1828, when she was just 13 years old. She also created different designs for boats, and would endlessly look at diagram after diagram of new inventions from the Industrial Revolution that were published in all the scientific magazines she could find. Her great exposure to Mathematics formed the person she was to become and prepared her for the contributions she was to give to the modern world.

Ada married an aristocrat, William King, in 1835 when she was 19 years old. King was ten years her senior. After three years, King inherited a noble title, making them the Earl and Countess of Lovelace. This was how she became known as Ada Lovelace, instead of Lady Ada King. They had three children together, but their family and fortune was still greatly influenced by Ada’s mother, Lady Byron. King accepted Lady Byron’s domineering personality and rarely opposed her decisions.

Lady Byron took on William Benjamin Carpenter to serve as a tutor for King and Ada’s children. However, he fell in love with Ada and continued to pursue her despite the circumstances. Ada was not comfortable about this and cut off any communication with him.

Notable Contributions and Works

It was an era where noblewomen were not expected nor encouraged to be intellectual. Still, Ada continued to pursue her passion for numbers and logic.

Ada developed a strong respect for her tutor, Mary Sommerville, and they continued corresponding for years. She was also acquaintances with other intellectuals like Andrew Crosse, Charles Wheatstone, and Charles Dickens.

In 1883, she met Charles Babbage through Mary Sommerville. He was a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge. This meeting would later on prove to grow into a lifelong friendship, as their mutual interests became the source of their constant correspondence. They would talk about their theories, beliefs, and visions, and she was left fascinated by the work that Babbage did. Charles Babbage was the one who initially called her as the “Enchantress of Numbers”.

Charles Babbage has already gained popularity at that time, and had previously been working on a Difference Engine, a machine that would have the ability to compute for polynomials by using the differences method. Because of a number of personal tragedies and continued disagreements between him and his chief engineer, Joseph Clement, Babbage’s frustrations about the whole project became evident and the government ceased its support for the project in 1842. This paved the way for him to concentrate on a calculating machine, and Analytical Engine.

Although the plans for this project had been drawn in 1834, the government refused to fund it because of the unfinished Difference Engine. However, this project earned interest from abroad. The Italian Mathematician Louis Menebrea discussed the Analytical Engine in a French memoir in 1842. This was where Ada proved to be most useful for Babbage. She was hired to translate the memoir from French to English. Ada worked on the memoir non-stop, working on it within a nine month period from 1842 to 1843. She also added her own notes to the translated memoir, which later on became critical in the work of Alan Turing, Father of Theoretical Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence as he worked on building the first modern computers during the 1940’s. These notes were seen as the first set of algorithms that were to be followed by a machine. They were longer than the memoir itself, and explained in great detail how the Analytical Engine differed from the Difference Engine. And though Babbage and a lot of other people in the same field concentrated merely on a computer’s capacity for calculating and number crunching, Ada believed in the vision that a computer can do so much more than that.

Ada Lovelace died at the early age of 36 in 1852 due to uterine cancer. Before she died, her husband abandoned her after she was rumored to have confessed to an affair. She was buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham beside her father as per her request, because her interest in him never subsided despite never having met him.

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Al-Battani



Al-Battani is sometimes known by a Latinized version of his name, being Albategnius, Albategni or Albatenius. His full name was Abu Abdallah Mohammad ibn Jabir ibn Sinan al-Raqqi al-Harrani al-Sabi al-Battani. Al-Battani’s father was Jabir ibn Sinan al-Harrani who had a high reputation as an instrument maker in Harran. The name makes the identification certain that al-Battani himself was skilled in making astronomical instruments and there is a good indication that he learnt these skills from his father.

Early Life and Career:

Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Jabir Ibn Sinan al-Battani al-Harrani was born around 858 C.E. in Harran. Battani was first educated by his father Jabir Ibn San’an al-Battani, who also was a well-known scientist. He then moved to Raqqa, situated on the bank of the Euphrates, where he received advanced education and later on flourished as a scholar. At the beginning of the 9th century, he migrated to Samarra, where he worked till the end of his life. His family had been members of the Sabian sect, a religious sect of star worshippers from Harran. Being worshipers of the stars meant that the Sabians had a strong motivation for the study of astronomy. Al-Battani, unlike Thabit, another mathematician from his home town, was not a believer in the Sabian religion. His name “Abu Abdallah Mohammad” indicates that he was certainly a Muslim.

Al-Battani made remarkably accurate astronomical observations at Antioch and ar-Raqqah in Syria. The town of ar-Raqqah, where most of al-Battani’s observations were made, became prosperous when Caliph Harun al-Rashid built several palaces there.

The Fihrist describes al-Battani as one of the most famous observers and a leader in geometry, theoretical and practical astronomy, and astrology. He composed work on astronomy, with tables, containing his own observations of the sun and moon and a more accurate description of their motions than that given in Ptolemy’s “Almagest”.

The main achievements of al-Battani’s are:

• He cataloged 489 stars.

• He refined the existing values for the length of the year, which he gave as 365 days 5 hours 46 minutes 24 seconds, and of the seasons.

• He calculated 54.5″ per year for the precession of the equinoxes and obtained the value of 23° 35′ for the inclination of the ecliptic.

Rather than using geometrical methods, as other scientists had done, al-Battani used trigonometric methods which were an important advancement. Al-Battani showed that the farthest distance of the Sun from the Earth varies and, as a result, annular eclipses of the Sun are possible as well as total eclipses. Al-Battani is important in the development of science for a number of reasons, but one of these must be the large influence his work had on scientists such as Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus.

Death:

Historians all agree that Al-Battani passed away in 317 H. /929 A.D., near the city of Moussul in Iraq. He was regarded as one of the most famous Arab astronomers. He dedicated all his life until his death to the observation of planets and stars.

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Alan Turing



Alan Turing was a man before his time.  This brilliant English code-breakerhelped turn the tide of a major World War II battle, and was arguably one of the fathers of the entire field of computer science. He was a Renaissance man who studied and made contributions to the philosophical study of the nature of intelligence, to biology and to physics.   His biography reveals that he was also the victim of anti-homosexual attitudes and laws, losing his security clearance and resorting to suicide two years later.

Background:

Born right before the start of WW I, and parked in England by his Indian civil service parents,Turing studied quantum mechanics, a very new field, probability, and logic theory at King’s College, Cambridge, and was elected a Fellow.  His paper-based theoretical model for the Turing Machine, an automatic computational design, proof of the theorem that automatic computation cannot solve all mathematical problems is called the Turing Machine, and contributed significantly to computational theory.  He continued his studies at Princeton in algebra and number theory.

Enigma:

In the years leading up to open hostilities in World War II, he was secretly working in government crypto-analysis.  When England entered the war, he took on the full-time task of deconstructing the operation of the German Enigma machine.  This cipher generator of immense complexityallowed the Germans to create apparentlyunbreakable codes.  Turing embraced this cryptographychallenge, creating a decryption machine specifically aimed at Enigma, named the Bombe.  Enigma’s unraveling was a several year process that achieved success in 1942.  Information gleaned from decoded German messages permitted the Allies to anticipate U-Boat deployment, thereby winning the battle of the Atlantic.

Diversification:

In cooperative US/UK cryptographic efforts in the latter years of the war, Turing was lead consultant.  At war’s end, he joined the National Physical Laboratory to try to invent a digital computer, or thinking machine.To that end, he studied neural nets and tried to define artificial intelligence.  Disappointed by the reception his ideas received at the NPL, he moved to Manchester University, in England’s gritty industrial region.  His department unveiled the first practical mathematical computer in 1949.

One triumph followed another.  In 1950, hedeveloped Turing Test for machine intelligence assessment: In brief, if an observer cannot tell whether they are interacting with human or machine, the machine is intelligent.

As always a polymath, he also did work on non-linear growth in biological systems, and physics, that promised to bear fruit.

Scandal:

However, a bio of Alan Turing is not complete without addressing the facts of his personal life.  According to 1952 legal charges, he became involved with what was termed ‘a bit of rough trade’.  In other words, he had a short term sexual liaison with a laborer who was down on his luck financially.  The scandal of this British national intellectual treasure, a Fellow of the Royal Society, innovator in a whole new discipline of study, and the savior of the navy, being revealed as a homosexual, was immense.  The humiliating trial ruined his career and his life.  He was stripped of his security clearance, because at that time it was believed that a homosexual was vulnerable to blackmailand enemy (read Communist) subversion.

This punishment effectively cut off from the work that he had pioneered.  He poisoned himself in 1954, leaving behind much intriguing unfinished work in physics and biology.

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Albert Abraham Michelson



The nineteenth century physicist, Albert Abraham Michelson, was the first American to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics. He became famous for his establishment of the speed of light as a fundamental constant and other spectroscopic and metrological investigations. He had a memorable career that included teaching and research positions at the Naval Academy, the Case School of Applied Science, Clark University, and the University of Chicago.

Life:

Born to a Jewish family on December 19, 1852 Strzelno, Provinz Posen in the Kingdom of Prussia, Michelson was brought to America when he was only two years old. He was brought up in the rough mining towns of Murphy’s Camp, California and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a trader. He completed his high school education in San Francisco and later in 1869 he went to Annapolis as an appointee of President U.S. Grant.

During his four years at the Naval Academy, Michelson did extremely well in optics, heat and climatology as well as drawing. He graduated in 1873. Two years later, he was appointed an instructor in physics and chemistry. After resigning from the post in 1880, he spent two years studying in Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, and the Collège de France and École Polytechnique in Paris. He developed a great interest in science and the problem of measuring the speed of light in particular.

He was then employed as a professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science at Cleveland, Ohio. Later in 1889 he moved to Clark University as professor of physics, and after three years he was invited to head the department of physics at the new University of Chicago, a position which he held until 1931.

In 1899, he married Edna Stanton and they had one son and three daughters.

Achievements:

During his stay at Annapolis, he carried out his first experiments on the speed of light. With his simple device, made up essentially of two plane mirrors, one fixed and one revolving at the rate of about 130 turns per second from which light was to be reflected, Michelson was successful in obtaining a measure closer than any that had been obtained to the presently accepted figure — 186,508 miles per second.

Michelson executed his most successful experiment at Cleveland in cooperation with the chemist Edward W. Morley. Light waves were considered as ripples of the aether which occupied all space. If a light source were moving through the aether, the pace of the light would be different for each direction in which it was discharged. In the Michelson-Morley experiment two beams of light, passed out and reflected back at right angles to each other, took equal amount of time. Thus the concept of stationary ether had to be discarded.

Michelson is also known for the measurement of the diameter of super-giant star, Betelgeuse, using astronomical interferometer with his colleague Francis G. Pease.

In 1907, Michelson was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics “for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid”. During the same year he also won the Copley Medal, the Henry Draper Medal in 1916, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1923. Moreover, a crater on the Moon is also named after him.

Death:

Michelson died on May 9, 1931, while he was working on a more refined measurement of the velocity of light in Pasadena, California.

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Albert Einstein



Albert Einstein was born in Germany. He was a great physicist from America and a Nobel laureate. Einstein gained worldwide fame as he created extraordinary theories related to relativity and for his suggestions and premises that are related to the light’s particle nature. Einstein is one of the most renowned physicists of the twentieth century.

Einstein was born on 14th March, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. He spent his teenage years in Munich with his family. He and his family had an electronic equipment store. Einstein was not talkative in his childhood, and till the age of three, he didn’t talk much. But as a teenager, he had great interest in nature and had aptitude to comprehend tricky and complicated theories of arithmetic. Einstein knew geometry when he was 12 years old.

Einstein loved to be creative and innovative, therefore he loathed the boring and noncreative spirit in his school at Munich. Einstein left his school at the age of 15, as his family left Germany due to constant failure in their business. His family went to Milan and Einstein spent a year with them. It was then that he decided that, in order to survive, he has to create his own way out. He studied his secondary school from Switzerland and then joined Swiss National Polytechnic which was located in Zurich. Einstein didn’t like the teaching method there, so he bunked classes to study physics or play his violin. With the help of his classmate’s notes, he cleared his exams, and in 1900, he graduated. Einstein was not considered a good student by his teachers.

Einstein accepted the job of a professor and worked as an alternate teacher for about two years. He achieved the post of an examiner in the year 1902 in Bern at the office of Swiss patent. Einstein wedded his class mate Mileva Maric in 1903. He had two sons with her but they later divorced. After some years Einstein married someone else.

Early Scientific Publications

University of Zurich awarded Einstein doctorate in 1905 for his thesis on the different sizes and extent of molecules. In order to highlight the importance of physics, Einstein published three theoretical documents which stated the significance of physics in twentieth century. One of these papers was based on Brownian motion which discussed Einstein’s prediction related to the movement of particles that are present in any liquid. Later many experiments supported his predictions.

Einstein’s second publication discussed photoelectric effect. This paper comprised of innovative premises related to the light’s nature. Einstein gave the idea that light under some conditions contains some particles and the energy that a light particle contains is termed as photon. This photon and the radiation’s frequency are directly related. Its formula is E=hu where E is defined as the radiation’s energy and h is a constant defined as Planck’s constant and u is defined as radiation’s frequency. Einstein’s idea was rejected by everyone because it was against the conventional idea which stated that transfer of light energy is an ongoing process.

Robert Andrews, who was an American physicist, was surprised when Einstein’s theory was experimentally proven by him a decade later. Main focus of Einstein was to comprehend the nature of radiations that are electromagnetic. This led to the birth of a theory that will be a mix of light’s particle and wave nature. This theory too was comprehended by few scientists.

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity

In 1905, Einstein’s third paper was published. It was based on dynamics of bodies in motion which later was called as the theory of relativity. The nature of radiation and matter and their interaction was the theme of discussion since the era of Newton. The view that laws of mechanics are essential is defined as the mechanical view of world, and the view that laws of electric are essential is defined as electromagnetic view of world. None of the view has been successful in giving a reliable elucidation for the interaction between matter and radiation, that is, the relation between radiation and matter is seen concurrently by the viewer at rest and a viewer travelling at consistent speed.

After observing these problems for a decade, Einstein came to the conclusion that the main problem was in the theory of measurement, and not in the theory related to matter. The main crux of Einstein’s special theory of relativity was the comprehension of the fact that all the dimensions of space and time are dependent on judgments that whether two events those are far off occur together. This hypothesis led Einstein towards the development of a theory which was based on two basic hypotheses: one that laws of physics are identical in all inertial positions. This is called as the principle of relativity. Second postulate is called as the principle of variance, according to this principle; the light’s speed is worldwide stable in a vacuum. Hence, Einstein was capable of providing reliable and accurate explanation of physical actions and measures in varying inertial positions without assuming about the matter or radiation’s nature, or their interaction. Practically, Einstein’s argument was not understood by any one.

Early Reactions to Einstein

Einstein’s work was not appreciated by others, not because it was very tough or difficult to understand, but the main problem that people faced was from Einstein’s viewpoint towards the theories and the affiliation between theory and experiment. Although Einstein believed that the sole foundation of information is experience and practice, he also maintained that scientific theories are developed by physical instinct, and the grounds on which theories are laid cannot be linked to an experiment rationally. According to Einstein, the definition of a good theory is the one that needs least number of postulates for physical confirmation. The innovation in Einstein’s postulates made it difficult for all his colleagues to understand his work.

Not many people supported Einstein. His biggest supporter was Max Planck who was a physicist from Germany. Einstein stayed at the patent agency for 4 years till the time he became famous in the physics society. He rapidly progressed upward in the educational German speaking world. In 1909, Einstein had his first meeting at the Zurich University. He then moved to the University of Prague dominated by German speaking people. He then came back to the Swiss Polytechnic in Zurich in 1912. Eventually Einstein was selected at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin as the director.

The General Theory of Relativity

In 1907 before Einstein left his job at patent office, he started working on the theory of relativity. He started by defining the equivalence principle which states that the accelerations of the frame of reference is equal to gravitational fields. For instance people while travelling in a lift are unable to make a decision that the force that they feel is felt by the elevator’s invariable acceleration or by the gravitation of the elevator. Until the year 1916, relativity theory was not available. According the general theory of relativity, the connection bodies had been attributed to the forces of gravity, are elaborated as the power of bodies on the space and time dimensions.

On the grounds on general theory of relativity, Einstein gave reasons for the changes in the orbital movement of planets that were not elaborated previously. He also told about the movement of starlight in the surroundings of a huge body like sun. Einstein became famous in 1919, when this prediction of Einstein was confirmed throughout the eclipse of the sun.

For the remaining lifetime of Einstein, he spent most of time to focus on his theory more. The last attempt of Einstein which was the theory related to the unified field was not completely successful, was an effort to comprehend the physical connections that included all weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions. This was all an adjustment of the geometry of space and time.

It was felt by most of Einstein’s classmates that these attempts were wrong. During 1915 and 1930 a new concept was in progress in the field of physics related to the basic trait of matter, also known as the quantum theory. According to this theory light has a dual character; it has the characteristics of both particle and wave, which Einstein previously considered compulsory. Also the uncertainty principle which says that accuracy in the process of measurement is restricted. In addition to this, it consisted of a new denial, at the basic level, of the idea of exact measurement. However, Einstein was not in favor of such ideas and he remained an opponent of these notions till his death.

World Citizen

Einstein became famous worldwide after 1919. He got many awards and prizes. In 1921, different scientific societies throughout the world awarded Einstein the Nobel Prize in physics. Wherever he travelled globally, that became an event. He was always followed by media. Einstein used media to add his views on society and politics.

Einstein supported pacifism and Zionism movement. While the World War I was taking place Einstein was one of the academics of Germany that criticized Germany’s participation in the war openly. He was attacked many times by Germans because of his continuous support toward Zionists and pacifist’s goals. Einstein’s theories including the relativity theory was criticized publically.

Einstein left Germany and went to United States when Hitler gained power. He got a place in New Jersey at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. On behalf of Zionism world Einstein continued his efforts. Einstein had to abandon pacifist because of the danger face by mankind put forward by the Nazi rule in Germany.

Einstein worked together with many other scientists in 1939 and wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, giving the option of making an atomic bomb and the possibility that the government of Germany was planning such route. As the letter was signed only by Einstein, helped in building the atomic bomb although Einstein had no participation in the whole work process and he was unaware about it.

Einstein participated actively in the international disarmament cause after the war. Einstein maintained his support with Zionism but he rejected the offer to become the president of Israel. In late 1940’s in US Einstein emphasized on the importance of making sacrifices to safeguard the freedom of politics. Einstein left this world on 18th April, 1955 in Princeton.

Some of Einstein’s efforts have been considered impractical. Einstein’s proposals had been very well managed and nicely planned and just like his theories that seemed motivated by the intuition of sound which comprised of wise and cautious observational assessment. Einstein was interested in politics and social issues too but it was science that really caught his interest and he believed that it was only the universe’s nature that mattered in the end. Relativity was found in his writings. He wrote, The Special and General Theory , About Zionism, Builders of the Universe, Why War?, The World as I See It, The Evolution of Physics and Out of My Later Years in the years 1916, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1938 and 1950 respectively. In the year 1987, Einstein’s papers had begun to get published in multiple volumes.

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Albrecht von Haller



One of the greatest and most influental biologists of the 18th century, Swiss scientst Albrecht von Haller is often credited as the “father of experimental physiology”. His contributions ranged across anatomy, physiology, embryology, botany and poetry.

Early Life and Career:

Born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1708, Albrecht von Haller, as a child prodigy, wrote several metrical translations from Ovid, Horace and Virgil when he was hardly fifteen. He studied the form and function of one organ after the other, launching anatomy as an experimental science, and also enforcing dynamic rules to the study of physiology.

Haller analyzed the irritability of muscle and the sensibility of nerves, studying circulation time and the automatic action of the heart. He gave the first to give detailed explanation of respiration.

His publicaton “Elementa Physialogiae Carports Hamani” (Elements of Physiology, 1757-66) proved to be one of the influential works on the subject. Haller consistently broadened the field of anatomy, relating it to physiology by experimentation, and implemented dynamic rules to complex physiological problems.

The approach of Albrecht von Haller was precise, analytical and objective. He was the first person to discover that only nerves produce sensation and only those parts of the body connected to the nervous system can undergo a sensation. Probably his most notable contribution was the formulation of the method of physiological research.

Later Life and Death:

Albrecht von Haller’s health began substantially declining after 1773. He died on December 12, 1777. He was 69 years old.

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Alessandro Volta



Alessandro Volta is one of the most famous Italian physicists who is highly regarded for his invention of the electric cell as well as the 1777 discovery of methane.

Early Life and Education:

Volta was raised in a strict Catholic family. He got his early education from a Jesuit school. He was adored by his teachers who thought Volta had all the abilities to become a good Jesuit priest.

Volta was very keen about studying electricity which was in its earliest stages at the time. He envisioned that there is a net neutral condition in a body in which all electrical attractions are neutralized. This effect could be transformed by some external source which later changes the relative configuration of the particles. Volta believed that in such an electrically unstable state, the body gets electrically charged.

Contributions and Achievements:

With this rather weak concept of an electrically charged body, Volta experimented extensively to study electrical induction. He was successful in creating some devices that were able to store electric charge. Subsequently, he gained fame and received grants to visit other countries. He also saw other famous scientists around this time. Volta accepted a teaching job at the University of Pavia where he stayed for about forty years.

Influenced by the efforts of Dc Saussure, Volta developed an interest in atmospheric electricity. He made certain modifications to the electrical instruments made by the Swiss geologist, making them more refined and precise. He came up with methods to measure the so-called “electrical tension”, later named as the volt.

Volta modified another instrument called the eudiometer, which measured the volume and composition of gases. He was successful in finding out that ordinary air contains about 21% of oxygen. The modified version of the instrument also helped Lavoisier on his legendary work regarding the composition of water. Volta found out that the inflammable gas which creates bubbles in marshes was methane, which is now used as a fuel.

Volta initially rejected the Galvani’s idea of animal electricity. When he carried out the experiment himself, he was amazed that the same effect, momentary electric current, which was discovered by Galvani, can be achieved using metals and not dead frogs. Volta made it clear that electric currents could be generated by appropriately connecting metals or wires. Using zinc and copper wires and saline solutions, Volta successfully construced the first electric battery, widely considered to be one of the greatest and most important breakthroughs in the history of science and mankind.

Later Life and Death:

Alessandro Volta retired in 1819 to his estate in Camnago, Lombardy, Italy (now called “Camnago Volta”). He died on March 5, 1827 at the age of 82.

[MysteRy]

Alexander Fleming



Scottish biologist and inventor Alexander Firming is widely regarded for his 1928 discovery of penicillin, a drug that is used to kill harmful bacteria. His work on immunology, bacteriology, and chemotherapy is considered groundbreaking and highly influential.

Early Life and Education:

Born in Ayrshire, Scotland on August 6, 1881 to Hugh Fleming and Grace Stirling Morton, Alexander Fleming was the third of the four children. He attended medical school in London, England and graduated in 1906. Fleming assisted in battlefield hospitals in France during World War I (1911-1918), where he observed that some soldiers, despite surviving their initial battlefield wounds, were dying of septicemia or some another infection only after a few years.

Contributions and Achievements:

Once the war was over, Fleming looked for medicines that would heal infections. The antiseptics of World War I were not totally efficient, and they primarily worked on a wound’s surface. Spraying an antiseptic made things even worse if the wound was deep.

Fleming came back to his laboratory in 1928 after a long vacation. He carried out an experiment and left several dishes with several bacteria cultures growing in them. After some time, he observed that some of the dishes were contaminated with a fungus, which ruined his experiment. He was about to discard the dishes, but he noticed that in one dish, the bacteria failed to grow in an area around the fungus.

He successfully isolated the fungus and established it was from the Penicillium group or genus. Fleming made his discovery public in 1929, however to a mixed reaction. While a few doctors thought penicillin, the antibiotic obtained from the Penicillium fungus, might have some importance as a topical antiseptic, the others were skeptical. Fleming was sure that the penicillin could also function inside the body. He performed some experiments to demonstrate that the genus of fungus had germ-killing power, even when it was diluted 800 times. Fleming tried to cultivate penicillin until 1940, but it was hard to grow, and isolating the germ-killing agent was even harder. He was unsure if it would ever work in a proper manner.

Luckily, a German Chemist, Ernst Chain, discovered the process to isolate and concentrate the germ-killing agent in penicillin some time later. Another Australian pharmacologist Howard Florey found out the ways of its mass production. During World War I, the goverments of U.S. and Great Britain funded Florey and Chain, therefore the penicillin almost became the magic spell that cured many diseases. Florey and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945.

Personal Life and Death:

Fleming married his first wife, Sarah, who died in 1949. Their only child, Robert Fleming, went on to become a general medical practitioner. Fleming married for the second time to Dr. Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, with whom he worked at St. Mary’s, on 9 April 1953. She also died in 1986.

Fleming died of a heart failure in London in 1955.

[MysteRy]

Alexander Graham Bell



Only few people in this world leave their footprints on the sands of history, and these men of honor never die. One such grand personality is the greatest innovator of all times Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the first practical telephone. His other major inventions include: optical communications, hydrofoils, metal detector and aeronautic.

Early Years of Life

Graham bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847. He was the only child, of Professor Alexander Melville Bell, out of the three, who didn’t die due to tuberculosis at a young age. He received his early education at home from his father; however he then got admitted to Royal high School, Edinburgh, which he left at the age of 15, due to poor performance.

Bell moved to London to live with his grand father and enrolled at the Western House Academy, Scotland. For further studies he joined University of Edinburgh. His first invention came at the age of 12, when he built a homemade de-husking machine to be used at his neighbor’s mill. In return, he was given a small workshop within the mill which he used to carry out further experiments.

At the age of 23, Bell’s brother’s widow and his parents shifted to Canada, to stay with a family friend. After a short stay there, they purchased a farm near Brantford, where Bell built his own workshop in the carriage house. After setting up his workshop, Bell continued his experiments with electricity and sound based on the work of Helmholtz.
Telephone

By 1874, telegraph message traffic was rapidly expanding; there was a great need to find an inexpensive way to send multiple telegraph messages on each telegraph line.

At that time, Bell had made great progress at both his Boston laboratory as well as at his family home in Canada and his work on harmonic telegraph entered a decisive stage. Bell got financial support from two wealthy patrons but he did not have the basic knowledge to continue with the experiment. He still he did not give up and kept trying.

Bell hired Thomas A. Watson, an experienced electrical designer, as his assistant. In 1875, an accident during the experiment led to the sound powered telephone, which was able to transmit voice like sounds. At last, after the patent issue made by Elisha Gray on March 10, 1876, Bell succeeded in making his telephone work.

The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877. Bell company engineers brought about numerous improvements to the telephone making it the most successful product ever.

Bell further carried out his experiments in communication. He came up with the photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light, which was a precursor of fiber-optics. He helped the deaf to learn new speech techniques. Altogether he received 18 patents in his name out of which he shared 12 with his collegues.

Final years:

On August 2, 1922 Bell died of diabetes at Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, at age 75, leaving behind a wife and two daughters. He was buried at the Beinn Bhreagh Mountain.

During his funeral every phone in North America was silenced in honor of the great inventor.

[MysteRy]

Alfred Binet



Alfred Binet, one of the most influential French psychologists and scientists, is known for his extensive research related to the mental capacity of humans. He literally revolutionized the fields of education and psychology, especially in regard to intelligence testing. Binet’s findings were way ahead of his time, and although he did not quite realise the true worth of his contributions, his name is cemented in the world of psychology.

Binet also authored many publications about psychophysics and creativity, including the legendary “L’Année psychologique”, which is still regarded as an important psychology journal.

Early Life and Education:

Born in July 1857, in Nice, France to a physician father and artist mother, Binet’s parents got divorced when he was quite young. He was mostly raised by his mother. At 15, he received several awards for his extraordinary skills in literary composition and translation at the prestigious Louis-le-Grand school. Binet took law and medicine as his favorite subjects. He acquired a degree in law but chosen not to pursue a career in any of these subjects.

While in his mid-twenties, Binet was given permission as a reader at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. There, he studied about the developments and trends in psychology. He was inspired by the works of Theodule Ribot and John Stuart Mill, and that boosted his enthusiasm for sensory and associationistic psychology.

Contributions and Achievements:

Binet met Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the early 1880s. He extensively studied, researched and published his works on hypnosis and hysteria. While asserting a controversial theory, he gradually comprehended the nature of suggestibility on psychological experimentation.

In 1884 he got married to Laure Balbiani, the daughter of the famous embryologist Edouard-Gérard Balbiani. They had two daughters together, Madeleine and Alice. Binet gave up his position at the Salpêtrière in 1890. He carried out home experiments with his daughters and observed their behavior and responses in a systematic approach. Subsequently, he published his work explaining these experiments that dealt with individual differences and measuring intelligence. His daughter’s ability to differentiate the relative size of collections premised conservation studies by Jean Piaget.

Binet volunteered at the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Sorbonne, where he was made a director in 1894. He worked with Henry Heaunis and Theodore Simon to lay down the psychology journal “L’Année psychologique”. The journal is widely considered to be one of the most important contributions in the history of psychology.

The approaches of Binet’s experimental research also addressed schoolchildren. French physical chemist Victor Henri briefly helped him with the investigations of visual memory and research regarding individual psychology. He advocated that the intelligence of a person, and the individual differences in intelligence of more than one persons, could well be measured. He became a member of the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. Binet also performed his services to a Commission on the Education of Retarded Children for the French government. The landmark development of mothods related to the intelligence quotient (IQ) tests also took place during this time. In an effort to find out the inadequacies that influence mental subnormality, Binet and Simon devised an instrument.

The research emphasis of Alfred Binet on the variable intelligence of children offered a fundamental model for measuring and understanding the individual differences of both typically and atypically developing children.

Later Life and Death:

Alfred Binet also studied human sexual behavior (he coined the term “erotic fetishism”) and the palm reading abilities of the famous Paris chiromancer Valentine Dencausse. He died on October 18, 1911.

[MysteRy]

Alfred Kinsey



Widely considered as the most important sex researcher in the history, American biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote two influential books on the nature of human sexuality: “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female”. Kinsey was also the founder of the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (now named after him) at Indiana University.

Early Life and Education:

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in June 1894, Alfred Kinsey’s father taught engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Kinsey graduated from Columbia High School, Hoboken, and his father insisted him to acquire a degree in engineering at Stevens. After two years, Kinsey recognized that engineering was not his passion, so he was transferred to Bowdoin College, Maine to study biology.

Contributions and Achievements:

Kinsey finally got a B.S. in biology and psychology in 1916. After that, he was listed in a doctoral program in zoology at Harvard University, where he got his Sc.D. in 1919. He took a teaching position in the department of zoology at Indiana University where he remained for the remainder of his career.

Kinsey had already become a big name in entomology by the mid-1930s. His research on gall wasps is considered as the pivotal point in the field of entomology. Meanwhile his interest in human sexuality bore fruit when, in 1938, the Indiana University publication, Daily Student, issued an editorial calling for extensive information about and testing for venereal diseases, a serious health problem that had then stormed the nation.

Kinsey requested permission to design a noncredit course on marriage with about hundred enrolled participants, in which several issues pertaining to sexuality were addressed. Soon he gave up his research on gall wasps and concentrated fully on human sexuality. His projects gained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Research Council in 1942 so established the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana. He conducted interviews from 5,300 males and 5,940 females on which he based his groundbreaking works.

His publication about male sexuality was issued out in 1948 which sold over a half million copies. The female version, one the other hand, was printed five years later, however to a less warm reception.

Later Life and Death:

The research work of Alfred Kinsey almost ended after the release of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female”. He had allegedly offended thousands of Americans and the U.S. congress exerted pressure on Dean Rusk, the incharge of the Rockefeller Foundation, to unilaterally terminate the financial support of the institute.

After failing to raise funding from other means, Kinsey unfortunately gave up his extraordinary efforts that revolutionized sexuality research. The institute, however, survived and is still functioning as an independent organization under Indiana University.

Alfred Kinsey died on August 25, 1956 of a heart ailment and pneumonia. He was 62 years old.

[MysteRy]

Alfred Nobel



The foundation of the Nobel Prize-that has been honoring people from all around the world for their great accomplishments in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in peace-was laid by none other than Alfred Nobel. He was a Swedish scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, author and pacifist. He was a great genius who invented dynamite and many other explosives. He also constructed companies and laboratories in more than 20 countries all over the world.

Early Life:

Alfred Nobel was born on 21 October, 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden. He was the third out of the four sons to the Swedish family. His father, Immanuel Nobel, an engineer and a prosperous arms manufacturer, encouraged his four sons to pursue mechanical fields. When Alfred was just nine years old, his family moved to Saint Petersburg in 1842, where his father started a “torpedo” works. Here young Alfred received his early education by private tutors. He studied chemistry with Professor Nikolay Nikolaevich Zinin.

At the age of 18 he traveled to United States where he spent four years studying chemistry and also worked for sometime under John Ericsson. During this time he also went to Paris where he was first introduced to nitroglycerin, a volatile, explosive liquid first made by an Italian scientist, Ascanio Sobrero in 1847. With the end of the war his father’s weapon’s business collapsed leaving the family poor. As a result the family had to rely on the earnings of his mother, Andriette Ahlsell Nobel who worked at the grocery store.

Contributions and Achievements:

After the family business got bankrupt, Alfred devoted himself to the study of explosives and sought a way to make the aggressive explosion of liquid nitroglycerin somehow more controllable. In 1863 he succeeded in exploding nitroglycerin from a distance with a gunpowder charge, and two years later he patented the mercury fulminate detonator which is a critical component for the development of high explosives. Nobel then built up factories in Hamburg and Stockholm, and soon New York and California.

Unfortunately his name became controversial after many serious accidents in the transit and use of his intrinsically unstable product, including an 1864 explosion at their factory in Heleneborg in Stockholm that killed Nobel’s younger brother Emil, among other casualties.

In order to improve the image of his business, Nobel put all his efforts to produce a safer explosive. In 1866 he discovered that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent still substance like kieselguhr (porous clay) it became safer and more convenient to handle. He called this mixture dynamite and received a patent in 1867. The same year he demonstrated his explosive for the first time at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey, England. After a few months he also developed a more powerful explosive by the name of ‘Gelignite’, (also called blasting gelatin). He made this by absorbing nitroglycerin into wood pulp and sodium or potassium nitrate.

Later Life:

During November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his last will and testament and established the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality. The executors of his will formed the Nobel Foundation to fulfill his wishes. The statutes of the foundation were formally adopted on June 29, 1900 and the first prize was awarded in 1901.

This great man died of a stroke on 10 December 1896 at Sanremo, Italy and was buried in Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

[MysteRy]

Alfred Wegener



The name of the German geophysicist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener is synonymous with the theory of continental drift. He was the first person to provide significant evidence for a consistent and logical hypothesis that realized a broad variety of natural phenomena.

Early Life and Education:

Wegener was born in Berlin to an evangelical minister. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Innsbruck, and Berlin and acquired a doctorate in astronomy. As an student, he dreamed of exploring the wonders of Greenland. Wegener also had much interest in the relatively unknown science of meteorology.

Contributions and Achievements:

While preparing for an expedition to the Arctic, Wegener practised backbreaking exercise. He also mastered kiting and ballooning for taking better weather observations. Even in 1906, he achieved a world record of an uninterrupted flight for 52 hours, with his brother Kurt.

Subsequently, Wegener was selected as a meteorologist to a Danish expedition to northeastern Greenland. After his return, he took a job as a junior teacher of meteorology at the University of Marburg. In a few years, he published his first textbook on the thermodynamics of the atmosphere. He also went to a second expedition to Greenland in 1912 with the Danish expeditioner J. P Koch. This trip turned out to be the longest crossing of the icecap ever completed by foot.

Alfred Wegener got married to Else Köppen, the daughter of another famous meteorologist, W. P. Köppen. After the death of his father-in-law, Wegener succeeded Mr. Köppen as the director of the Meteorological Research Department of the Marine Observatory at Hamburg. He also accepted a teaching position of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz, Austria in 1926.

Wegener lost his life in 1930 while conducting a third expedition to Greenland in 1930, reportedly due to a severe heart attack. Last seen alive on his 50th birthday in 1930, he was hailed as one of the greatest arctic explorers ever and a groundbreaking meteorologist. Today, Wegener is widely regarded as the most important proponent of the theory of continental drift.

Much of the evidence that made Wegener put forward the theory was related to the continents bordering the South Atlantic. Besides the implicative ‘jigsaw fit’, there was a paleontological evidence for a possible direct connection between them. However, the popular belief of the incidental sinking of a land bridge beneath the ocean was rejected mainly due to the principle of isostasy, which says that the higher topography of the Earth is compensated by the presence of mostly irreversible continental crustal rocks. Several geologic links between the continents were also found that were more credibly made clear by former contiguity.

Wegener also provided a few paleoclimatological arguments related to both polar wandering and continental drift. Regrettably, he was unsuccessful in presenting a credible mechanism for continental drift, one of the main reasons his views were ignored and criticized until the plate tectonics revolution of the late 1960s.