8 Legends Who Shaped Physics

Physics' canon spans further back than almost any other modern profession's, from a self-taught bookbinder's apprentice who talked his way into a laboratory job to a Chinese-American experimentalist whose result disproved a basic assumption of nuclear physics in a matter of weeks.

The eight people here span seven countries and more than three centuries, and include several whose stories complicate any simple hero narrative: a woman who lectured unpaid for four years because a university senate objected to her sex, a physicist who worked out nuclear fission from exile and never received a Nobel Prize for it, and an experimentalist excluded from the prize awarded for the very theory her experiment proved.

The all-time podium

Albert Einstein

Germany / Switzerland / United States

Isaac Newton

England

Michael Faraday

England

The eight who reached the top

Godfrey Kneller · Public domain

Isaac Newton

England · 1643–1727

Formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation in his 1687 Principia Mathematica, unifying terrestrial and celestial mechanics under a single mathematical framework and setting the template — precise laws, testable predictions — every physicist since has followed.

The story

In 1665, isolated at Woolsthorpe during a plague outbreak, Newton pushed a bodkin, a blunt needle, between his eyeball and the bone of its socket to press on the back of his own eye, then recorded in his notebook the colored rings the pressure produced. The notebook survives at Cambridge University Library, an unsettling but characteristic example of his willingness to experiment on himself to understand light and vision.

“Real understanding sometimes demands testing an idea directly, however uncomfortable or strange the method looks to others.”

Principia published

1687

President, Royal Society

1703–1727

Years as Cambridge professor

~33 years

Oren Jack Turner · Public domain

Albert Einstein

Germany / Switzerland / United States · 1879–1955

In 1905, working as a patent clerk in Bern, published four papers in a single year covering special relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion, then spent the next decade extending relativity to gravitation itself, reshaping physics' basic concepts of space, time and mass.

The story

On May 29, 1919, British astronomer Arthur Eddington photographed a solar eclipse from the island of Principe off West Africa, measuring starlight bent by the Sun's gravity by almost exactly the amount Einstein's general relativity predicted. When the results were announced that November, The Times of London ran the headline 'Revolution in Science,' and Einstein woke up world-famous almost overnight.

“A theory earns trust only when an independent test can falsify it and instead confirms a specific numerical prediction.”

Miracle-year papers, 1905

4 papers

Nobel Prize

1921, photoelectric effect

Eddington eclipse confirmation

1919

Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain

Michael Faraday

England · 1791–1867

A bookbinder's apprentice with no university training who became the era's greatest experimentalist, discovering electromagnetic induction in 1831 — the principle behind every electric generator and transformer since — and founding the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures to bring science to the public.

The story

In 1812, the 20-year-old bookbinder's apprentice Michael Faraday attended four lectures given by chemist Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, took detailed notes, bound them into a nearly 300-page volume, and sent it to Davy asking for a job. Davy, temporarily blinded months later in a laboratory explosion, hired Faraday as a laboratory assistant to help him work — the start of Faraday's scientific career.

“Meticulous, self-taught preparation can open a door that formal credentials were never going to open for you.”

Electromagnetic induction discovered

1831

Christmas Lectures founded

1825

Years at the Royal Institution

~54 years

Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain

James Clerk Maxwell

Scotland · 1831–1879

Unified electricity, magnetism and light into a single set of equations in his 1865 paper 'A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,' predicting that light itself is an electromagnetic wave and laying the theoretical foundation for radio, radar and every wireless technology that followed.

The story

On May 17, 1861, Maxwell demonstrated the first durable color photograph at a Royal Institution lecture: a tartan ribbon photographed three times through red, green and blue filters by photographer Thomas Sutton, then projected together to recreate the ribbon's true colors — proving his three-color theory of vision years before color photography became practical.

“A theory worth trusting can usually be demonstrated with a simple, physical proof, not just defended with equations.”

Electromagnetic theory published

1865

First durable color photograph

1861

Maxwell's equations, number

4 equations

Henri Manuel · Public domain

Marie Curie

Poland / France · 1867–1934

Discovered polonium and radium with husband Pierre in 1898, coined the term 'radioactivity,' and became the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences — physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911 — while building the field of radioactivity research largely from scratch.

The story

In late 1911, days after the Nobel committee privately suggested she stay away from the ceremony amid a public scandal over her relationship with physicist Paul Langevin, Curie traveled to Stockholm anyway and delivered her lecture, telling the committee in writing that the prize had been awarded for her scientific work, which bore no relation to her private life.

“Separate the science from the scandal machine around you — the work has to be judged on its own evidence.”

Nobel Prizes won

2, physics & chemistry

Elements discovered

Polonium, radium

First woman to win a Nobel Prize

1903

Unknown author Unknown author Publisher: Mathematical Association of America [3] , Brooklyn Museum [4] , Agnes Scott College [5] , [6] · Public domain

Emmy Noether

Germany / United States · 1882–1935

Proved in 1918 that every symmetry in a physical system corresponds to a conserved quantity — Noether's theorem — a result Einstein called one of the most important mathematical theorems of the century, and one that still underlies how modern physicists build and check new theories.

The story

When David Hilbert and Felix Klein tried to secure Noether a paid teaching position at Gottingen in 1915, the university's faculty senate objected to a woman lecturing to male students. Hilbert reportedly told the assembled faculty, 'I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as Privatdozent — after all, the Senate is not a bathhouse.' She lectured under Hilbert's name, unpaid, for four years before finally receiving her own paid position in 1919.

“Brilliant work can still need a powerful advocate to overcome a system's unrelated prejudices.”

Noether's theorem published

1918

Years lecturing unpaid at Gottingen

1915–1919

Called by Einstein

'Most significant... genius'

Lise Meitner

Austria / Sweden · 1878–1968

Co-discovered the theoretical explanation for nuclear fission in December 1938 with her nephew Otto Frisch, correctly calculating the enormous energy released when a uranium nucleus splits — work for which her collaborator Otto Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The story

Exiled from Nazi Germany as a Jewish scientist, Meitner was in Kungalv, Sweden, for Christmas 1938 when her nephew Otto Frisch visited with news of Otto Hahn's puzzling experiment showing uranium apparently splitting into barium. Walking together in the snow, the two worked out the physics on a scrap of paper, using Einstein's E=mc2 to calculate the huge energy the process would release, and named it 'nuclear fission.'

“Being written out of the credit does not erase the fact that the physics was yours to work out first.”

Nuclear fission explained

Dec. 1938

Years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

~30 years

Nobel Prizes for fission she received

0 (Hahn alone, 1944)

Chien-Shiung Wu

China / United States · 1912–1997

Designed and ran the 1956 experiment that disproved the conservation of parity in weak nuclear interactions, confirming a hypothesis by Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang — who won the 1957 Nobel Prize for the idea alone, without Wu, whose experiment had actually proven it.

The story

Over the 1956 Christmas holiday, Wu ran her cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, keeping a radioactive cobalt-60 source cooled to near absolute zero inside a cryostat for weeks to align the nuclei's spins, working through the holiday because the delicate cooling apparatus could not simply be paused and restarted.

“The experimentalist whose result actually proves a theory deserves equal credit with the theorists who only proposed it.”

Parity violation confirmed

1956

Manhattan Project uranium work

1944–1945

National Medal of Science

1975

Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.

Comparison Lab

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The argument

Whether Lise Meitner should have shared Otto Hahn's 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry remains one of physics' most debated omissions; papers released decades later by the Nobel committee show her contribution was seriously considered by at least one nominator and then set aside.

Chien-Shiung Wu's exclusion from the 1957 Nobel Prize awarded to Lee and Yang for the parity-violation theory she experimentally confirmed is widely cited as a case where an experimentalist's proof mattered less to the committee than the theorists' idea.

⚛️The Greats

The all-time podium