Important Scientists

I have included here biographies of a selected number of important physicists and astronomers, with particular emphasis on the key 20th Century theoretical physicists involved in areas of quantum theory, relativity and astrophysics.

In alphabetical order:

Although the development of modern physics owes a huge debt to physicists, scientists and philosophers of the 19th Century and earlier, (including but not limited to James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, Daniel Bernoulli, André-Marie Ampère, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Robert Boyle, Thomas Young, Michael Faraday, John Dalton, Christiaan Huygens, Blaise Pascal, Johannes Kepler and of course Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton), a detailed consideration of these contributors is outside the scope of this website.

Likewise, the decision to focus on these contributors in particular, at the expense of others (such as Henri Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz, Paul Ehrenfest, Willem de Sitter, Max Born, David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski, Satyendra Nath Bose, Sir James Jeans, Otto Hahn, Enrico Fermi, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, Leó Szilárd, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Richard Feynman, Roger Penrose, John Polkinghorne, Martin Rees, Sir Martin Ryle, Lev Landau, etc) is purely my own and in the interests of expediency.

As in the other sections, the green links (like this one) are handy popup "sticky boxes" for quick and simple explanations of the most common technical terms and important concepts, while the regular blue links are to other sections and biographies of other scientists.