My Science School

            Max Ferdinand Perutz was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962, jointly with English biochemist John Kendrew, for their investigation on the structure of haemoglobin.

          Max Perutz was born on 19th May 1914, in Vienna, Austria, where his father owned a textile factory. He took his Ph.D from Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1936.

          Max Perutz applied the most powerful device X-ray crystallography to analyze the structure of haemoglobin. During the 1930s, this method was used to map increasingly large and complex molecules. He began to map the structure of haemoglobin, for example - the protein that allows blood to transport energy-giving oxygen to the body’s muscles.

          He received several awards including the Royal Medal in 1971, and the Copley Medal in 1979 from the Royal Society’ of London.

          On 6th February, 2002, he succumbed to cancer.

 

 

        Sully Prudhomme, the French essayist and poet in 1901, had the honour of winning the first Nobel Prize in Literature.

          Born on the 16th March 1839, in Paris, little is recorded about his upbringing, but it is known that he was originally studying engineering but he changed streams and studied philosophy instead. He had already begun writing poetry as a student, and his debut came in 1865.

          Much of his work demonstrated a sometimes sentimental, and certainly personal, style with a heavy leaning towards his interests in philosophy and all things scientific.

          He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect. Sully Prudhomme died in1907.

            Rudyard Kipling was an English writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his poems and stories set in India during the  period  British imperial rule.

            Kipling was born in Bombay, but educated in England. In 1882, aged sixteen, he returned to Lahore, where his parents then lived. He worked for Anglo-Indian newspapers there.

           His literary career began with ‘Departmental Ditties’ published in 1886. His children’s books are classics of children’s literature. Rudyard Kipling wrote the most famous children’s book in world history- ‘The Jungle Book’ in 1894.

          In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.

         His other works are ‘Stalky and Co.’, ‘Kim’ and ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’. The ‘Just So Stories’ were originally written for his daughter Josephine, who died of pneumonia aged six.

         Rudyard Kipling died on 18th January, 1936.

          William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Born in Dublin, Ireland, on 13th June 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats.

          A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped in founding the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years, served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Though his works after 1910 was strongly influenced by Ezra Pound, becoming more modern in its imagery, W. B. Yeats was loyal to the traditional verse forms.

          He won the Nobel Prize in the year 1923 for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation. William Butler Yeats used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence.

          His first significant poem was ‘The Island of Statues’, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser and Shelley for its poetic models.

          His first solo publication was the pamphlet ‘Mosada: A Dramatic Poem’. Yeats died in 1939.

             George Bernard Shaw was born on 26th July 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. He was a renowned playwright, critic and polemicist. When Shaw was 15-years-old, his mother left him and his father.

            Later, Shaw’s plays, including ‘Misalliance’, are filled with problematic parent-child relationships: with children who are brought up in isolation from their parents.

            He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as ‘Widowers’ Houses’, ‘Pygmalion’ and ‘Candida’. George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 1925.

            Over a decade later in 1938 he earned an Academy Award for the film adaptation of ‘Pygmalion’. In the final decade of his life, he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death. Bernard Shaw refused all state honours including the Order of Merit in 1946.

          Bernard Shaw’s complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950.

          Today he is considered as one of the greatest wits of English language. Film adaptations of his plays are considered classics.

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             A chemist and physicist, Ernest Rutherford was the central figure in the study of radioactivity who led the exploration of nuclear physics. Ernest Rutherford was born on 30th August 1871, in New Zealand. He is considered be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday.

               After studying at the Cavendish Laboratory, Rutherford became a professor at McGill University in Canada. Being the first to split the atom, Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of atomic structure. Working with Frederick Soddy, Rutherford advanced the hypothesis that helium gas could be formed from radioactive substances.

               He discovered that radioactive preparations gave rise to the formation of gases. Rutherford had an enormous influence in the field of nuclear physics and mentored scientists, including Chadwick, Niels Bohr, and Otto Hahn. He died on October 19th, 1937.

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               Sir William Ramsay was a Scottish physical chemist who at the end of the 19th century discovered four new elements. These were the noble gases, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon; they added a whole new group to the Periodic Table of the elements.

               William Ramsay was born on 2nd October 1852, and received his basic education in Glasgow before traveling to Germany to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of this achievement.

               The remarkable inertness of the newly found elements resulted in their use for special purposes, for example, helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen for lighter-than-air craft and argon to conserve the filaments in light bulbs.

               Upon the outbreak of war in 1914, he became involved in efforts to secure the participation of scientific experts in the creation of government science policy. He died on 23rd July, 1916.

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            Hermann Emil Louis Fischer was a renowned German chemist of the 19th century, who did pioneering work in the field of organic chemistry. He was born on 9th October 1852, in Germany.

            In 1874, he received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg, under Adolph von Baeyer.

            Fischer demonstrated the structure of biological compounds for instance sugars, proteins and purines. He also worked on the organic synthesis of glucose. This work showed that various substances, little known at that time, such as adenine, xanthine, caffeine all belonged to one homogeneous family and could be derived from one another.

            This parent substance, which at first he regarded as being hypothetical, he called purine in 1884, and he synthesized it in 1898.

            In 1902 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on sugar and purine syntheses. Fischer died in Berlin on July 15th, 1919. 

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          Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff was the first person to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was a Dutch physicist and organic chemist, who became the first to propose a three-dimensional model for the structure of simple carbon compounds. His pioneering work helped found the modern theory of chemical affinity, chemical equilibrium, and chemical thermodynamics.

          He is also widely considered as one of the founders of physical chemistry as the discipline is known today.

          Jacobus Henricus was born in Netherlands, and earned his doctorate in Utrecht in 1874. In 1885, van’t Hoff was appointed as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

          Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901. Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff died on 1st March, 1911.

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            Italian physicist Enrico Fermi built the prototype of a nuclear reactor and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. Enrico Fermi was born in Rome  on 29th September, 1901.

            Enrico Fermi has been called ‘the architect of the nuclear age’, and ‘the architect of the atomic bomb’. He was one of the very few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally.

            In 1934, Fermi began his most important work with the atom, discovering that nuclear transformation could occur in nearly every element. One of the elements’ atoms he split was uranium. This work led to the discovery of slowing down neutrons, which led to nuclear fission, and the production of new elements beyond the traditional Periodic Table.

            In 1938, Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with artificial radioactivity produced by neutrons, and for nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.

            During the last years of his life Fermi occupied himself with the problem of the mysterious origin of cosmic rays. He died in Chicago on 28th November, 1954.

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          The Nobel Prize in Physics 1935 was awarded to James Chadwick for the discovery of the neutron. Chadwick was born in England on 20th October 1891. He attended Manchester High School prior to entering Manchester University in 1908. He graduated with first class honours in 1911.

          When Herbert Becker and Walter Bothe directed alpha particles (helium nuclei) at beryllium in 1930, a strong, penetrating radiation was emitted. One hypothesis was that this could be high-energy electromagnetic radiation.

          In 1932, Chadwick made the fundamental discovery that it actually consisted of a neutral particle about the same mass as a proton, and proved the existence of neutrons. Ernest Rutherford had earlier proposed that such a particle might exist in atomic nuclei.

          He was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1932, and subsequently the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935. James Chadwick died on 24th July, 1974.

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               Erwin Schrodinger is a renowned Austrian physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter, and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics, which formed the basis of wave mechanics. He formulated the wave equation.

               He was born on 12th August 1887 in Austria. Schrodinger proposed an original interpretation of the physical meaning of the wave function. The Schrodinger equation, which he formulated to describe the quantum state of a system, is his biggest achievement.

               In Niels Bohr’s theory of the atom, electrons absorb and emit radiation of fixed wavelengths when jumping between fixed orbits around a nucleus.

               In 1926, Erwin Schrodinger formulated a wave equation that accurately calculated the energy levels of electrons in atoms.

               Schrodinger died on 4th January, 1961.

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          Paul Dirac was a British theoretical physicist who is particularly known for his attempts to unify the theories of quantum mechanics, and the relativity theory.

          Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on 8th August 1902 in Bristol, England. He became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1932, a post he held for the next 37 years.

          In 1933, he published a pioneering paper on Lagrangian quantum mechanics. The importance of Dirac’s work lies essentially in his famous wave equation, which introduced special relativity into Erwin Schrodinger’s equation. The equation is a mathematical formulation for studying quantum mechanical systems.

          The Nobel Prize in Physics 1933 was awarded jointly to Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.

          He was also awarded the Royal Medal in 1939, the Copley Medal, and the Max Planck Medal both in 1952, among other honours, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930 and of the American Physical Society in 1948.

          Dirac died on 20th October 1984, in Florida, US where he is buried.

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               German physicist Gustav Hertz, born on 22nd July 1887 in Hamburg, won the Nobel Prize in 1925, for the Franck-Hertz Experiment conducted in 1914 with James Franck, who shared the Nobel honour.

               Gustav Ludwig Hertz and James Frank established the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom through their ground-breaking experiment.

               After the publication of Niels Bohr’s theory on the structure of the atom, Gustav Hertz and James Franck studied the movements of free electrons in various gases, and the impacts these electrons have on an atom’s functions. They conducted an experiment in 1913 to verify Bohr’s theory. A potential difference was applied to a tube containing a low-pressure gas. The potential difference increased the free electrons’ mobility until, at a certain energy level; they jumped to a higher-energy orbit instead.

               Hertz was a Member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Corresponding Member of the Gottingen Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Gustav Hertz died in 1975 and James Franck in 1964.

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            Niels Bohr was a Nobel prize-winning physicist and   humanitarian who made revolutionary theories on atomic structures.

            Bohr was born on 7th October 1885, in Copenhagen. He earned a doctorate in physics in 1911 from the Copenhagen University. The discoveries of the electron and radioactivity at the end of the 19th century led to different models for the structure of the atom.

            In 1913, Bohr developed his model of atomic structure, known as the Bohr model, which depicts the atom as a small, positively-charged nucleus, surrounded by negatively-charged electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus, similar in structure to the Solar System.

            In 1921, Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute. The element bohrium (Bh) was named after him. Niels Bohr died on 18th November, 1962.

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