"Could anything at first sight seem
more impractical than a body which is
so small that its mass is an
insignificant fraction of the mass of
an atom of hydrogen?"
-- J.J. Thomson.
* Sir Joseph John Thomson was born December 18, 1856 in Cheetham Hill near Manchester, England.
* His dad was a bookkeeper in Manchester who died with Thomson was 16 years old.
* He entered Owens College, now known as the Victoria University of Manchester, at age 14.
* There he took courses in experimental physics and math.
* In 1876, he obtained a scholarship for Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and remained there for the rest of his life.
* In 1890, he married Rose Elisabeth.
* He and Rose had a son, Sir George Paget Thomson, Emeritus Professor of Physics at London University, and a daughter.
* Thomson taught mathematics and physics at Cambridge, succeeding Lord Rayleigh as professor of physics at the age of 27.
* He became director of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory to do research from 1884 through 1919.
* For his involvement in the scientific community, he was appointed president of the Royal Society, a position he maintained from 1915 through 1920.
* He was invited to be professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institute of Great Britain from 1905 to 1918.
* He served as master of Trinity College from 1918 until his death.
* He was also very active in many other fields of interest other than science. He was involved in politics, current fiction, drama, university sports, and the non-technical aspects of science.
* His greatest interest outside of physics was plants. He enjoyed walks in the hilly regions near Cambridge, where he searched for rare botanical specimens for his garden.
* He died August 30, 1940 at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. He was given the honor of burial in the Westminster Abbey.
* J.J. Thomson attempted to solve the argument on the nature of cathode rays in 1897. For these investigations he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1906.
Charles attended Brentwood School in Essex which is father was headmaster of but in 1894 Charles changed schools to Clifton College before winning a scholarship to Hertford College in Oxford in 1898.
Later when he was 25 years (1870) he became fireman on the railroad and at night he went to a local business college.
Even if he wasn't seeking new advances in science, he sought to improve the human condition. Theodore gave his fellow people a fair chance of freedom and opportunity for success. He valued everyone. He wanted everyone to have equality and for the human condition to progress forward. He accomplished his tasks and equality for all is improving every day.
of a Naturalist". He went on to lecture at Queens and in 1973 he left
John Smith was born on January 8, 1580 in a small town of Willoughby, Lincolnshire, England. A couple days after John's birth, he was baptized. John's father, George was a farmer who owned his own business. Both John's parents, George and Alice, expected him to become a farmer and take over his father's business. John had other plans, he wanted to explore to world.
Henry Thoreau, like Goethe before him, showed a lasting interest in science. (2) He belonged to the Boston Natural History Society from 1850 onwards, and read widely in the current scientific literature. Beyond this, Thoreau was intensely interested in the scientific puzzles suggested by his own rambles around Concord, Massachusetts. In the years following Walden’s publication he observed more systematically and tested his hypotheses more rigorously, and published one of the first scholarly discussions on forest succession. Some historians rate Thoreau as one of the founders of the modern science of ecology. (3)
John Dalton was born on September 6 1766 at Eagelsfield, Cumbria in England.Although he was born in England, he spent most of his life in Manchester.He was born into a Quaker family and while his family had food, they were still poor. His father Joseph was a weaver and John recieved most of his early education from his father. At the age of 12, John opened a school in Eagelsfield where he was the master. He was often threatened by the older boys who wanted to fight him because he was smarter, but he managed to keep in control for 2 years.Due to a poor salary, John was forced to leave his school and work in the fields with his brother. In 1781 John and his brother moved to Kendall. There John, his cousin George, and his brother ran a school where they offered English,Latin,Greek,French and twenty one mathematics and science course. Their school had sixty pupils. After twelve years at Kendall John started doing lectures and answering questions for mens magazines. John found a mentor in John Gough,who was the blind son of a wealthy tradesman. John Gough taught Dalton languages,mathematics,and optics. In 1973 John moved to Manchester as a tutor at New College. He immediately joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and in the same year he published his first book: Meteorological Observations and Essays. In his book Dalton stated that gas exits and acts independantly and purely physically not chemically. After six years of tutoring, John resigned to conduct private research while still doing tutoring at 2 shillings a lesson. In 1802 John stated his law of partial pressures. When two elastic fluids are mixed together ( A and B) they dont repel each other. A particles do not repel B particles but a B particle will repel another B particle. One of his experiments involved the addition of water vapor to dry air. The increase in pressure was the same as the pressure of the added water. By doing this experiment, John established a relationship between vapor pressure and temperature. John’s interest in gases arose from his studies of meteorology. He had weather equipment that was with him at all times and he was constantly studying weather and atmosphere. He also kept a journal throughout his life in which he wrote over 200,000 observations. In 1803, John made his biggest contribution to science: The Atomic Theory.
In the first several chapters of The Double Helix, James Watson gives detailed descriptions of the places and people who were of some importance in this charade of science. Watson wrote of his personal history and of how he arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In this laboratory was a yet-unknown thirty-five year old man named Frances Crick . When Watson joined the team at Cavendish it was to help continue studies on the structure of proteins. Some of the people in the lab that Watson mentioned were Sir Lawr...
Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1911), The Principles of Scientific Management, New York, NY, USA and London, UK: Harper & Brothers
Sir William Rowan Hamilton was born on August 4, 1805 in Dublin, Ireland. His remarkable intelligence developed at the early age of 3, and he made many successful contributions in math and science. Hamilton excelled in the dynamics of the math and science world such as geometrical optics, quaternions, Cayley-Hamilton theorem, and Hamiltonian mechanics.
After scoping out the DNA-research picture, Watson got a job at the Cambridge lab where Francis Crick, Max Perutz, and Sir Lawrence Bragg were working. Francis was rumored to be immodest and exceedingly talkative, at times irritating Bragg to the point of considering kicking him out of the lab. He was extremely enthusiastic about his work and eager to share his theories with anyone who would listen and intently studied and experimented with things that were important in the scientific world, perhaps only because they
Henry Cavendish was born October 10, 1731 in Nice, France. His mother, Lady Anne Grey was the daughter of the first Duke of Kent while his father Lord Charles Cavendish, was second Duke of Devonshire. His ancestry links back to many of the aristocratic families in Great Britain. The chemist/physicist is most accredited for the discovery of hydrogen, the “inflammable air” and measuring the Earth’s density, but he also researched and discovered many other important scientific revolutions.
England's most talented and well know poet and dramatist was born on April 23, 1564, at Stratford-upon-Avon, located in the cetre of England. His father, John, was a glove-maker and wool dealer involved with money lending. His mother Mary Arden was the daughter of a Farmer. William was the third out of eight children whom all died young. His father became Mayor in 1568, after serving on the town council for many years.
Of all the scientists to emerge from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there is one whose name is known by almost all living people. While most of these do not understand this mans work, everyone knows that his impact on the world is astonishing.
The dates regarding the advent of Mathematical Physics vary just as how the dates concerning the advent of Mathematics and Physics vary from person to person and from tale to tale. There is an account which says that the methods of Mathematical Physics as a theory of mathematical model in Physics can be traced in the works of Newton and his contemporaries such as Lagrange, Euler, Laplace, Gauss and others who contributed in the advancement of methods of Mathematical Physics. However, there is a version especially that of which written in The Evolution of Mathematical Physics (1924) by Lamb laying the mark of its birth in 1807; the date after the French Revolution had subsided and later succeeded by the relative tranquility of the early empire, and the year when Laplace, Lagrange, and several other mathematicians used Newton’s scientific work to model, describe and predict the motion of celestial and terrestrial bodies. In this age, the methods of Mathematical Physics were successfully used in studying mathematical models of physical phenomena. These models have something to do with electrodynamics, acoustics, theory of elasticity, hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, and other related areas. The models used were usually described using partial differential equation, integral and integrodifferential equations, variational and probability theory methods, potential theory, the theory of functions of complex variable. Some of the dominant western mathematicians and scientist who succeeded in studying and describing the physical world by mathematical modeling are Lord Kelvin, George Stokes, James Clerk Maxwell, and Guthrie Tait.