38
votes
Has there been an equivalent in physics to Ramanujan in maths?
George Green may be considered a physicist or a mathematician. (The titles of his papers suggest a physicist). He was a son of a miller, and a miller himself,
in Nottingham, self educated. At the age ...
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29
votes
Has there been an equivalent in physics to Ramanujan in maths?
Michael Faraday would meet your criteria as a physicist of historic significance without a formal education. Notably, he spent most of his teenage years working as an apprentice bookbinder. Somewhat ...
- 1,548
28
votes
Who was the first to hypothesise that gravity from one mass causes the spacetime around another mass to curve?
The first metric theory of gravitation, in which the effects of gravitation are treated entirely in terms of the geometry of curved spacetime, was published by Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordström in ...
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18
votes
Accepted
Did Richard Feynman ever meet Stephen Hawking or comment on Hawking radiation?
I take that your primary goal is to know what Feynman thought of Hawking's work. While it is possible that they have met I would consider it unlikely given that Feynman mentioned several times how his ...
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18
votes
Which physicists died very young or in a tragic way?
Henry Moseley was KIA at Gallipoli at the age of 27
Rene Gateaux was KIA in the Battle of Grand Couronné at the age of 25. (France lost many young mathematicians in WWI. The list can be continued).
...
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18
votes
Accepted
Who was the first woman to complete the physics and mathematics program in Zürich?
The first woman to complete the course of study in department VI A, mathematics and physics, was Mary Ann Elizabeth Stephansen of Bergen, Norway 4. The diploma in mathematics (specifically, Fachlehrer ...
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17
votes
Accepted
What did Schroedinger try to say with the cat thought experiment?
One can simply read what Schroedinger said, English translation of his paper The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics (1935) by Trimmer is available on Jstor. The cat paradox is presented as part of ...
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16
votes
Has there been an equivalent in physics to Ramanujan in maths?
Other possibilities might be James Joule and Oliver Heaviside.
Joule was a brewer by trade and worked on science entirely as an amateur (as far as I know). He was one of the few examples of a ...
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15
votes
Famous scientists in the Nazi party
The most famous mathematicians who were the members of NSDAP are Ludwig Bieberbach and Oswald Teichmüller.
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15
votes
Why did Einstein oppose quantum uncertainity?
I am not sure what "explain it like a story" means, but the Bohr–Einstein debates is perhaps the most dramatic story of Einstein making his dissatisfaction known. Pais's scientific biography ...
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15
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Which physicists died very young or in a tragic way?
A few more. At the time of their deaths ...
Alexis Thérèse Petit was 28 (tuberculosis): known for work in thermodynamics, including the Dulong–Petit law
Walther Ritz was 31 (tuberculosis): known ...
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12
votes
Accepted
On early US patriotism to choose quark color charge labels
According to the best source, "red, white, and blue" were proposed in honour of France, not the United States.
As discussed in the answer to "Quantum chromodynamics - an origin of the ...
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11
votes
Accepted
Heisenberg's Obituary to Pauli
I think the article in question is:
Heisenberg, W. Wolfgang Paulis philosophische Auffassungen. Naturwissenschaften 46, 661–663 (1959). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00594803
I found it via citation in ...
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11
votes
Heisenberg's Obituary to Pauli
The English translation by Kurt Leidecker is referenced as "Wolfgang Pauli's philosophical views", in Main Currents in Modern Thought, volume 17, pages 51-54 (1961).
The paper is also cited ...
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11
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Accepted
Who were some physicists with musical background?
Classical education included music as one of the liberal arts since the times of Plato's Academy, see quadrivium, so most physicists had musical background until the end of 19th century. But there ...
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10
votes
Accepted
What actually led Feynman to the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics?
It was Dirac's paper The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics. He gave more than just a remark about $\exp{iS/\hbar}$, he described the general structure of the path integral expression for the transition ...
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9
votes
Famous scientists in the Nazi party
The mathematician who would have been famous had he not been a member of the SS / Nazi Party and died in a POW camp is, I think, Gerhard Gentzen. He invented/rigourously described natural deduction ...
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9
votes
Why were 20th Century German scientists so impressive?
Given the historical circumstances the German education system might or might not have played a significant role in the formation of these scientists. In his collection of essays entitled "Brocas ...
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9
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Accepted
How did J.J. Thomson learn that what he discovered was different than an atom or a molecule?
Thomson drew his conclusion based on his calculation of the charge to mass ratio of the "corpuscular carriers of negative charge in cathode rays". Quoting Thomson's Nobel Lecture of 1906:
...
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9
votes
Which physicists died very young or in a tragic way?
Harry Daghlian, 24
Louis Slotin, 35
Both killed at Los Alamos during separate reckless criticality accidents with the same plutonium bomb core (afterwards nicknamed the "Demon Core").
...
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8
votes
Has there been an equivalent in physics to Ramanujan in maths?
Sorry for the hype in this answer. But trying to convey how singular - how truly remarkable Ramanujan was, as a mathematician and innovator, is truly difficult without writing a book on him... so ...
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8
votes
Which physicists died very young or in a tragic way?
Louis Cartan, son of Élie Cartan and brother of Henri Cartan, was a member of the French Resistance and was executed by the Germans in 1943, when he was 33 years old.
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8
votes
Who were some physicists with musical background?
Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist and polymath, is famous for having collaborated with Albert Einstein on his original work, which came to be called Bose-Einstein statistics. However, very few ...
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7
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Did John von Neumann ever go to any Nordic Country? Did Eugene Paul Wigner ever go to any other Nordic country apart from Sweden?
“In Copenhagen again! The brothers Bohr fetched me at the pier, and now I’m established in Niels Bohr’s private palace. I had numerous conversations with the Bohrs and Mrs. Bohr, of course mostly ...
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7
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Names of the electromagnetic units in SI
Actually, the farad was the term used for a unit of charge by Latimer Clark and Charles Bright in 1861 in honour of Michael Faraday.
But by 1873, it had become the unit of capacitance and was adopted ...
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7
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Who were some physicists with musical background?
Boltzmann was a trained classical pianist who, in his teenage years, was taught by no less than Anton Bruckner. We don't know how long these lessons lasted but it is believed that they ended when ...
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7
votes
Who were some physicists with musical background?
William Herschel comes to mind, if you consider this polymath to be a physicist - he built telescopes, discovered infra-red radiation in sunlight, discovered Uranus, and more.
Recordings of his ...
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6
votes
Did Einstein really say: "If I were wrong, it would only take one."
To return to this old question with at least a partial answer: there really was a book called "Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein"; you can read it here:
https://archive.org/details/...
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6
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Famous scientists in the Nazi party
After the Second World War, Operation Paperclip was started to bring certain top German scientists to America. Many of these had worked on military applications for the Nazis (developing rockets etc.),...
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