Archive for June, 2009

Other discoveries and inventions: While Archimedes did not invent the lever, he wrote the earliest known rigorous explanation of the principle involved. According to Pappus of Alexandria, his work on levers caused him to remark: "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth." (Greek: δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ...
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Discoveries and inventions The Golden Crown: The most widely known anecdote about Archimedes tells of how he invented a method for determining the volume of an object with an irregular shape. According to Vitruvius, a new crown in the shape of a laurel wreath had been made for King Hiero II, and Archimedes was...
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Archimedes of Syracuse(c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Among his advances in physics are the foundations of hydrostatics, statics and the explanation of...
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Antoine Henri Becquerel (15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French physicist, Nobel laureate, and one of the discoverers of radioactivity. He won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering radioactivity. Early life: Becquerel was born in Paris into a family which, including him and his son Jean, produced four generations...
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Padma Vibhushan Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS (October 19, 1910 – August 21, 1995) was an Indian born American astrophysicist. He was a Nobel laureate in physics along with William Alfred Fowler for their work in the theoretical structure and evolution of stars. He was the nephew of Indian Nobel...
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The history of quantum mechanics as this interlaces with history of quantum chemistry began essentially with the 1838 discovery of cathode rays by Michael Faraday, during the 1859-1860 winter statement of the black body radiation problem by Gustav Kirchhoff, the 1877 suggestion by Ludwig Boltzmann that the energy states of a physical system could...
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My present-day readers live in a world so dominated by numbers and number-crunching that the question might look childish or even stupid to most. But wait! Tell me what a "number" is before you decide to do something else!
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