Famous physical scientists

Thomas Edison

American inventor and businessman who invented or marketed many modern devices such as the record-player, the movie camera, and a practical, long-lasting light bulb.

Samuel Morse

American painter and inventor who contributed to the invention of the telegraph system and was a co-developer of the Morse code.

Ernest Rutherford

American physicist who became known as the "father of nuclear physics" and is considered one of the greatest experimentalist scientists.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

American theoretical physicist and professor of physics who is known as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his help in developing the Atomic Bomb.

Archimedes

Ancient Greek mathematician who explained the physical law of Buoyancy through the Archimedes' Principle.

Christian Doppler

Austrian mathematician and physicist celebrated for his principle (known as the Doppler Effect) that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer, a concept which he used to explain the color of binary stars.

Benjamin Franklin

Founding father of the United States who is often called the "first American" scientist who became famous for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity, as well as for inventing the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions.

Blaise Pascal

French mathematician, physicist, and inventor whose earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and explained the concepts of pressure by adapting earlier scientists works.

Andre-Marie Ampere

French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics", and for whom the unit of measurement of electric current (the ampere) is named after.

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

French physicist who was best known for developing Coulomb's law, the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion, but also did important work on friction.

Georg Ohm

German physicist and mathematician best known for his "Ohm's Law", which states that the current flow through a conductor is directly proportional to the voltage difference and inversely proportional to the resistance, and for whom the physical unit of electrical resistance, the Ohm, was named.

Albert Einstein

German theoretical physicist best known for his development of the General Theory of Relativity and his development of the Mass-Energy Equivalency formula: E = mc2.

Guglielmo Marconi

Italian inventor and electrical engineer, often credited as the inventor of radio, known for his pioneering work on long-distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system.

Alessandro Volta

Italian physicist and chemist credited with the invention of the first electrical battery (known as the voltaic pile or voltaic column), and who inspired the Volt, a unit of electrical potential, to be named in his honor.

James Watt

Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer who was called the "father of the industrial revolution" because his improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution, and who developed the concept of horsepower measured in a unit called Watts.

Alexander Graham Bell

Scottish scientist and inventor who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone for household use.

James Clerk Maxwell

Scottish scientist in the field of mathematical physics whose most important achievement was formulating the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first time electricity, magnetism, and light as manifestations of the same phenomenon.

Nikola Tesla

Serbian-American inventor, electrical and mechanical engineer famous for the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

Niels Bohr

Danish physicist who made enormous contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.

Thomas Young

English physician, physicist, and Egyptologist who established the principle of interference of light and resurrected the century-old wave theory of light, and helped decipher the Rosetta Stone.

Michael Faraday

English physicist and chemist whose many experiments contributed greatly to the understanding of electromagnetism.

Isaac Newton

English physicist and mathematician whose three laws of motion became the basic principles of modern physics and resulted in the formulation of the law of universal gravitation.

James Prescott Joule

English physicist who studied the nature of heat and discovered its relationship to mechanical work, leading to the law of conservation of energy and the development of the first law of thermodynamics.

William Gilbert (a.k.a. Gilberd)

English scientist and physician who is credited by many as the "father of electricity and magnetism" and who coined the term "electricity".

Stephen Hawking

English theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose major contributions have been collaboration on gravitational singularity theorems, and the prediction that black holes emit radiation.