Important Chemistry People

Wolfgang Pauli

Austrian theoretical physicist who was one of the pioneers of quantum physics. Pauli received the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Louis de Broglie

French physicist and aristocrat who postulated in his 1924 PhD thesis the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave-particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics. De Broglie won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics, after the wave-like behavior of matter was first experimentally demonstrated in 1927.

Werner Heisenberg

German theoretical physicist who was one of the three men credited with the discovery of modern mechanics. His breakthrough paper on quantum mechanics was published in 1925. He is also known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927.

Ernest Rutherford

in a series of experiments (now called the famous gold foil experiments) performed between 1908 and 1913 with his colleagues Geiger and Marsden showed that over 99.9% of the mass of the atom is located in a very small positively charged region at the center which Rutherford termed the nucleus.

Robert Millikan

American physicist who in 1909 deduced the charge of a single electron with his now famous oil drop experiment.

Erwin Schrodinger

Austrian-Irish physicist who was one of the three men credited with the discovery of modern quantum mechanics. His breakthrough paper on the wave mechanics formalism of quantum mechanics which presented what is now known as the Schrödinger equation was published in January of 1926. He is also known for his "Schrödinger's cat" thought-experiment which illustrates what he saw as the problem of the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-live cats as a serious possibility; rather, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.

JJ Thomson

British physicist who measured the charge to mass ratio of the electron in 1897. His work showed that cathode rays were composed of particles and showed that the atom was not indivisible. He proposed the plum-pudding model of the atom.

Thomas Young

British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. His now famous doublet-slit experiment of 1801 proved that light behaves as a wave and produces an interference pattern.

Niels Bohr

Danish physicist who created the old quantum theory in 1913 which envisioned electrons orbiting the nucleus in quantized orbits and emitting radiation only when falling from a higher allowed orbit to a lower one. This theory reproduced line spectra for the hydrogen atom and for the helium cation, but failed for multielectron systems. For this work, Bohr won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the chief spokesman for modern quantum theory once it was discovered in 1925 and 1926.

John Dalton

English chemist who published the law of multiple proportions in 1804 and combined this law with the law of definite proportions and the law of conservation of mass and formulated a coherent atomic theory in 1808

Henry Moseley

English physicist who proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table. Thus, he proposed that the periodic table be ordered by atomic number rather than atomic mass. Moseley was shot and killed during World War I in the Battle of Gallipoli on August 10, 1915, at the age of 27. Experts have speculated that Moseley could otherwise have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1916.

Paul Dirac

English theoretical physicist who was one of the three men credited with the discovery of modern quantum mechanics. His formulation of quantum mechanics allowed him to obtain the quantization rules in a more direct manner. For his work, published in 1926, Dirac received a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. In 1928 he proposed the Dirac equation as a relativistic equation of motion for the wave function of the electron. This work led Dirac to predict the existence of the positron, the electron's antiparticle. The positron was observed experimentally by Carl Anderson in 1932 which was the same year Chadwick discovered the neutron.. Dirac's equation also contributed to explaining the origin of quantum spin as a relativistic phenomenon.

Joseph Proust

French chemist who formulated the law of definite proportions in 1797.

Antoine Lavoisier

French chemist who is often known as the father of modern chemistry; formulated the law of conservation of mass in 1789.

Dmitri Mendeleev

Russian chemist who formulated the Periodic Law which states that when the elements are arranged in order of increasing mass, certain sets of properties recur periodically. He arranged the known elements into the first periodic table where mass increased from left to right and where elements with similar properties fell on the same column. He used the Periodic Law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, but also to predict the properties of eight elements that were yet to be discovered (gallium and germanium are two examples).

Marie Curie

coined the word "radioactivity"; first woman to win a Nobel Prize (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903); first person to win two Nobel Prizes (Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for the discovery of radium and polonium); only person in history to win the Nobel Prize in two different sciences.

Max Planck

first introduced the concept of quantized energy in a paper in 1900.

Chemistry

the central science; the study of matter and the changes it may undergo; the science that seeks to understand the properties of matter by studying the particles that compose it

Albert Einstein

used Plank's idea to solve the problem of the photoelectric effect in 1905 for which he later won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. His solution showed that the energy of the light was quantized and that light had a particle nature as well as a wave nature.