Robert Stephenson FRS, HonFRSE, FRSA, DCL (Hon. causa) (October 16, 1803 – October 12, 1859) was an English civil engineer and locomotive designer. He was the only son of George Stephenson, known as the “Father of Railways,” and continued his father’s work.
George Stephenson (9 June 1781 – 12 August 1848) was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer. He was well-known as the “Father of Railways” and was admired by the Victorians for his hard work and determination to improve technology. The rail gauge he chose, sometimes called the “Stephenson gauge,” became the standard used by most railways around the world.
Max Born (German: [ˈmaks ˈbɔʁn]; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German–British theoretical physicist who played a key role in developing quantum mechanics. He also contributed to solid-state physics and optics. He supervised the work of many important physicists during the 1920s and 1930s.
Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld (German: [ˈaʁnɔlt ˈzɔmɐˌfɛlt]; born on December 5, 1868, and died on April 26, 1951) was a German theoretical physicist who helped develop atomic and quantum physics. He also taught and guided many students during the new era of theoretical physics. Sommerfeld helped guide doctoral and postdoctoral students who later became Nobel Prize winners.
Paul Karl Ludwig Drude was a German physicist who worked in the field of optics. He is best known for creating the Drude model. He was born on July 12, 1863, and died on July 5, 1906.
Max Karl Werner Wien was a German scientist who studied physics. He was born on December 25, 1866, and died on February 22, 1938.
Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (German: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈviːn]; 13 January 1864 – 30 August 1928) was a German physicist who studied heat and electromagnetism. He discovered a rule called Wien’s displacement law, which helps calculate how much energy a blackbody emits at any temperature based on its emission at a known temperature. He also created a formula that accurately describes how black-body radiation behaves when light acts like a gas of particles.
Johannes Wilhelm “Hans” Geiger (pronounced GYE-ger or GYE-guh; German: [ˈɡaɪɡɐ]; September 30, 1882 – September 24, 1945) was a German scientist who studied how things work through experiments. He is best known for inventing the Geiger counter, a tool that detects radiation that can change atoms. He also helped conduct the Rutherford scattering experiments, which showed that atoms have a center called a nucleus.
Johannes Stark (German: [joˈhanəs ˈʃtaʁk]; 15 April 1874 – 21 June 1957) was a German physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 for discovering the Stark effect. From 1924, Stark supported Adolf Hitler. He was a key leader, along with another Nobel Prize winner named Philipp Lenard, in the anti-Jewish Deutsche Physik movement.
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (German: [ˈvaltɐ ˈboːtə]; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German experimental physicist who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics with Max Born “for the coincidence method and his discoveries made therewith.” Bothe served in the military during World War I from 1914 and was captured by the Russians, returning to Germany in 1920. After returning to his laboratory, he developed and used coincidence circuits to study nuclear reactions, such as the Compton effect, cosmic rays, and the wave–particle duality of radiation. In 1930, Bothe became a Full Professor and Director of the Physics Department at the University of Giessen.