Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson was a New Zealand chemist who has become known as the “father of nuclear physics.” In 1911, he was the first to discover that atoms have a small charged nucleus surrounded by largely empty space, and are circled by tiny electrons, which became known as the Rutherford model […]

Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist, considered to be the initial founder of quantum theory and one of the most important physicists of the 20th Century. Around the turn of the century, he realized that light and other electromagnetic waves were emitted in discrete packets of energy that he called “quanta” – “quantum” in […]

Wolfgang Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted for his work on spin theory and quantum theory, and for the remarkable discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle, which underpins the structure of matter and the whole of chemistry. Education and Influences Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was born on 25 April 1900 in Vienna, Austria (then Austria-Hungary). […]

Alexander Oparin was a Russian biochemist, notable for his contributions to the theory of the origin of life on Earth, and particularly for the “primordial soup” theory of the evolution of life from carbon-based molecules. Oparin also devoted considerable effort to enzymology and helped to develop the foundations of industrial biochemistry in the USSR. He […]

Monsignor Georges Lemaître was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, physicist, and astronomer. He is usually credited with the first definitive formulation of the idea of an expanding universe and what was to become known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which Lemaître himself called his “hypothesis of the primeval atom” […]