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Antoine Lavoisier
He recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783) and opposed the phlogiston theory. Lavoisier helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He predicted the existence of silicon (1787) and was also the first to establish that sulfur was an element (1777) rather than a compound. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same. -
Joseph Proust
Proust’s largest accomplishment into the realm of science was disproving Berthollet with the law of definite proportions, which is sometimes also known as Proust's Law. Proust studied copper carbonate, the two tin oxides, and the two iron sulfides to prove this law. -
Michael Faraday
He similarly discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology. -
Marie Curie
She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Floating University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. -
J.J.Thomson
In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively charged particles, which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large value for their charge-to-mass ratio. H,e is credited with the discovery and identification of the electron; and with the discovery of the first subatomic particle. -
Henri Becquerel
He was a physicist, Nobel laureate, and the discoverer of radioactivity, for work in this field he, along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel is named after him. -
Robert Milikan
In 1909 Millikan began a series of experiments to determine the electric charge carried by a single electron. He began by measuring the course of charged water droplets in an electric field. The results suggested that the charge on the droplets is a multiple of the elementary electric charge, but the experiment was not accurate enough to be convincing. -
Niels Bohr
Niels was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. -
Ernest Schrodinger
In Niels Bohr's theory of the atom, the electrons absorb and emit radiation of fixed wavelengths when jumping between the fixed orbits around a nucleus. The theory gave a good description of the spectrum from the hydrogen atom, but must be further developed for more complicated atoms and molecules. Assuming that matter, e.g. electrons, could be regarded both as particles and as waves, Erwin Schrödinger formulated in 1926 a wave-equation that accurately gave the energy levels of atoms. -
James Chadwick
Chadwick pursued a line of research that led to his discovery of the neutron in 1932, and went on to measure its mass. He anticipated that neutrons would become a major weapon in the fight against cancer. C -
Otto Hahn
Otto was a German chemist and pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery and the radiochemical proof of nuclear fission. He is often referred to as the "father of nuclear chemistry". -
Max Planck
Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as an originator of the quantum theory. However, his name is also known on a broader academic basis, through the renaming in 1948 of the German scientific institution. -
Glen T. Seaborg
Seaborg was the principal or co-discoverer of ten elements: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and element 106, which, while he was still living, was named seaborgium in his honor. -
Ernest Rutherford
Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei. Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus,and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery.
