Fall.2008.MMA.Doucette.O'Brien.Timeline


 * Will Doucette and Brendan O'Brien's WIKI for Dr. Reich (like bike)**

Born and Died: 460 B.C. - 370 B.C.
 * Democritus** was a Greek philosopher born in Thrace. His teacher was another Greek philosopher named Leucippus. An important theory of his was that of matter. Democritus believed that matter was made up of extremely small indivisible units, which he called atomas, or atoms. Democritus gained most of his knowlege because of his extremely wealthy father. He used his father's money to travel the lands, on a personal quest for knowledge. Democritus had an unquenchable thirst for learning, and as he went through various city stater, he picked up more and more information on the world he lived in. Later in his life, he used the cumilative information he learned, and came up with his theory on matter.

Born and Died: 1643-1727
 * Sir Isaac Newton** a mathematician and physicist, one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. Born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, where he attended school, he entered Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. He remained at the university, lecturing in most years, until 1696. Of these Cambridge years, in which Newton was at the height of his creative power, he singled out 1665-1666 as "the prime of my age for invention". During two to three years of intense mental effort he prepared //Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica// (//Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy//) commonly known as the //Principia,// although this was not published until 1687.

Born and Died: 1766-1844 Dalton arrived at his view of atomism by way of meteorology. In which he was seriously interested for a long period: he kept daily weather records from 1787 until his death, his first book was //Meteorological Observations// published in 1793. He read a series of papers on meteorological topics before the Literary and Philosophical Society between 1799 and 1801. He proceeded to calculate atomic weights from percentage compositions of compounds, using an arbitrary system to determine the likely atomic structure of each compound. If there are two elements that can combine, their combinations will occur in a set sequence.
 * John Dalton** was born in Cumberland, England, in a Quaker family. For a portion of his life his main profession was teaching and lecturing in his village school when he was 12. After teaching 10 years at a Quaker boarding school in Kendal, he moved on to a teaching position in the burgeoning city of Manchester. There he joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which provided him with a stimulating intellectual environment and laboratory facilities. The first paper he delivered before the society was on color blindness, which afflicted him and is sometimes still called "Daltonism."


 * Wilhem C Roentgen** was born in Lennep, Germany, in 1845. He was born to a wealthy family, which funded a part of his education. He was the primary discoverer of the Xray, which lead to his winning of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, at the age of 56. The famous first picture of an xray was taken by Roentgen of his wife's hand, which showed her bones, and a ring on one of her fingers. Later in his life he became a teacher, and taught at the University of Munich until 1920, when he retired 3 years before his death.

Born and Died: 1852-1908 Becquerel's earliest work was concerned with the plane polarization of light, with the phenomenon of phosphorescence and with the absorption of light by crystals. For his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity Becquerel was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, the other half being given to Pierre and Marie Curie for their study of the Becquerel radiation. He was elected a member of the Academie des Sciences de France in 1889 and succeeded Berthelot as Life Secretary of that body. He was a member also of the Accademia dei Lincei and of the Royal Academy of Berlin, amongst others. He was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1900.
 * Henri Becquerel** was born in Paris on December 15, 1852, a member of a distinguished family of scholars and scientists. His father, Alexander Edmond Becquerel, was a Professor of Applied Physics and had done research on solar radiation and on phosphorescence, while his grandfather, Antoine César, had been a Fellow of the Royal Society and the inventor of an electrolytic method for extracting metals from their ores.

Born and Died: 1856-1940 In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his researches into the discharge of electricity in gases. Even though he was clumsy with his hands, he had a genius for designing apparatus and diagnosing its problems. He was a good lecturer, encouraged his students, and devoted attention to the wider problems of science by teaching at university and secondary levels. Of all the physicists associated with determining the structure of the atom, Thomson focused mostly on the chemistry portion of the subject.
 * J.J. Thomson** enrolled at Owens College, Manchester, in 1870, and in 1876 entered Trinity College, Cambridge as a minor scholar. He became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1880, when he was Second Wrangler and Second Smith's Prizeman. Thomson's early interest in atomic structure was reflected in his //Treatise on the Motion of Vortex Rings// which won him the Adams Prize in 1884.

Born and Died: 1867-1934
 * Marie Curie** was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the daughter of a secondary-school teacher. She received some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students' revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics in 1894 and in the following year they were married. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.

Born and Died: 1871-1937 At Manchester, Rutherford conducted research on the properties of the radium emanation and of the alpha rays and, in conjunction with H. Geiger, a method of detecting a single alpha particle and counting the number emitted from radium was devised. In 1910, his investigations into the scattering of alpha rays and the nature of the inner structure of the atom which caused such scattering led to the postulation of his concept of the "nucleus", his greatest contribution to physics. According to him practically the whole mass of the atom and at the same time all positive charge of the atom is concentrated in a minute space at the centre.
 * Ernest Rutherford** was born on August 30, 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand, the fourth child and second son in a family of seven sons and five daughters. His father James Rutherford, a Scottish wheelwright, emigrated to New Zealand with Ernest's grandfather and the whole family in 1842. He earned his early education through the government and then at the age of 16 he entered Nelson Collegiate School. Rutherford was knighted in 1914; he was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1925, and in 1931 he was created First Baron Rutherford of Nelson, New Zealand, and Cambridge. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1903 and was its President from 1925 to 1930.

Born and Died: 1879-1955 In the 1920's, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories, although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory, and he persevered with this work in America. He contributed to statistical mechanics by his development of the quantum theory of a monatomic gas and he has also accomplished valuable work in connection with atomic transition probabilities and relativistic cosmology.
 * Albert Einstein** was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree.

Born and Died: 1885-1962 At some point during World War 2 he left Copenhagen in fear of the Nazis. He came back after the war to Copenhagen and later helped find the peaceful use of atomic energy.
 * Niels Henrik David Bohr** was born October 7, 1885. Got his education from Copenhagen University in Copenhagen. Won the 1922 Nobel Proze in Physics for his work with atomic structure. Studied under Ernest Rutherford after his graduation in 1911, when he moved to Manchester. Discovered that atoms have a positively charged nuclues with negatively charged electrons that orbit around it. Became a professor of physics at the University in 1916 after doing work with Ritherford. In 1920 he was the director of the institue of theoretical physics.

Born and Died: 1886 - 1953 **Robert Millikan** in 1893, after obtaining his mastership in physics, he was appointed Fellow in Physics at Columbia University. He afterwards received his Ph.D. in 1895 for research on the polarization of light emitted by incandescent surfaces - using for this purpose molten gold and silver at the U.S. Mint. On the instigation of his professors, Millikan spent a year in Germany, at the Universities of Berlin and Göttingen. He returned at the invitation of A. A. Michelson, to become assistant at the newly established Ryerson Laboratory at the University of Chicago (1896). Millikan was an eminent teacher, and passing through the customary grades he became professor at that university in 1910, a post which he retained till 1921. As a scientist, Millikan made numerous momentous discoveries, chiefly in the fields of electricity, optics, and molecular physics. His earliest major success was the accurate determination of the charge carried by an electron, using the elegant "falling-drop method"; he also proved that this quantity was a constant for all electron in 1910.

Born and Died: 1887-1961 It came as a result of his dissatisfaction with the quantum condition in Bohr's orbit theory and his belief that atomic spectra should really be determined by some kind of eigenvalue problem. For this work he shared with Dirac the Nobel Prize for 1933.
 * Erwin Schrodinger** was born in Vienna, the only child of Rudolf Schrödinger. Schrödinger graduated from the Akademisches Gymnasium in 1906 and, in that year, entered the University of Vienna. On May 20, 1910, Schrödinger was awarded his doctorate for the dissertation //On the conduction of electricity on the surface of insulators in moist air.// After this he undertook voluntary military service in the fortress artillery. In the spring of 1917 Schrödinger was sent back to Vienna and assigned to teach a course in meteorology.

Born and Died: 1891-1974 Chadwick smashed alpha particles into beryllium, a rare metallic element, and allowed the radiation that was released to hit another target: paraffin wax. When the beryllium radiation hit hydrogen atoms in the wax, the atoms were sent into a detecting chamber.
 * James Chadwick** was born in Cheshire, England and attended Manchester University in 1908. Chadwicks work and studies focused mostly on radioactivity. Chadwick was the physicist who discovered the neutron. Chadwick's research toward the fission of Uranium 235 led to him recieving the Nobel Prize in physics.

Born and Died: 1901-1976 Heisenburg was one of the nine head leaders of the Uranium Club, a group set forth by Hitler to do research on nuclear weapons. Before being with the Uraniem Club he studied at Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld and Wilhelm Wien. He studied physics and mathmatics.
 * Werner Heisenberg** a theoretical physicist from Germany best known for uncertainty principle and quantum theory. He made important contributions to quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, quantum field theory, and particle physics. His matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925 led him to his Nobel Prize in physics in 1932.

Born: November 27, 1955 (Bill Nye has a chin that frowns =[ )
 * Bill Nye** began his career at Boeing, where he starred in training films and developed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor still used in the Boeing 747. He went out to become a NASA asrtonaut but was rejected each time. Nye helped with the Mars Rover missions by the development of a small sundial that went on the Rover to Mars. There was color colaboration that helped keep track of time easier.