Bilkent erzurum laboratory high school physicists awarded with the nobel prize in physics ozanalp eryilmaz

İHSAN DOĞRAMACI FOUNDATION

BİLKENT ERZURUM LABORATORY HIGH SCHOOL

PHYSICISTS AWARDED WITH THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS

OZANALP ERYILMAZ

RESPONSIBLE TEACHER

MEHMET ALİ DOĞRU

APRIL 6, 2012

ERZURUM

CONTENT

PAGE

HISTORY OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS……………………………..3

STATISTICAL INFORMATION OF THE PRIZES……………………………4

NOBEL LAUREATES IN PHYSICS IN THE 20TH CENTURY……………...5

SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHYSICS…………………………...26

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………31

HISTORY OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS

Alfred Bernhard Nobel, who was both a chemist and an engineer, wrote his last will and testament on November 27, 1895 in Paris. He had a request of allocating %94 of his total fortune “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind” by means of certain prizes. Nobel established five various areas to be awarded by these prizes; physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

As a prominent scientist of all times, Alfred Nobel was closely interested in physics as well. He invented dynamite after he had carried out a series of investigations on an explosive liquid called nitroglycerin. Besides, he gave his name to nobelium, an artificially produced element that decays radioactively, and obtained a total number of 355 patents including dynamite.

Physics was the first area to be made reference to as “one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics”. Perhaps, Alfred Nobel regarded physics as the leading branch of the sciences. Consequently, the Nobel Prize in Physics is annually awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the anniversary of Nobel’s death, December 10.



STATISTICAL INFORMATION OF THE PRIZES

The total number of the Nobel Prizes in Physics awarded is 105 since the beginning of the process in 1901.

There are 6 years in which the prizes were not awarded; 1916, 1931, 1934, 1940, 1941 and 1942. In the first three of these years, none of the studies in physics were found satisfactory (according to Alfred Nobel’s will) to be nominated. In the other years, no prizes were awarded in any category due to the Second World War.

191 different Laureates had the chance of winning this international prize of science.

The country receiving the greatest number of the Nobel Prizes in Physics is the United States with 79 times. Germany is the second with 24 times and the United Kingdom is the third with 20 times.

47 Nobel Prizes had been awarded to one physicist only, 29 prizes were shared by two and 29 prizes were shared by three physicists.

John Bardeen from the United States is the first and only Laureate awarded twice in physics in the years of 1956 and 1972.

Only 2 female Laureates won the Nobel Prize in Physics (Marie Curie from Poland and Maria Goeppert Mayer from the United States).

NOBEL LAUREATES IN PHYSICS IN THE 20TH CENTURY

1901

In the first year of Nobel Prizes, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen from Germany was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him".

1902

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman both from the Netherlands shared the prize "in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena".

1903

In 1903, a half of the prize was offered to Antoine Henri Becquerel from France "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity". The other half was equally shared by Pierre Curie from France and Marie Curie from Poland "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".

1904

John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) from the United Kingdom won this prestigious prize "for his investigations of the densities of the most important gases and for his discovery of argon in connection with these studies".

1905

The German-Hungarian physicist Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard was the winner of the Nobel Prize "for his work on cathode rays".

1906

Joseph John Thomson from the United Kingdom succeeded to receive the prize this year "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases".

1907

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Albert Abraham Michelson from the United States "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid".

1908

The extraordinary achievement of Gabriel Lippmann from France had earned him the award "for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference".

1909

The prize had jointly been shared to the inventors, Guglielmo Marconi from Italy and Karl Ferdinand Braun from Germany "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".

1910

The Dutch theoretical physicist Johannes Diderik van der Waals won the award in the tenth year of the Nobel Prize "for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids".

1911

In the eleventh year of Nobel Prizes, Wilhelm Wien from Germany was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his discoveries regarding the laws governing the radiation of heat".

1912

Nils Gustaf Dalén from Sweden was awarded the prize "for his invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys".

1913

In 1913, the prize was offered to Heike Kamerlingh Onnes from the Netherlands "for his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium".

1914

Max von Laue from Germany won this prestigious prize "for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals".

1915

The British physicist William Henry Bragg and his son, William Lawrence Bragg were the winners of the Nobel Prize "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays".

1916

The prize was not awarded this year.

1917

Charles Glover Barkla from the United Kingdom achieved to receive the prize this year "for his discovery of the characteristic Röntgen radiation of the elements".

1918

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck from Germany "in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta".

1919

The extraordinary success of Johannes Stark from Germany had earned him the award "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields".

1920

The Nobel Prize had been awarded to Charles Edouard Guillaume from Switzerland "in recognition of the service he has rendered to precision measurements in Physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys".

1921

The famous German physicist Albert Einstein won the award in the twenty-first year of the Nobel Prize "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

1922

In the twenty-second year of Nobel Prizes, Niels Henrik David Bohr from Denmark was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them".

1923

Robert Andrews Millikan from the United States was awarded the prize "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect".

1924

In 1924, the prize was offered to Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn from Sweden "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy".

1925

James Franck and Gustav Ludwig Hertz both from Germany won this prestigious prize "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom".

1926

The French physicist Jean Baptiste Perrin was the winner of the Nobel Prize "for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter, and especially for his discovery of sedimentation equilibrium".

1927

Arthur Holly Compton from the United States achieved to receive the prize this year "for his discovery of the effect named after him" and Charles Thomson Rees Wilson from the United Kingdom "for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapour".

1928

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Owen Willans Richardson from the United Kingdom "for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law named after him".

1929

The extraordinary achievement of Louis Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie from France had earned him the award "for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons".

1930

The Nobel Prize had been awarded to Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman from India "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him".

1931

In 1931, the prize was not awarded to anyone.

1932

In the thirty-second year of Nobel Prizes, Werner Heisenberg from Germany was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen".

1933

Erwin Schrödinger from Austria and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac from the United Kingdom shared the prize "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".

1934

No Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded.

1935

In 1935, the prize was offered to James Chadwick from the United Kingdom "for the discovery of the neutron".

1936

Victor Franz Hess from Austria won this prestigious prize "for his discovery of cosmic radiation" and Carl David Anderson from the United Kingdom "for his discovery of the positron".

1937

The American physicist Clinton Joseph Davisson and the British scientist George Paget Thomson were jointly the winners of the Nobel Prize "for their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals".

1938

Enrico Fermi from Italy succeeded to receive the prize this year "for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons".

1939

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Ernest Orlando Lawrence from the United States "for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements".

1940

No Nobel Prize was awarded in any area due to the Second World War.

1941

No Nobel Prize was awarded in any area due to the Second World War.

1942

No Nobel Prize was awarded in any area due to the Second World War.

1943

The extraordinary success of Otto Stern from the United States had earned him the award "for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton".

1944

The prize had been given to the distinguished physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi from the United States "for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei".

1945

The Austrian pioneering physicist Wolfgang Pauli won the award in the forty-fifth year of the Nobel Prize "for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle".

1946

In the forty-sixth year of Nobel Prizes, Percy Williams Bridgman from the United States was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of an apparatus to produce extremely high pressures, and for the discoveries he made therewith in the field of high pressure physics".

1947

One of the significant physicists Edward Victor Appleton from the United Kingdom was elected "for his investigations of the physics of the upper atmosphere especially for the discovery of the so-called Appleton layer".

1948

In 1948, the prize was offered to Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett from the United Kingdom "for his development of the Wilson cloud chamber method, and his discoveries therewith in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation".

1949

Hideki Yukawa from Japan won this prestigious prize "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces".

1950

The British physicist Cecil Frank Powell was the winner of the Nobel Prize "for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method".

1951

In the fifty-first year of Nobel Prizes, John Douglas Cockcroft from the United Kingdom and Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton from Ireland were jointly awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their pioneer work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles".

1952

Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell both from the United States shared the prize "for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith".

1953

In 1953, the prize was offered to Frits (Frederik) Zernike from the Netherlands "for his demonstration of the phase contrast method, especially for his invention of the phase contrast microscope".

1954

Max Born from the United Kingdom "for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction" and Walther Bothe from Germany "for the coincidence method and his discoveries made therewith" won this prestigious prize together.

1955

The American physicist Willis Eugene Lamb "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum" and another American physicist Polykarp Kusch "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron" were the winners of the Nobel Prize.

1956

William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain all from the United States managed to receive the prize this year "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".

1957

The Nobel Prize for Physics 1957 was shared between Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee both from China "for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles".

1958

The uncommon accomplishment of Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Ilja Mikhailovich Frank and Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm from the Soviet Union had earned them the award "for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect".

1959

The prize had jointly been shared to the scientists, Emilio Gino Segrè from Italy and Owen Chamberlain from the United States "for their discovery of the antiproton".

1960

The American physicist Donald Arthur Glaser won the award in the sixtieth year of the Nobel Prize "for the invention of the bubble chamber".

1961

In the sixty-first year of Nobel Prizes, Robert Hofstadter from the United States "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons" and Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer from Germany "for his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma radiation and his discovery in this connection of the effect which bears his name" were awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics.

1962

Lev Davidovich Landau from the Soviet Union was nominated "for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium".

1963

In 1963, a half of the prize was offered to Eugene Paul Wigner from Hungary-United States "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles". The other half was equally shared by Maria Goeppert Mayer from the United States and Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen from Germany "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure".

1964

Charles Hard Townes from the United States and Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov from the Soviet Union won this prestigious prize "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle".

1965

The Japanese physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and the American physicists Julian Schwinger and Richard Phillips Feynman were the winners of the Nobel Prize "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles".

1966

Alfred Kastler from France succeeded to receive the prize this year "for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms".

1967

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Hans Albrecht Bethe from the United States "for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars".

1968

The extraordinary success of Luis Walter Alvarez from the United States had earned him the award "for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis".

1969

The prize had been given to Murray Gell-Mann from the United States "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions".

1970

The Swedish physicist Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén "for fundamental work and discoveries in magnetohydro- dynamics with fruitful applications in different parts of plasma physics" and the French physicist Louis Eugène Félix Néel "for fundamental work and discoveries concerning antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism which have led to important applications in solid state physics” won the award in the seventieth year of the Nobel Prize.

1971

In the seventy-first year of Nobel Prizes, Dennis Gabor from Hungary-United Kingdom was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his invention and development of the holographic method".

1972

John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer from the United States shared the prize "for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory".

1973

In 1973, a half of the prize was equally shared by Leo Esaki from Japan and Ivar Giaever from Norway "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively" and the other half was offered to Brian David Josephson from the United Kingdom "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects".

1974

Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish from the United Kingdom jointly won this prestigious prize "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars".

1975

The Danish physicists Aage Niels Bohr and Ben Roy Mottelson and the American physicist Leo James Rainwater were the winners of the Nobel Prize "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection".

1976

Burton Richter and Samuel Chao Chung Ting from the United States achieved to receive the prize this year "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind".

1977

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Nevill Francis Mott from the United Kingdom and Philip Warren Anderson and John Hasbrouck van Vleck from the United States "for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems".

1978

The unusual achievement of Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa from the Soviet Union "for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics" and Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson both from the United States "for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation". Had earned them the award.

1979

The prize had jointly been shared to the scientists Sheldon Lee Glashow and Steven Weinberg from the United States and Abdus Salam from Pakistan"for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current".

1980

The American physicists James Watson Cronin and Val Logsdon Fitch won the award in the eightieth year of the Nobel Prize "for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons".

1981

In the eighty-first year of Nobel Prizes, Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Leonard Schawlow from the United States "for their contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy" and Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn from Sweden "for his contribution to the development of high-resolution electron spectroscopy" were awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics.

1982

Kenneth Geddes Wilson from the United States was the Nobel Prize winner "for his theory for critical phenomena in connection with phase transitions".

1983

In 1983, the prize was equally divided between Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar from India "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars" and William Alfred Fowler from the United States "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe".

1984

Carlo Rubbia from Italy and Simon van der Meer from the Netherlands won this prestigious prize "for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction".

1985

The German physicist Klaus von Klitzing was the winner of the Nobel Prize "for the discovery of the quantized Hall effect".

1986

Ernst Ruska from Germany "for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope" and Heinrich Rohrer from Switzerland and Gerd Binnig from Germany "for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope" accomplished to receive the prize this year.

1987

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Johannes Georg Bednorz from Germany and Karl Alexander Müller from Switzerland "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials".

1988

The extraordinary accomplishment of Leon Max Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger from the United States had earned them the award "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino".

1989

The prize had been shared to Norman Foster Ramsey from the United States "for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks" and Hans Georg Dehmelt from the United States and Wolfgang Paul from Germany "for the development of the ion trap technique".

1990

The American physicists Jerome Isaac Friedman and Henry Way Kendall and the Canadian physicist Richard Edward Taylor won the award in the ninetieth year of the Nobel Prize "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics".

1991

In the ninety-first year of Nobel Prizes, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes from France was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers".

1992

Georges Charpak from France did a significant work "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber".

1993

In 1993, a half of the prize was offered to Russell Alan Hulse and the other half to Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. both from the United States "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation".

1994

Bertram Neville Brockhouse from Canada "for the development of neutron spectroscopy" and Clifford Glenwood Shull from the United States "for the development of the neutron diffraction techniques” won this prestigious prize. These scientists were both elected "for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter".

1995

The American physicists Martin Lewis Perl "for the discovery of the tau lepton" and Frederick Reines "for the detection of the neutrino" were the winners of the Nobel Prize, commonly "for pioneering experimental contributions to lepton physics".

1996

David Morris Lee, Douglas Dean Osheroff and Robert Coleman Richardson from the United States succeeded to receive the prize this year "for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3".

1997

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips from the United States and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji from France"for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light".

1998

The unusual success of Robert Betts Laughlin and Daniel Chee Tsui from the United States and Horst Ludwig Störmer from Germany had earned them the award "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations".

1999

The prize had jointly been shared to Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus Justinus Godefriedus Veltman from the Netherlands "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics".

2000

The Russian physicist Zhores Ivanovich Alferov and the German physicist Herbert Kroemer "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics" and the American physicist Jack St. Clair Kilby "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit" won the award in the hundredth year of the Nobel Prize. The general rationale was "for basic work on information and communication technology".

SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHYSICS

WILHELM CONRAD RÖNTGEN (1845-1923)

Röntgen had been a physics professor since he was at the age of 30. He invented electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range by propagating it himself. The fundamental base of electromagnetism, X-ray is known and understood today thanks to the investigations of Röntgen. He also carried out some researches in different fields of physics like capillarity, elasticity and piezoelectricity.

PIETER ZEEMAN (1865-1943)

Zeeman made use of powerful magnets to prove that a magnetic field is able to decompose light into bunches of two or three lines. His teacher, Hendrik Lorentz was interested in polarization of light as well and they together invented a term called the Zeeman effect. Besides, Pieter Zeeman studied mass spectrometry and later on his own student, Samuel Goudsmit introduced electron spin to atomic physics.

MARIE SKLODOWSKA-CURIE (1867-1934)

Curie was both a chemist and interested in nuclear physics. She made a pioneering work by the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. Moreover, she found the atomic masses of those elements and where they are positioned in the periodic table. Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie are mostly famous for inventing the scientific term radioactivity and measuring it by quantitative processes.

JOSEPH JOHN THOMSON (1856-1940)

Thomson, after a series of scientific studies, stated that all chemical elements are composed of negatively charged sub-atomic particles. He worked on a “plum puding model” of the atom to prove the existence of electrons and develop his theory. However, Thomson’s atomic theory was later confuted by one of his well-known students, Ernest Rutherford.

GUGLIELMO MARCONI (1874-1937)

Marconi, as a scientist marking the end of an era, invented radio transmission by the transfer of electronic signals to a distance exceeding one mile, where an antenna was placed. Furthermore, he improved the techniques of wireless telegraphy and found a formula (Marconi’s law) between the height of an antenna (H) and the furthest signalling distance (D).

JOHANNES DIDERIK VAN DER WAALS (1837-1923)

Van der Waals’ common researches had majored on the area of thermodynamics. He introduced new terms to chemistry and physics such as van der Waals equation of state (a substance’s transition between the different phases of matter could be properly guessed by means of the behaviour of gases), van der Waals forces (attractive forces between the molecules of a substance) and van der Waals molecules (tiny molecules attracted to each other by van der Waals forces). Van der Waals made so much scientific effort that these terms were named after him.

MAX KARL ERNST LUDWIG PLANCK (1858-1947)

Planck created the fundament of a new branch of physics called quantum mechanics. He stated that energy is transferred in small, discontinuous units rather than being a continually flowing concept. These units were named quanta and defined as "the pennies of the atomic world" by Planck. Furthermore, Einstein made use of Planck’s constant (h) to relate the energy of a photon (E) and the frequency of its wave (v) by the equation E = h.v.



ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)

Einstein is considered the founder of modern physics as he came up with the theory of relativity between the years of 1907 and 1915. Then, he developed the basis of quantum theory, photoelectric effect, by working on the emission of electrons from all states of matter. Einstein had also quoted the question "Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?” and constituted the second famous equation worldwide or mass-energy equivalence in other words (E = mc²). According to this equation, m is the mass of a body, the constant c is the speed of light in vacuum and E is the body’s energy at rest.

NIELS HENRIK DAVID BOHR (1885-1962)

Bohr carried out his former studies under the physicist Joseph John Thomson and his student, Ernest Rutherford. He later on extended the atomic theory of Rutherford by stating that the atom’s nucleus is surrounded by stationary orbits where negatively charged electrons are positioned. As far as Bohr’s diagram is concerned, an electron shell can hold greater number of electrons when it gets further away from the nucleus.

LOUIS VICTOR PIERRE RAYMOND DE BROGLIE (1892-1987)

In the twentieth century, de Broglie had opposed the idea regarding that the wave of light and the particle of matter behave completely different from each other. He justified that waves can show certain similar characteristics with particles and particles with waves in terms of behaviour. In addition, wave-particle duality was expressed by de Broglie as λD = h / p where h is Planck’s constant, p is the momentum of the particle and λD is the de Broglie wavelength.

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