The science of sleep

Written by Helen Sheridan Illustrated by Jolien Hampson & Helen Sheridan

For Sophia

First self pulished by Helen Sheridan 116 Holywell Rise, Swords, Co. Dublin, Ireland.

Text Copyright Š 2014 Helen Sheridan Illustrations Copyright Š 2014 Jolien Hampson & Helen Sheridan All rights reserved Designed in collaboration with little Eggheads www.little-eggheads.com

Written by Helen Sheridan Illustrated by Jolien Hampson & Helen Sheridan

Albert Einstein was a German physicist

who is best known for his theory of relativity.

This theory explains how gravity works in the Universe and how it effects the motion of light.

If you imagined standing on a meteor traveling very fast and your friend was on a meteor next to you traveling at the same speed in the same direction it would seem like neither of you were moving at all. Movement is relative to the objects around you.

Also in outer space large objects like planets cause space to bend. The larger the object the more space bends. Imagine a marble on a trampoline and now imagine a bowling ball on the same trampoline. The bowling ball would cause space to bend more than the marble.

Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher.

He was famous for developing improvements to the telescope and for supporting that the Earth revolved around the Sun. He also studied the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter now called Galilean Moons.

He was put under house arrest for his belief that the Sun was at the centre of our solar system and not the Earth. He is sometimes called "the Father of Modern Science".

Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, alchemist, and theologian.

He is famous for formulating the theory of gravity which some believe was prompted by an apple falling on his head. This theory and the three laws of motion were very important in describing the physical motion of our Universe.

He also discovered that white light could be broken into many colours, just like a rainbow, by using a prism.

Florence Nightingale was a famous British nurse and statistician.

She attended to sick soldiers during the Crimean war.

Her nick name was “the lady with the lamp� since she used a lamp during night rounds to check on the wounded.

She was very gifted at mathematics and she invented a type of pie chart called a Nightingale rose diagram which used graphics to represent complicated information.

Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist.

He is famous for his work on the causes and preventions of diseases. He developed some of the first vaccines including one for rabies and believed that germs cause many diseases.

He is best known for Pasteurization which is used to stop milk and wine from making people sick. In this process milk is heated to a particular temperature and then cooled very quickly. This reduces the amount of germs in the milk but does not affect how it tastes.

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian born actress who became famous during the golden age of Hollywood cinema in the 1940s.

She is best known for the invention of frequency hopping.

This is where radio signals are sent and are quickly switched from channel to channel. This was used in the military, at first, to make it difficult for enemies to decode secret messages.

Later on this technology was used to allow wi-fi, bluetooth and mobile phones to work.

Charles Darwin was a British naturalist whose theory of evolution says that all living things are descended over time to each other.

He said that through natural selection the fittest plants and animals survived by changing to adapt to their environment. Changes that worked allowed that plant or animal to survive and changes that didn't work caused that plant or animal to die.

Over a long, long time these small, but positive, changes caused all plants and animals to evolve from one type of creature into another.

Tim Berners-Lee is a British physicist and

computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. At first he wanted an easy way to share and edit information among his co-workers and so in 1989 he decided to build the first web page which would be viewable and editable over the internet. Very quickly the idea caught on and people all over the world wanted to share information too.

Now the World Wide Web affects our daily lives with billions of websites waiting to share information with us.

Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer.

He is best known for his laws describing the motion of planets around the Sun. He said that planets moved around the Sun in a ellipse rather than a circle and that planets move faster when they are nearer to the Sun. Isaac Newton studied Kepler's laws and used these as a basis for his own discoveries and so his work laid the foundation for modern astronomy and physics.

Sigmund Freud was a Austrian neurologist. A neurologist treats a persons nervous system which is made of the brain, spine, nerves and muscles.

Freud is famous for his work in the related field of psychoanalysis which attempts to investigate peoples minds, their unconscious and how these may affect their behaviour.

He believed that people's dreams had certain meanings which could help them to understand their waking lives.

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