Quantum physicists James Chadwick

In the 1920s, physicists realized that tiny particles inside atoms do not behave according to Newton’s laws of motion. Here are some scientists who made leaps in this mind-bending field of science called quantum physics.Quantum physicists The pioneers who he lp e d us un d e r s t a nd the world INSIDE A N A TO M Did you know? James Chadwick was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War I.

James Chadwick

Chadwick worked with nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford in various radioactivity studies.

By 1920, physicists understood that most of an atom’s mass lay in its central nucleus, which contained protons (particles with a positive electric charge). In 1932, Chadwick confirmed that an atom’s nucleus also contained uncharged particles, which he named NEUTRONS. This discovery won him the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Werner Heisenberg

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932, this German-born physicist is best known for developing the UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE. This tells us that unlike

Newton’s Universe – in which things run according to firm laws – there is only so much we can know about how tiny particles behave inside atoms. You can know where a particle is, or how fast it is moving, but can’t know both things. Their random behaviour can only be predicted on the basis of probability.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

This Nobel Prize-winning Indian-American astrophysicist is best known for his proof that there is an upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf star. Using principles of quantum physics, he showed that

ANY STAR EXCEEDING THE CHANDRASEKHAR LIMIT (a mass equalling 1.4 times the mass of the Sun) will end its life as a supernova – a violently exploding star.

Richard Feynman

American physicist Richard

Feynman was awarded the Nobel

Prize in Physics in 1965 for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics (the theory of the interaction of light and matter). He created

FEYNMAN DIAGRAMS – graphics of interactions between the tiny particles inside atoms.

He was also a key figure in the top-secret Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb.

Peter Higgs

In 1964, this English theoretical physicist predicted the existence of an invisible field that gives mass to every single object in the Universe. Many scientists disagreed with the idea, but 48 years later, the Large Hadron Collider (a powerful particle smasher in Geneva) confirmed the existence of the HIGGS

BOSON, a particle associated with this field, which proved his theory. Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Did you know? Stephen Hawking bet another scientist $100 that the Higgs boson would never be discovered.