THE TOP TEN GREATEST MINDS
BY MARK MANZI
Gregor Johann Mendel Albert Einstein Dmitri Mendeleev Ada Lovelace Nikola Tesla Rosalind Elsie Franklin Alfred Wegener Richard Phillips Feynman Leonardo Fibonacci Marie Curie
Gregor Mendel Mendel was born in 1822 in what was then Austria but is now the Czech Republic. His parents were very poor but they decided to spend all their money on education for him. Mendel tried to become a science teacher but was unsuccessful and so turned to spending most of his free time in the gardens of the monastery curiously observing the wildlife and plants. Being a curious scientist he the started doing experiments on some of the plants in the gardens, mostly pea plants. He noticed that most of the pea plants would produce purple flowers and occassionally produce white ones. Medel wondered if the the plants were inheriting half the genes from both parents or there was something more to it. Mendel he studied heredity in college he knew he had to create true breeding lines for white and purple flower peas. After his experiments he learned that pea plants inherited a pair of genetic instructions from each parent. He also realised that there were dominant and recessive alleles in the pea plants. From this Mendel came up with a rule for inheritance called Mendles First Law.
Albert Einstein Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany and he earned his PhD from the university of Zurich with a dissertation called ‘A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions.’ Albert worked as a substitute teacher in various towns and moved around trying to find a stable job. He then moved to Switzerland to work in the Swiss patent offices, he spent 6 days a week looking at inventions and trying to strip them down to the core to write the patent. While on a bus Einstein was looking at the clock tower in the town where he worked. He wondered what would happen if the bus was moving at the speed of light, he imagined the hands of the clock would appear to him as if they are moving slower (light taking longer to get to him). Meaning the faster he races through space the slower he would move through time. This was the birth of the theory of special relativity, showing that space and time are connected like a single piece of fabric (space time). Einstein needed a way to prove this theory as the idea was too radical, too advance for nearly all the world to understand. He sent off the paper and didn’t get a response for 6 months, that was until Max Planck had a read. His idea was rivalling that of Isaac Newton’s, Einstein’s childhood hero. Einstein realised that there in no such thing as gravitational pull. To prove his idea of space being malleable he realised that if he shone a light past something big distorting space time, the light will appear to bend. Light particles travel in straight lines, what bends is space and showing that would take an object with a great mass. Einstein realised that the sun would be the perfect object to demonstrate his theory, as the light from distant stars is bent as it goes past it. Looking directly at the sun would be impossible, he knew the sun would be at its dimmest during the solar eclipse. With the help of British astronomer Arthur Eddington he was able to photograph the stars and show them moving slightly out of position during the eclipse.
Dmitri Mendeleev Mendeleev was born in Siberia in 1834 as the youngest between 11 and 17 siblings, no one is quite sure exactly. As a teenager he almost died of tuberculosis but lucky for the world, he survived and his mother put all her efforts into him getting an education and sent him to Saint Petersburg. He went on to become a professor and wrote a dissertation called ‘On the combinations of water and alcohol’. Mendeleev introduced the idea of ‘The Periodic Law’, saying that if you arranged elements by similar properties and weight they would appear periodically in rows. Mendeleev’s discovery was important and revolutionary because he introduced that idea 25 years before the discovery of the electron. In his draft of the first periodic table he also realised that there were holes in the tables, meaning that some elements were yet to be discovered and guessed with incredible accuracy of what the elements could be like and behave like. Mendeleev was married but when he first saw his niece’s friend he realised that he wanted to be with her instead. Mendeleev then divorced his wife and remarried. This was seen as bigamy in the Russian Orthodox Church and was brought to the attention of Alexander III of Russia. The Russian leader replied to these critics saying ‘well, Mendeleev has two wives but I only have one Mendeleev’, he then promoted him to Director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures where his job was to come up with the official standards for the production of vodka. To this day all Russian vodka has to be 40% alcohol. He also pioneered the study of petroleum and Russia’s first oil refinery. Both of these are Russia’s major exports.
ADA LOVELACE During the 1840s Lovelace dreamt of machines that could manipulate symbols and not just numbers. Lovelace was a very gifted mathematician who was also way ahead of her time. Some of her ideas still being used today in machines and computers. Her father was Lord Byron and although he wasn’t around for much of her life, he too wanted her to pursue a career in science. In 1833 Lovelace was introduced to Charles Babbage, a mathematics professor at Cambridge University who is known today as ‘the father of the computer’. Ada was 17 and Babbage was 42 but intellectually they were peers. Babbage’s most notable invention was the Analytical Engine, a brass and iron steam powered machine that he first envisioned in 1837. It had a central processing unit, ability to increase memory and was operated using punch cards that input data. Babbage asked Lovelace to translate a description of his engine and over the next 9 months she did just that. She also appended her own set of notes which were 3 times longer and other notes showing the what the computer could possibly do in the future. While doing this she wrote the worlds first computer algorithm. She said that computers could one day be used for many other tasks, practical or scientific. At the age of 36 Lovelace died of cancer and 101 years later her work was republished, just as people were building the computers she envisioned. Ada Lovelace described herself as ‘an analyst and metaphysician’, but Babbage called her ‘the enchantress of numbers’.
NIKOLA TESLA Tesla was born in 1856 in what is now Croatia, his father was a priest and wanted young Tesla to also become a priest when he grew up. During his teenage years Tesla fell seriously ill and while he was resting he asked his father to promise him that if he got better he would let him go to an engineering school. He soon made a full recovery and was sent off to school. In 1884 Tesla moved to New York with hardly any money and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison, at the same time he was introduced to the D/C current (Direct Current) and started seeing the flaws in it. He explained to Edison about his A/C current (Alternating Current) a system where the power was sent through wires but periodically reversed the direction so it was continuously stepping up its voltage. This allowed the power to travel efficiently over great distances. When Tesla presented a demonstration of the A/C current to Edison, he snubbed the idea and from there on him and Tesla were rivals. They hated each other so much that in 1915 they both were denied a Noble Prize in physics because they didn’t want to share it between them. Tesla sold the patents for his A\C current to George Westinghouse for $60,000. This would later become one of the most amazing inventions of all time. Nikola Tesla was an early pioneer in safe affordable power, hydroelectric power, radio, x-ray photography, remote controls, electric generators, wireless energy, spark plugs and fluorescent lights. He also spoke eight languages and fooled the US government into thinking he made a 60 million watt death ray that could vapourise army tanks from 200 miles away.
ROSALIND FRANKLIN Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920 in London and went on to study physics and chemistry at Cambridge University. She earned her PHD with a thesis on the porosity of cold before moving to France in 1946. She became an expert in the field of x-ray crystallography. This skill would be important to her discoveries once she returned back to England in 1951. Franklin started working at King’s College and her arrival coincided with the race among other scientists to be the first to deduce the structure of DNA. Franklin worked with Maurice Wilkins leading separate research groups, however their work would inevitably overlap as they worked on the DNA structure. Many scientists at the time knew that DNA was in a helix structure but no one had confirmed this. There was still doubt if it was a single, double or even triple helix. By using x-ray diffraction techniques on crystallised fibers of DNA that involved exposers lasting hundreds of hours, Franklin was able to separate patterns that other scientists couldn’t. In 1952 one pattern stood out to Franklin in a photograph, the photograph would later be named ‘Photograph 51’. It shown that DNA was in a double helix structure and this was the first real evidence of this. James Watson and Francis Crick were also working on their own models but were still unable to confirm the double helical structure. Though Franklin hadn’t published her results her colleague Maurice Wilkins took ‘Photograph 51’ to Watson and Crick without her knowledge or permission in early 1953. Watson wrote ‘…the instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse started racing.’ Less than two months after seeing the photograph Watson and Crick announced to the world that had discovered the structure of DNA. After leaving Kings College Franklin tragically died of ovarian cancer aged just 37. In 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared a Nobel Prize unfortunately Franklin was unable to share the award posthumously.
Alfred Wegener was born in 1880 in Germany and was interested in many, many subjects within the scientific realm. He had a degree in astronomy but later decided to go into the field of meteorology where he pioneered the use of balloons to track air currents. He went on expeditions to Greenland to study polar weather, and spent many winters in huts observing ice samples. Alfred was very interested in geo-physics and couldn’t help wondering that Africa and South America almost look like puzzle pieces and can fit together. Other people had picked up on this at the time but unlike them Wegener wasn’t afraid to ask the stupid question of continents moving. Due to his curiosity he went around asking people and often asking them about why they look like that and what if they we once together. During his time questioning he found out that similar plant fossil have been found on both sides of the Atlantic. He learned that distinctive rocks have been found in South Africa and in Brazil, almost as if the continents had… drifted. During WW1 Wegener finally published his theory, he said that all the landmasses of earth used to be part of one continent called the Urkontinent (origin of all continents). Wegener theory claimed the continents drifted apart, he published this in his book, ‘The Origins of Continents and Oceans’. The scientific community laughed at his idea and held conferences just to pick apart his publication. He struggled to pin down the reason why the continents moved. He thought that there might have been ‘land bridges’, something that is not possible. He had no idea how they moved and the damage had been done to his name. Aiming to collect some more evidence of his theory in Greenland Alfred got caught in a blizzard and died. His body is still buried beneath the ice today. In 1960 the scientific community accepted the idea of plate tectonics, long after Wegener’s death.
Richard Feynman was an American physicist most famous for his pioneering work in quantum electro-dynamics and also one of sciences great explainers. Feynman had the special ability of taking the most complex and difficult equations and breaks them down to such a simple diagram that other scientist could understand and develop their ideas faster. In 1965 he shared a Nobel Prize with other scientists for helping them understand how light and matter interact. Feynman was also a big fan of bongos and strived to find the perfect pair, wherever that took him in the world. Feynman created the famous ‘Feynman diagrams’ that changed how people understood physics in the 1940s. He contributed to advancements in a wide range of scientific fields like quantum computing, nanotechnology and particle physics. Feynman also single handedly described why the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986. Hid did that by asking for a cold glass of water, placing a piece of the shuttle inside the glass then later interrupting the talk to show how the piece of the shuttle became weak. This was later proved to be the cause of the accident. He also worked with some of the greatest minds in science like Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli. He believed that understanding the world was important to being a person and not just a scientist. When asked to explain the world of physics to people, he came up with arguably one of the most accurate descriptions of the world, as we know it. He said: ‘All things are made of atoms. Little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.’ Adding to his long list of activities other than pioneering developments in quantum electro-dynamics and nanotechnology he reportedly spent years negotiating with the soviet government trying to get into Tuva. It was remote country in Asia where he wanted to learn the native style of throat singing. Sadly the letter clearing him to go came a day after he died. His last words were: ‘I’d hate to die twice, it is so boring.’
Leonardo Fibonacci Fibonacci was born around 1170 and is best known to the modern world for the spreading of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in Europe, primarily through his composition in 1202 of Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation). Fibonacci began the sequence not with 0, 1, 1, 2, as modern mathematicians do but with 1,1, 2, etc. He carried the calculation up to the thirteenth place (fourteenth in modern counting), that is 233, though another manuscript carries it to the next place: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377.
Marie Curie Marie Curie was born in Poland in 1867, during the invasion by the Russian Empire. Marie’s family was well respected but they didn’t have enough money to send her to university. Marie and her sister decided that they would go to university by putting each other though, so her sister Bronislawa went first. Marie became a governess in order to pay for her sisters education. When her sister was done with medical school Marie decided to move to Paris. When in Paris she met Pierre Curie and they soon fell in love due to their similar interests and he had a laboratory where they could study together. She decided that she wanted to write about some newly discovered uranium rays that Henry Becquerel had recently discovered were emitted by uranium salts. Most scientists were not interested in these rays but Marie was. Her and Pierre started going through all the elements trying to find out which emitted these rays and came up with the term radioactive. It wasn’t long before they had discovered new elements to add to the periodic table such as radium and polonium, which is named after Poland by Marie. She came up with a groundbreaking conclusion that radioactivity was some kind on molecular interaction but coming from the atom itself. Her and Pierre continued to work with radioactive materials and later had a couple of children. Marie won a Nobel Prize for her efforts along with Pierre and Becquerel. She became the very first woman to win a Nobel Prize and defend their dissertation in the same calendar year. Pierre died in 1906 because his head got caught underneath a horse drawn carriage. Marie carried on researching and realised that radioactivity kills healthy cells but can also repair unhealthy ones. She won another Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911 and the Legion of Honor award by the French Government. Marie died of leukemia aged 66 due to her work with radioactive elements. Both her daughter and husband also won a Nobel Prize, meaning that the Curies hold the most Nobel Prizes in one family.