- Robert Evans - Crazy Amateur Astronomer!
- Henry Cavendish - very shy British scientist with squaky voice. noted for cavendish experiment to measure the weight of the world. it was his name given to the physics lab at Cambridge where guys like Maxwell, Thompson, Rutherford, Chadwick spent their time researching.
- Richard Owen - Probably the only man hated by Charles Darwin. there was a long lasting scientific feud between Darwin and Owen. "Owen: the most distinguished vertebrate zoologist and palaeontologist... but a most deceitful and odious man." Richard Broke Freeman. But he was also the first scientific person to open the doors of museum(now british museum of natural history) to common people.
- Charles Lyell - Leading geologist of his day. Close friend of Darwin.
- William Buckland - Crazy English theologian, geologist and palaeontologist. was determined to eat each known animal specie!
- Einstein - Used to work as a third class patent office in Swiss capital. Had a baby girl without wedlock whom he probably never saw since she was adopted by someone or died in infancy. 1905 legendary papers - Brownian motion, photoelectric effect, theory of special relativiy and the famous matter-energy equation.
- Wilhelm Röntgen - German X-ray inventor who also taught at Uni Würzburg!! Thomas's hometown! Didnt go for patents and donated the money from all the awards including noble prize for physics to the university of Würzburg!
- Niels Bohr - Danish Physicist, who postponed his honeymoon to write a paper on an idea that became what we know as quantum leap. 1922 noble for physics.
- Ernest Rutherford - New Zealand born physicist who was one of the greatest experimenter in the history of science. Considered as a father of nuclear physics.
- After the proposal of quantum mechanics and acceptance of the idea that electron can be seen as a particle as well as waves, physics parted ways with itself. quantum mechanics - laws which govern on micro level and relativity - for the things on macro level. Einstein spent half of his later life trying to knot this two loose ends of physics without much success.
- pg 192 last page of a chapter telling stories about atoms and the sceintist who ventured into it. "Elsewhere however real progress was being made. by the mid 1940s scientists had reached the point where they understood the atom at an extremely profound level - as they all too effectively demonstrated in august 1945 by exploding a pair of atomic bomb over Japan"! hahhahha bitchslap!
- Clair Patterson - An American geochemist of 20th century whose estimation of the age of the earth is considered as a fact now. 4.5 billion years(+- 70 million years). He found it using lead-lead dating/uranium-lead dating techniques on a meteorite. He also fought against the ethyl corporation and lead additive manufacturing lobby to draw public attention to the lead poisoning and the adverse environmental effects of lead.
- Boson particle was named after Satyendra Nath Bose!
- Edward Hubble - Popular for the Hubble Space Telescope. Was the second guy after Lemaitre to show that the universe is expanding by the interpretation of redshifts using doppler effect.
- Alfred Wegener - German meteorologist who postulated the then controversial continental drift theory but which is a widely accepted fact now.
- Manson Crater - approx. 70 million years ago a big extraterrestrial rock came rushing towards Manson, Iowa with a velocity of 200*that of sounds(380m/s avg)
- Eugene Shoemaker : One of the first geologist to study impact crater and the subsequent Shock metamorphism in detail.
- Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event - Generally accounted for the mass extintion of flaura and fauna (including the cool dinos). nearly 70 million years ago an astoroid collided with earth resulting in a huge disaster affecting the global environment for centuries to come. It left a layer of iridium throughout earth which is only found in asteroids and very rare in Earth's crust.
- Deccan Trap - दख्खनच्या पठाराचा भाग! around 65 million years ago there was a massive volcanic eruption in सह्याद्री(western ghats) leaving one of the largest volcanic feature on earth. How oblivious I was about this fact during all those memorable trekking trips there. and Matheran too!
- Yellowstone National Park and the fire beneath!
- Earth's Magnetic Field changes its power and direction from time to time(of course not the human time-to-time but in the sense of geographic time).
- "The history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror" - nice quote at the start of one of the chapters by some Geologist.
- "Even the most substantial ocean creatures are often remarkably little known to us - including the most mighty of them all, the great blue whale, a creature of such leviathan proportions that (to quote David Attenborough) its 'tongue weigh as much as an Elephant, its heart is the size of a car, and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them'. It is the most gargantuan beast the earth has yet produced, bigger than the most cumbrous dinosaurs." pg 343
- okapi - nearest living relative to giraffe. This animal looks like an orgy went crazy between giraffe, zebra and a deer!
- "But it is worth remembering, before we move on, that all of these evolutionary jostlings over five million years, from distant puzzled australopithecine to fully modern human, produced a creature that is still 98.4 per cent genetically indistinguishable from the modern chimpanzee. There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world." pg 543 last paragraph. Awestrucking fact. We are all africans ;)
apr 3 2013 ∞
aug 9 2013 +
aug 9 2013 +