NINE LUMINARIES OF SCIENCE

In this book we look at the lives of nine eminent scientists Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Curie, Bose, Einstein, Raman, Feynman and Hawking not so much as scientists but as human beings, their family lives, their religious beliefs, their values and their idiosyncrasies
Little known facts:
Copernicus had a doctorate in Church Law and was a senior official of the Catholic Church till his death
Einstein invented a new type of refrigerator; Curie could not afford to buy even 1 gram of the element she discovered
Curie and Einstein thought of suicide; Hawking attempted suicide
Newton waited at tables and cleaned rooms of rich classmates to pay his college fees; Curie could not afford a full meal during her student days.
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Bose were deeply religious; Einstein and Raman were pantheists; Curie was an agnostic; Feynman and Hawking were atheists
Curie's died of her own discovery; her notebooks are still radioactive and will remain so for the next 1500 years
Newton spent the last thirty years of his life in alchemy, Bible studies and catching and putting to death counterfeiters; Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life in a lonely, frustrating attempt to develop the Unified Theory, abandoned and even ridiculed by his fellow scientists.
Curie's and Hawking's parents were highly educated; Newton's parents were illiterate
E = mc2 is not Einstein's full equation; and its negative counterpart led to the idea of antimatter

Dettagli