Tycho Brahe (/tako brhi, br/), born Tyge Ottesen Brahe

(Danish: [ty dd snn bd ];[5] 14 December 1546 24 October 1601),

was a Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive
astronomical and planetary observations. He was born in Scania, then
part of Denmark, now part of Sweden. Tycho was well known in his
lifetime as an astronomer, astrologer and alchemist, and has been
described more recently as "the first competent mind in modern
astronomy to feel ardently the passion for exact empirical facts." [6]
In his De nova stella (On the New Star) of 1573, he refuted the
Aristotelian belief in an unchanging celestial realm. His precise
measurements indicated that "new stars" (stellae novae, now known
as supernovae), in particular that of 1572, lacked the parallax
expected in sublunar phenomena and were therefore not tailless
comets in the atmosphere as previously believed but were above the
atmosphere and beyond the moon. Using similar measurements he
showed that comets were also not atmospheric phenomena, as
previously thought, and must pass through the supposedly immutable
celestial spheres.[7]
As an astronomer, Tycho worked to combine what he saw as the
geometrical benefits of the Copernican system with the philosophical
benefits of the Ptolemaic system into his own model of the universe,
the Tychonic system. Furthermore, he was the last of the major naked
eye astronomers, working without telescopes for his observations.
Tycho was granted an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to
build Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large
astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements, and
later Stjerneborg, underground, when he discovered that his
instruments in Uraniborg were not sufficiently steady. On the island
(where he behaved autocratically toward the residents) he founded
manufactories, such as a paper mill, to provide material for printing his
results.
After disagreements with the new Danish king, Christian IV, in 1597, he
was invited by the Bohemian king and Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II
to Prague, where he became the official imperial astronomer. He built

an observatory at Bentky nad Jizerou. There, from 1600 until his death
in 1601, he was assisted by Johannes Kepler, who later used Tycho's
astronomical data to develop his three laws of planetary motion.
Tycho's body has been exhumed twice, in 1901 and 2010, to examine
the circumstances of his death and to identify the material from which
his artificial nose was made. The conclusion was that his death was
likely caused by a burst bladder, as had been suggested, and that the
artificial nose was more likely made of brass than silver or gold, as
some had believed in his time.
Hans Georg Dehmelt (born 9 September 1922) is a German-born
American physicist, who was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989,[1]
for co-developing the ion trap technique (Penning trap) with Wolfgang
Paul, for which they shared one-half of the prize (the other half of the
Prize in that year was awarded to Norman Foster Ramsey). Their
technique was used for high precision measurement of the electron
magnetic moment.
Biography[edit]
At the age of ten Dehmelt enrolled in the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum
Grauen Kloster, a Latin school in Berlin, where he was admitted on a
scholarship. After graduating in 1940, he volunteered for service in the
German Army, which ordered him to attend the University of Breslau to
study physics in 1943. After a year of study he returned to army
service and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge.
After his release from an American prisoner of war camp in 1946,
Dehmelt returned to his study of physics at the University of Gttingen,
where he supported himself by repairing and bartering old, pre-war
radio sets. He completed his master's thesis in 1948 and received his
Ph.D. in 1950, both from the University of Gttingen. He was then
invited to Duke University as a postdoctoral associate, emigrating in
1952. Dehmelt became an assistant professor at the University of
Washington in Seattle, Washington in 1955, an associate professor in
1958, and a full professor in 1961.
In 1955 he built his first electron impact tube in George Volkof's
laboratory at the University of British Columbia[2] and experimented on
paramagnetic resonances in polarized atoms and free electrons. In the

1960s, Dehmelt and his students worked on spectroscopy of hydrogen

and helium ions. The electron was finally isolated in 1973 with David
Wineland, who continued work on trapped ions at NIST.
He created the first Geonium atom in 1976, which he then used to
measure precise magnetic moments of the electron and positron with
R. S. Van Dyck into the 1980s, work that led to his Nobel prize. In 1979
Dehmelt led a team that took the first photo of a single atom. He
continued work on ion traps at the University of Washington, until his
retirement in October 2002.
In May 2010, he was honoured as one of Washingtons Nobel laureates
by Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden at a special event in Seattle.[3]
He was married to Irmgard Lassow, now deceased, and the couple had
a son, Gerd. Later Dehmelt married Diana Dundore, a practising
physician.

Alfred Kastler (3 May 1902 7 January 1984) was a French physicist,

and Nobel Prize laureate.[1]
Kastler was born in Guebwiller (Alsace, German Empire) and later
attended the Lyce Bartholdi in Colmar, Alsace, and cole Normale
Suprieure in Paris in 1921. After his studies, in 1926 he began
teaching physics at the Lyce of Mulhouse, and then taught at the
University of Bordeaux, where he was a university professor until 1941.
Georges Bruhat asked him to come back to the cole Normale
Suprieure, where he finally obtained a chair in 1952.
Collaborating with Jean Brossel, he researched quantum mechanics,
the interaction between light and atoms, and spectroscopy. Kastler,
working on combination of optical resonance and magnetic resonance,
developed the technique of "optical pumping". Those works led to the
completion of the theory of lasers and masers.
He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1966 "for the discovery and
development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in
atoms".

He was president of the board of the Institut d'optique thorique et

applique and served as the first chairman of the non-governmental
organization (NGO) Action Against Hunger.
Kastler also wrote poetry (in German). In 1971 he published Europe,
ma patrie: Deutsche Lieder eines franzsischen Europers (i.e. Europe,
my fatherland: German songs of a French European).
In 1978 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences.[2]
In 1979, Kastler was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal.[3]
Kastler ca. 1967
Professor Kastler spent most of his research career at the Ecole
Normale Suprieure in Paris where he started after the war with his
student, Jean Brossel a small research group on spectroscopy.
Over the forty years that followed, this group has trained many of
young physicists and had a significant impact on the development of
the science of atomic physics in France. The Laboratoire de
Spectroscopie hertzienne has then been renamed Laboratoire KastlerBrossel in 1994 and has got a part of its laboratory in Universit Pierre
et Marie Curie mainly at the cole Normale Suprieure.
Professor Kastler died on 7 January 1984, in Bandol, France.[4]
Richard Phillips Feynman, (/fanmn/; May 11, 1918 February 15,
1988) was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the
path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of
quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of
supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he
proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of
quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He
developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the
mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic
particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his
lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the

world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British

journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest
physicists of all time.[4]
He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II
and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the
Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle
Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics,
Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum
computing,[5][6] and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held
the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the
California Institute of Technology.
Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and
lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and the three-volume
publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on
Physics. Feynman also became known through his semiautobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What
Do You Care What Other People Think? and books written about him,
such as Tuva or Bust! and Genius: The Life and Science of Richard
Feynman by James Gleick.
John Daltons Early Life and Education
John Dalton was born on September 6, 1766, in Eaglesfield, England.
His father was a weaver, who owned a house and a small amount of
land. Both of his parents were Quakers.
Although Quakers were Christians, they were seen as dissenters by the
established Church of England. As a result of this, John Daltons higher
educational opportunities were restricted to dissenting places of
education.
John Dalton was an intelligent child, who took an interest in the world
around him and tried to learn as much as he could about everything.
He attended his village school until he was 11, and then began helping
as a teacher.

At age 15, he started helping his older brother John to run a Quaker
boarding-school in the town of Kendal, 40 miles from his home. All the
while, he continued teaching himself science, mathematics, Latin,
Greek and French. By the time he was 19, he had become the schools
principal, continuing in this role until he was 26 years old.
John Bardeen (May 23, 1908 January 30, 1991)[4] was an American
physicist and electrical engineer, the only person to have won the
Nobel Prize in Physics[3] twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and
Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972
with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schriefer for a fundamental
theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.[6]
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, allowing the
Information Age to occur, and made possible the development of
almost every modern electronic device, from telephones to computers
to missiles. Bardeen's developments in superconductivity, which won
him his second Nobel, are used in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
Spectroscopy (NMR) or its medical sub-tool magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI).
In 1990, John Bardeen appeared on LIFE Magazine's list of "100 Most
Influential Americans of the Century."[7]