Word: physicists
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...French Physicist Jean Bernard Leon Foucault (1819-68) installed the first Foucault pendulum in Paris's Pantheon in 1851. That one, since dismantled, was 200 feet long. Foucault's idea was to prove the rotation of Earth on its axis. A pendulum which is swinging freely in space keeps to the same line, whereas compass directions beneath the pendulum are constantly changing as the earth rotates. This apparent shift was duly performed by the pendulum of Jean Bernard Leon Foucault. Such demonstrations always make a great impression on students of elementary physics...
...spectators broke and scattered. Undoubtedly, the twinkling-eyed scientist would have been arrested as police arrived, had he not identified himself as Professor Robert Williams Wood, eminent physicist of Johns Hopkins University...
...look for something else when the research reaches a stage where long routine labor is in prospect. He once, it is now known, had the Raman Effect** in his apparatus, trembling on the verge of detection, but he did not detect it. The phenomenon was discovered in 1928 by Physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman of India, who received the Nobel Prize in 1930. In his humbler moments, Wood admits that, even had he discovered the phenomenon, he did not have the theoretical background which would have conveyed to him its importance. But in experimental physics, the diverse contributions of Robert Williams...
...whole structure of Quantum Mechanics, which deals mathematically with the mathematically complex innards of the atom. Presumably, Herren Heisenberg and Schrodinger were forbidden to attend because of the Nazi Government's antipathy for the League of Nations. Why Dirac of democratic Britain did not appear was not disclosed. Physicist Heisenberg's paper was presented for him by colleagues from Belgium and Holland...
...most productive years of a topflight theoretical physicist appear to be about the same as those of a championship tennis player. Most of the five bigwigs of Quantum Mechanics did their most important work when they were very young men. Heisenberg, for example, laid down his celebrated Uncertainty Principle (relating to the position and velocity of electrons) when he was 26; Dirac mathematically deduced the existence of the positive electron when he was 28. Once a theorist has constructed a powerful new theory, he is likely to become fond of it and spend much energy polishing and protecting...