Easy Answer Science:
Calendar 2009

James Prescott Joule
b. 12-24-1818; Lancashire, England
d. 10-11-1889

Joule was the English physicist who discovered the relationship between heat, electricity and mechanical work. The International System of Units (SI) derived unit of energy, the joule, is named after him, and Joule's laws concerning the flow of current through a resistance and the heat dissipated. He also worked with Lord Kelvin to develop the absolute scale of temperature.

• Biography of James Prescott Joule

Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
b. 6-26-1824; Ireland
d. 12-17-1907

William Thomson was an engineer, inventor who was knighted given the title Lord Kelvin for his achievements which included more than 600 scientific papers, 70 patents and critical input in the laying of the transatlantic cable. The temperature measurement (Kelvin scale) is named for him. He is also remembered for grossly underestimating the age of the Earth, that making the statements that "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible," (1895) and the "Radio has no future," (1897).

• Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth

Antoine Lavoisier & Marie-Anne Pierette Lavoisier
b. 8-26-1743; Paris
d. 5-8-1794; beheaded in the French Revolution

Antoine Lavoisier, a chemist and biologist, was also involved in the financial and economic administration of pre-revolutionary France, for which he was beheaded.

As a scientist Lavoisier worked on the law of conservation of mass, recognized (and named) oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), introduced the metric system, listed the elements. His wife Marie-Anne Lavoisier was his constant assistant and noted scientist in her own right.

• Antoine Lavoisier: Father of Chemistry
• women scientists

Sir Joseph Lister
b. 4-5-1827; England
d. 2-10-1912

Joseph Lister was a surgeon who successfully introduced preventing infections with the sterilization of surgical instruments and wounds. (Florence Nightengale, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Ignaz Semmelweis were important advocates of cleanliness in health care and what would come to be know as antisepic practices.) Listerine mouthwash is named after Lister.

• Joseph Lister and the Story of Antiseptics
• health care posters

Murray Gell-Mann
b. 9-15-1929; New York

Gell-Mann is a physicist whose work involved elementary particles, quantum number, quark model, and the study of complexity.

Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1969.

• The Eightfold Way

Guglielmo Marconi
b. 4-25-1874; Italy
d. 7-20-1937

Guglielmo Marconi was an inventor of radio telegraph equipment and wone the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun.

• Guglielmo Marconi and Radio Waves

James Clerk Maxwell
b. 11-13-1831; Edinburgh, Scotland
d. 8-13-1910; Cambridge

James Clerk Maxwell was a mathematician and theoretical physicist noted for his equations in electricity, magnetism and inductance; and laying the foundations for the 20th century fields of special relativity and quantum mechanics. He also made the first true color photographs.

• The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

Maria Goeppert-Mayer
b. 6-28-1906, Silesia
d. 2-20-1972, San Diego, CA

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, a German born American physicist, was awared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She is only the second woman to win the Nobel physics prize, the other was Marie Curie.

• Maria Goeppert Mayer: Physicist

Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev
b. 2-8-1834; Siberia
d. 2-2-1907; St. Petersburg

Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev was a chemist and inventor credited with the first version of the periodic table of elements where he predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered.

Periodic Law of Chemical Elements by Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev Giclee Print

Periodic Law of Chemical Elements by Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev Giclee Print

Alfred Nobel
b. 10-21-1833; Sweden
d. 12-10-1896; Italy

• Nobel Peace Prize posters
• Alfred Nobel: Inventive Thinker

Georg Simon Ohm
b. 3-16-1789; Bavaria
d. 7-6-1854

Ohm, a physicist and high school teacher, researched the electrochemical cell (battery) invented by Count Volta (voltage). The result of his experiments was the beginning of electrial circuit analysis. The ohm, the SI unit of electrical impedance or resistance is named after Ohm.

• The galvanic circuit investigated mathematically by Georg Simon Ohm

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
b. 9-21-1853; The Netherlands
d. 2-21-1926

Physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was the first to liquify helium (1908), at the time the lowest temperature on Earth, and in 1911 described the new state of "superconductivity".

Onnes was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium".

• The galvanic circuit investigated mathematically by Georg Simon Ohm

J. Robert Oppenheimer
b. 4-22-1904; New York City
d. 2-18-1967; Princeton, NJ

The first atomic bomb was built by a team of scientists, called the Manhattan Project, headed by the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

In 1965 Oppenheimer, in an interview about the Trinity test, the first nuclear explosion, recalled, "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.'"

The first and second nuclear weapons were dropped on Japan by the United States to end World War II.

FYI - Oppenheimer chose the name 'Trinity' from poet John Donne's Holy Sonnets.