Over the course of human history, there have been many great discoveries, such as the

wheel and fire, but arguably, one of the most important discoveries of mankind, is
physics. This essay covers five of the greatest physicists to ever exist. Their discoveries
have changed the way we have seen the world, and for the better.
Albert Einstein is probably the first man you think about when asked about
physics, and rightly so. Born March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, he excelled at geometry
and math while at a young age, and became a student under his family friend, max
Talmey, at the age of 16. In his attempt to get into the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology, he passed math and physics with flying colours, but failed Chemistry,
French, and Biology. However, the high grades from his Math and Chemistry allowed
him into the polytechnic, under the condition that he finished his formal schooling. After
graduation in 1896, he became a Swiss citizen, and made many lifelong friends in
Zürich, with whom he enjoyed conversations about space and time. However, he
reached the lowest point in his life, as his father’s business want bankrupt, and he
resorted to tutoring, but was eventually fired from these jobs. After his father’s death, he
married Mivela Maric, had two kids, and found a job at a patent office. Einstein’s job at
the patent office was a miracle in disguise, as he finished patent applications rather
quickly, allowing time to think and daydream about the burning question that he had
since the age of 16, “what would happen if you raced alongside a light beam?” In his
years at the polytechnic school, he had studied Maxwell’s equations, which describes
the nature of light, and found a fact the Maxwell himself did not know, that the speed of
light remains the same no matter how fast one moves. This discovery, however,
violated Newton’s laws of motion. But because there was no velocity in Newton’s
theory, Einstein formulated possibly his most well-known theory that is, the Theory of
Relativity, “the speed of light is a constant in any inertial frame.” During 1905, Einstein’s
“miracle year,” he published four papers, with each one altering the course of modern
physics. “The Production and Transformation of Light,” “The Movement of Small
Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of
Heat,” “The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, and “Does the Inertia of a body Depend
Upon Its energy content?” This paper led to the equation of E = mc^2. He also
submitted a fifth paper for his doctorate. At first, Einstein’s papers were ignored by the
physics community, but this changed when he received the attention of Max Planck, the
founder of the Quantum Theory. Soon, experiments were done to confirm his theories,
and Einstein was offered positions at prestigious institutions, including the Universities
of Zürich, Prague, and finally Berlin, where he served as a director of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute of Physics from 1913 to 1933. Although Einstein continued to pioneer
many developments in the theory of Relativity, such as wormholes, higher dimensions,
and even time travel, he became isolated from the physics community, as multiple
scientists worked on the quantum theory. He died in 1955 of an aortic aneurysm, but his
legacy continues, even to this day.
Erwin Schrödinger, born August 12, 1887, was an Austrian physicist who
contributed to the Wave Theory and the fundamentals of Quantum Mechanics. He
entered the University of Vienna in 1906 and acquired his doctorate in 1910. During
WWI, he saw military service, and then went to the University of Zürich in 1921, where
he remained for the next 6 years. During that time, he produced the papers that gave
the foundations of Quantum Wave mechanics. In these papers he described the Partial
Differential Equation that is the basic equation of quantum mechanics and has the same
relations to Newton’s equations of motion regarding the mechanics of the atom and
planetary astronomy. In 1924 he introduced a theory describing the particles of matter
having a dual wave nature that is now known as the Schrödinger’s Equation.
Newton’s Notions of Probability made Schrödinger and several other scientists very
unhappy, and Schrödinger devoted much of his later life to formulating objections to the
theory. His most famous objection was the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment. In 1927, he
accepted an invitation to succeed Max Planck at the University of Berlin and joined a
distinguished faculty that included Albert Einstein. He worked at the University until
1933, when he decided that he could no longer live in a country in which the
persecution of Jews was a national policy. He began a seven-year journey that took him
to Austria, Great Britain, Belgium, Rome, and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Schrodinger remained in Ireland for the next fifteen years and researched both Physics
and the philosophy and history of science. During this period, he wrote the book, What
Is Life? (1944), to show how quantum physics can be used to explain the stability of
genetic structure. Although much is this book has been modified by later developments
in Molecular Biology, his book remains one of the most useful introductions to the
subject. In 1956, Schrödinger retired and returned to Vienna as a professor at the
university. He passed away at the age of 74.
Max Planck, born April 23, 1858, was a German physicist who discovered the
quantum of action, now known as Planck’s Theory, and laid the foundation for quantum
theory. Planck was the sixth child of a jurist and professor of law at the University of
Kiel. Young Planck attended the Maximillian Gymnasium, where a teacher, Hermann
Müller, sparked his interest in mathematics and physics, but Planck excelled in all
subjects, and after graduating at age 17, he chose physics over classical philology
because he felt that his greatest originality lay in physics. In the fall of 1874, Planck
entered the University of Munich, but found little encouragement from his physics
professors, but he studied independently, and received his doctoral degree in the same
year that Einstein was born at the age of 21. After completing his dissertation and
becoming a lecturer, he worked at the University of Berlin, and was promoted to a
professor, and remained in Berlin for the rest of his active life. Back when he was a
gymnasium student, he was impressed by the law of the conversation of energy and the
second law of thermodynamics. The second law became the subject of his dissertation
at Munich, and it was the core of the research that led him to discover the quantum of
action, now Planck’s Constant, h, in 1900. In 1859-18960, the definition of a blackbody,
defined by Kirchhoff, was experimented on to determine its spectral energy distribution.
Planck was attracted to the formula found in 1896 by his colleague Wilhelm Wien in
Berlin and made a series of attempts to derive “Wien’s Law” and made his own law,
“Planck’s Radiation law,” which proved to be better than Wien’s, was hailed to be the
better of the two. While researching blackbodies, he discovered quanta, and evaluated
the constant h. Planck’s Theory of energy quanta conflicted with all past physical theory,
though it was years before his work was eventually recognized, and with the major help
of Einstein. In a conference in Brussels, Einstein and Planck discussed the
mathematical proof of quanta, which was proved to exist, and converted multiple
physicists to supporters of the quantum theory. At the age of 42, Planck received the
Nobel Prize for Physics, but he still contributed to thermodynamics, optics and physical
chemistry. After retirement, his wife, Marie Merck, died, leaving Planck with two sons
and twin daughters. Unfortunately, Karl, his son, was killed in action in 1916, during
WWI, and his daughters, Margarete and Emma, both died in childbirth. His youngest
son, Erwin, was killed after an attempt on Hitler’s life. In 1947, in his 89 th year, he
passed away from natural causes.