Notable Chemists & Physicists Posters & Prints, pg 5/5
for science classrooms, laboratories, home schoolers.

Notable chemists and physicists posters, prints and curriculum enrichment resources: Andrei Sakharov, Scheele, Erwin Schrodinger, William Shockley, Nicola Tesla, Margaret Thatcher, Evangelista Torricelli, Hermes Trismegistus, Alessandro Volta, study the atomic level of matter and the physical universe made up of matter.

Andrei Sakharov
b. 5-21-1921; Moscow
d. 12-14-1989

Andrei Sakharov was a nuclear physicist in the former Soviet Union who became uneasy about the human rights issues around the work he was doing. He became an advocate of civil liberties and reforms, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

• more Nobel Peace Prize winners posters
• Sakharov: A Biography

Carl Wilhelm Scheele
b. 12-9-1742; Germany
d. 5-21-1786

Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the son of a carpenter, and without a formal science education, became a pharmacist. Scheele read many books and was an experimenter. Scheele, Priestley and Lavoisier all "discovered" oxygen about the same time. Scheele also died at a young age, probably due to his experimentation of tasting the chemicals he was studying.

• Oxygen

Erwin Schrödinger
b. 8-12-1887; Vienna
d. 1-4-1961

Schrödinger was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 (with Dirac) for his Schrödinger equation describing the space and time dependence of quantum mechanical systems. In 1935, he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

• What is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger

William Shockley
b. 2-13-1910; London
d. 8-12-1989; Stanford, CA

Physicist William Shockley was co-awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for their invention of the transistor.

• Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age

Nikola Tesla
b. 7-10-1856; Smiljan, Croatian Krajina
d. 1-7-1943, NYC

Nikola Tesla was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. He is is best known for his revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism, and to his adversarial relationship with Thomas Edison that began with Edison's failure to pay Tesla for work in the Edison laboratory; and the "War of the Currents" between Edison and his direct current (DC), and George Westinghouse and Tesla's alternating current (AC).

Tesla was both a celebrated popular figure and the public's idea of the "mad scientist" for his eccentrities, reclusiveness, and then transformation into the consumate showman. Among the people who often visited his laboratory was author Mark Twain. And in 1943 the US Supreme Court did uphold Tesla's claim he was the inventor of the radio (demonstrated in 1893).

Tesla was an ethnic Serb born in what is now Croatia, a subject of the Austrian Empire; he became a US citizen in 1891.

• The Nikola Tesla Treasury

Evangelista Torricelli
b. 10-15-1608; Italy
d. 10-25-1647

Torricelli was a mathematician and physicist most noted for inventing the Barometer (1642) and for stating Torricelli's Law concerning the speed of a fluid flowing out of an opening, later shown to be a particular case of Bernoulli's principle. He succeeded Galileo as the grand-ducal mathematician and professor of mathematics in the University of Pisa.

• weather posters

Hermes Trismegistus, the "thrice-great Hermes", was a melding of the Greek god Hermes (Latin: Mecury), the Egyptian god Thoth, and the Hebrew's Enoch (a descendant of Adam and Eve's third son Seth, the father of Methuselah and great-grandfather of Noah). Hermes Trimegistus carries the characteristics of magical powers expressed in the ability to write, communicate over long distances, and alchemy, the manipulation of matter.

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the writings and spells attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, known as the Hermetica, were popular. The phrase 'hermetically sealed' is from the description of magical spells that were designed to protect objects.

• Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus

Alessandro Volta
b. 2-18-1745; Como, Italy
d. 3-5-1827

Alessandro Volta was an Italian professor of physics, is known for his development of the electric battery in 1800 (voltaic pile). The SI derived unit of electicity, the volt, is named for Volta.

• Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment