NINE LUMINARIES OF SCIENCENINE LUMINARIES OF SCIENCE

In this book we look at the lives of nine eminent scientists – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Curie, Bose, Einstein, Raman, Feynman and Hawking – not so much as scientists but as human beings, their family lives, their religious beliefs, their values and their idiosyncrasies 

Little known facts: 

• Copernicus had a doctorate in Church Law and was a senior official of the Catholic Church till his death

• Einstein invented a new type of refrigerator; Curie could not afford to buy even 1 gram of the element she discovered

• Curie and Einstein thought of suicide; Hawking attempted suicide

• Newton waited at tables and cleaned rooms of rich classmates to pay his college fees; Curie could not afford a full meal during her student days.

• Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Bose were deeply religious; Einstein and Raman were pantheists; Curie was an agnostic; Feynman and Hawking were atheists

• Curie’s died of her own discovery; her notebooks are still radioactive and will remain so for the next 1500 years

• Newton spent the last thirty years of his life in alchemy, Bible studies and catching and putting to death counterfeiters; Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life in a lonely, frustrating attempt to develop the Unified Theory, abandoned and even ridiculed by his fellow scientists.

• Curie’s and Hawking’s parents were highly educated; Newton’s parents were illiterate

• E = mc2 is not Einstein’s full equation; and its negative counterpart led to the idea of antimatter