Galileo Galilei

Born February 15, 1564 Pisa

Died January 8, 1642 Arcetri

Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 8 January 1642)

was an Italian physicist, astronomer, and philosopher
who was closely associated with the scientific revolution.
His achievements include improvements to the
telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, and
effective support for Copernicanism. According to
Stephen Hawking, Galileo has probably contributed more
to the creation of the modern natural sciences than
anybody else. He has been referred to as the "father of
modern astronomy," as the "father of modern physics",
and as the "father of science". The work of Galileo is
considered to be a significant break from that of Aristotle.
The motion of uniformly accelerated objects, treated in
nearly all high school and introductory college physics
courses, was studied by Galileo as the subject of
kinematics.

Biographical Sketch
Galileo was born in Pisa, in the Tuscany region of Italy, on February 15, 1564, the first of
seven children (some people believe six) of Vincenzo Galilei.
Galileo was tutored from a very young age. He attended the University of Pisa but was
forced to halt his studies for financial reasons. However, he was offered a position on its
faculty in 1589, where he taught mathematics. In 1592 he moved to the University of
Padua, teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy until 1610. During this period
Galileo made significant discoveries in both pure (e.g., kinematics of motion, and
astronomy) and applied science (e.g., strength of materials, improvement of the
telescope).
Although a devout Roman Catholic, Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock with
Marina Gamba. They had two daughters (Virginia and Livia) and one son (Vincenzio).
Because of their illegitimate birth, both girls were sent to the convent of San Matteo in
Arcetri at early ages and remained there for the rest of their lives. Virginia (b. 1600) took
the name Maria Celeste upon entering the convent. She was Galileo's eldest child, the
most beloved, and inherited her father's sharp mind. She died on April 2, 1634, and is
currently buried with Galileo at the Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze. Livia (b. 1601)
took the name Suor Arcangela, made no great impact on the world, and was ill for most
of her life. Vincenzio (b. 1606) was later legitimized and married Sestilia Bocchineri.
In 1610, Galileo published an account of his telescopic observations of the moons of
Jupiter, using this observation to argue in favor of the sun-centered, [[Copernicus| theory
of the universe against the dominant earth-centered Ptolemaic and Aristotelian theories.

The next year Galileo visited Rome in order to demonstrate his telescope to the
influential philosophers and mathematicians of the Jesuit Collegio Romano, and to let
them see with their own eyes the reality of the four moons of Jupiter. While in Rome he
was also made a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. In 1612, opposition arose to the
Sun-centered which Galileo supported. In 1614, from the pulpit of Santa Maria Novella,
Father Tommaso Caccini (1574-1648) denounced Galileo's opinions on the motion of the
Earth, judging them dangerous and close to heresy. Galileo went to Rome to defend
himself against these accusations, but, in 1616, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino personally
handed Galileo an admonition enjoining him to neither advocate nor teach Copernican
astronomy as religious doctrine. In 1622, Galileo wrote the The Assayer (Saggiatore),
which was approved and published in 1623. In 1624, he developed the first known
example of the microscope. In 1630, he returned to Rome to apply for a license to print
the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in Florence in 1632.
In October of that year, however, he was ordered to appear before the Holy Office in
Rome. The court issued a sentence of condemnation and forced Galileo to abjure. As a
result, he was confined in Siena and eventually, in December 1633, he was allowed to
retire to his villa in Arcetri. In 1634, he was deprived of the support of his beloved
daughter, Sister Maria Celeste (1600-1634), who died prematurely. In 1638, almost
totally blind, Galileo published his final book, Two New Sciences, in Leiden. He died in
Arcetri on January 8, 1642, in the company of his student Vincenzo Viviani.
SCIENTIFIC METHODS
Galileo Galilei pioneered the use of quantitative experiments whose results could be
analyzed with mathematical precision, an approach then lacking in Europe. Thus William
Gilbert, the great experimentalist in magnetism and electricity, who immediately
preceded Galileo, did not take a quantitative approach. In contrast, Galileo's father,
Vincenzo Galilei, a lutenist and music theorist, had performed experiments in which he
discovered what may be the oldest known non-linear relation in physics: that for a
stretched string the pitch varies as the square root of the tension. These observations
lay within the framework of the Pythagorean tradition of music, well-known to instrument
makers, which included the fact that subdividing a string by a whole number will produce
a harmonious scale. Thus, a limited amount of mathematics had long related music and
physical science, and young Galileo could see his own father's observations expand on
that tradition. Galileo is perhaps the first to clearly state that the laws of nature are
mathematical, writing that "the language of God is mathematics." His mathematical
analyses are a further development of a tradition employed by late scholastic natural
philosophers which Galileo learned when he studied philosophy (Wallace, 1984).
Although he tried to remain loyal to the Catholic Church, Galileo's adherence to
experimental results, and their most honest interpretation, clearly contributed to the
rejection of blind allegiance to authority, both philosophical and religious, in matters of
science. This helped lead to the separation of science from both philosophy and religion,
a major justification for his description as the "father of science".
In the 20th century some authorities, in particular the distinguished French historian of
science Alexandre Koyr, challenged the validity of Galileo's experiments. The
experiments reported in Two New Sciences to determine the law of acceleration of
falling bodies, for instance, required accurate measurements of time, which appeared to
be impossible with the technology of the 1600s. According to Koyr, the law was arrived
at deductively, and the experiments were merely illustrative thought experiments.

Later research, however, has validated the experiments. The experiments on falling
bodies (actually balls rolling down an inclined plane) were replicated using the methods
described by Galileo (Settle, 1961), and the precision of the results were consistent with
Galileo's report. Later research into Galileo's unpublished working papers from as early
as 1604 clearly showed that he had performed earlier experiments demonstrating the
time-squared law (Drake, 1973; Wisan, 1984). These early results, however, disagreed
with Galileo's theoretical expectations and he never published them (Naylor, 1990). His
later published account describes a different form of the inclined plane experiment.
In order to perform his experiments, Galileo had to set up standards of length and time,
so that measurements made on different days could be compared in a reproducible
fashion. For measurements of particularly short intervals of time, Galileo sang songs
with whose timing he was familiar.
Galileo also attempted to measure the speed of light, wisely concluding that his
measurement technique was too imprecise to accurately determine its value.

He climbed one hill and had an assistant to climb another hill; both had lanterns
with shutters, initially closed.
He then opened the shutter of his lantern. His assistant was instructed to open
his own shutter when he saw Galileo's lantern. Galileo then measured the time
interval for his assistant's shutter to open.
Knowing the time interval and the separation between the hills, he determined
the apparent speed of light.

On repeating the experiment with more distant hills, Galileo obtained the same time
lapse, concluding that the time for the light to travel was much less than the reaction
time of the person, and therefore that the actual speed of light was beyond the sensitivity
of his measurement technique.
Galileo showed a remarkably modern appreciation for the proper relationship between
mathematics, theoretical physics, and experimental physics. For example:

He understood the parabola, both in terms of conic sections and in terms of the
ordinate (y) varying as the square of the abscissa (x).
He asserted that the parabola was the theoretically-ideal trajectory for uniformly
accelerated motion, in the absence of friction and other disturbances. Further, he
noted that there are limits to the validity of this theory, stating that it was
appropriate only for laboratory-scale and battlefield-scale trajectories, and noting
on theoretical grounds that the parabola could not possibly apply to a trajectory
so large as to be comparable to the size of the planet. (Two New Sciences, page
274 of the National Edition)
He recognized that his experimental data would never agree exactly with any
theoretical or mathematical form, because of the imprecision of measurement,
irreducible friction, and other factors.

Einstein, in appreciation, called Galileo the "father of modern science".

ASTRONOMY
CONTRIBUTIONS

The belief that Galileo invented the telescope is a common misconception. However, he
improved the device, was one of the first to use it to observe the sky, and for a time was
one of very few people able to construct one good enough for that purpose. Based only
on sketchy descriptions of the telescope, invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo
made one with about 3x magnification, and then made improved models up to about
32x. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
His work on the device also made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it
useful for their shipping businesses. In fact, the telescope that Galileo did so much to
help perfect was what we would call a terrestrial telescope, or spyglass, which shows
distant objects as magnified upright images. He published his initial telescopic
astronomical observations in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius
(Starry Messenger).
It was on this page that Galileo first noted an observation of the moons of Jupiter. This
observation upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the Earth.
Galileo published a full description in Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610.
In the week of January 7, 1610 Galileo discovered three of Jupiter's four largest satellites
(moons): Io, Europa, and Callisto. He discovered Ganymede four nights later. He noted
that the moons would appear and disappear periodically, an observation which he
attributed to their movement behind Jupiter, and concluded that they were orbiting the
planet. He made additional observations of them in 1620. Later astronomers overruled
Galileo's naming of these objects, changing his originally named Medicean stars (after
his patrons, the Medici) to Galilean satellites. The demonstration that a planet had
smaller planets orbiting it was problematic for the orderly, comprehensive picture of the
geocentric model of the universe, in which everything circled around the Earth.
From September 1610 Galileo observed that Venus exhibited a full set of phases similar
to that of the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Copernicus
predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would
cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of
the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun. In
contrast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases
would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its
orbit around the Earth. Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus proved that it
orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model.
Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots. He also reinterpreted a
sunspot observation from the time of Charlemagne, which formerly had been attributed
(impossibly) to a transit of Mercury. The very existence of sunspots showed another
difficulty with the unchanging perfection of the heavens as assumed in the older
philosophy. And the annual variations in their motions, first noticed by Francesco Sizi,
presented great difficulties for both the geocentric system and that of Tycho Brahe. A
dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots, and in their interpretation, led Galileo
to a long and bitter feud with the Jesuit Father Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there is little
doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes. Scheiner
quickly adopted Kepler's 1615 proposal of the modern telescope design, which gave
larger magnification at the cost of inverted images; Galileo apparently never changed to
Kepler's design.

Galileo was also the first to report lunar mountains and craters, whose existence he
deduced from the patterns of light and shadow on the Moon's surface. He even
estimated the mountains' heights from these observations. This led him to the conclusion
that the Moon was "rough and uneven, and just like the surface of the Earth itself," rather
than a perfect sphere as Aristotle had claimed. Galileo observed the Milky Way,
previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars packed so
densely that they appeared to be clouds from Earth. He located many other stars too
distant to be visible with the naked eye. Galileo also observed the planet Neptune in
1612, but did not realize that it was a planet and took no particular notice of it. It appears
in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars.
Galileo made at least one major scientific error, in addition to opposing Kepler's
hypothesis that the gravity of the moon is the origin of the tides. This was his view on the
origin of the comets of 1618. He argued vehemently in The Assayer that they were an
optical illusion, in opposition to the interpretation of the Jesuit Father Orazio Grassi that
they were real, and quite distant from the Moon. His alienation of both Scheiner and
Grazzi may have influenced the later response of the Jesuit order to his publication of
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632, and the inquisition that
followed.
Galileo, Kepler, and theories of tides
Galileo never accepted Kepler's elliptical orbits of the planets,[1] despite Kepler's
tremendous amount of data collected by Tycho Brahe, considering the circle a "perfect"
shape. While the Copernican theory used epicycles to account for the variations, which
added a great deal of complexity, Kepler's model did not.
Galileo attributed tides to momentum, as opposed to Kepler's theories which used the
moon as a cause. (Neither of these great scientists, however, had a workable physical
theory of tides[citation needed]; this had to wait for the work of Newton.) Galileo stated in his
Dialogue that, if the Earth spins on its axis and is travelling at a certain speed around the
Sun, parts of the Earth must travel "faster" at night and "slower" during the day.
If this theory were correct, there would be only one high tide per day at noon. Galileo
and his contemporaries were aware of this inadequacy because there are two daily high
tides at Venice instead of one, and they travel around the clock. But Galileo dismissed
this anomaly as the result of several secondary causes, including the shape of the sea,
its depth, and other things.[citation needed] Against the assertion that Galileo was deceptive in
making these arguments, Albert Einstein developed the opinion that Galileo developed
his "fascinating arguments" and accepted them uncritically out of a desire for physical
proof of the motion of the Earth (Einstein, 1952).
The noted author Arthur Koestler, in his book 'The Sleepwalkers', argued that Galileo
was grossly unscientific and dishonest in his methods, and rarely gave credit where due.
Others argue that it is unfair to hold him to modern "scientific standards" (mathematical
theory supported by evidential trial) with which he himself was only beginning to
experiment. By the standards of his own time, Galileo was often willing to change his
views in accordance with observation. It may also be argued that all modern scientists
(not to mention other professionals) filter their observations and beliefs through preconceived notions. Although this may appear "dishonest", some of it is actually required
for the scientific process to function (see Bayes theorem). Galileo's perceived
dishonesty, then, is not abnormal.

PHYSICS
Galileo's theoretical and experimental work on the motions of bodies, along with the
largely independent work of Kepler and Ren Descartes, was a precursor of the
Classical mechanics developed by Sir Isaac Newton. He was a pioneer, at least in the
European tradition, in performing rigorous experiments and insisting on a mathematical
description of the laws of nature.
One of the most famous stories about Galileo is that he dropped balls of different
masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was
independent of their mass (excluding the limited effect of air resistance). This was
contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in
direct proportion to weight. Though the story of the tower first appeared in a biography
by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani, it is not now generally accepted as true. Moreover,
Giambattista Benedetti had reached the same scientific conclusion years before, in
1553. However, Galileo did perform experiments involving rolling balls down inclined
planes, one of which is in Florence, called the bell and ball experiment, which proved the
same thing: falling or rolling objects (rolling is a slower version of falling, as long as the
distribution of mass in the objects is the same) are accelerated independently of their
mass. (Although Galileo was the first person to demonstrate this via experiment, he was
not contrary to popular belief the first to argue that it was true. John Philoponus
had argued this centuries earlier: see also the Oxford Calculators).
He determined the correct mathematical law for acceleration: the total distance covered,
starting from rest, is proportional to the square of the time (
). He expressed this law
using geometrical constructions and mathematically-precise words, adhering to the
standards of the day. (It remained for others to re-express the law in algebraic terms.)
He also concluded that objects retain their velocity unless a force often friction acts
upon them, refuting the generally accepted Aristotelian hypothesis that objects
"naturally" slow down and stop unless a force acts upon them (again this was not a new
idea: Ibn al-Haitham had proposed it centuries earlier, as had Jean Buridan, and
according to Joseph Needham, Mo Tzu had proposed it centuries before either of them,
but this was the first time that it had been mathematically expressed). Galileo's Principle
of Inertia stated: "A body moving on a level surface will continue in the same direction at
constant speed unless disturbed." This principle was incorporated into Newton's laws of
motion (first law).
Galileo also noted that a pendulum's swings always take the same amount of time,
independently of the amplitude. The story goes that he came to this conclusion by
watching the swings of the bronze chandelier in the cathedral of Pisa, using his pulse to
time it. While Galileo believed this equality of period to be exact, it is only an
approximation appropriate to small amplitudes. It is good enough to regulate a clock,
however, as Galileo may have been the first to realize. (See Technology below)
In the early 1600s, Galileo and an assistant tried to measure the speed of light. They
stood on different hilltops, each holding a shuttered lantern. Galileo would open his
shutter, and, as soon as his assistant saw the flash, he would open his shutter. At a
distance of less than a mile, Galileo could detect no delay in the round-trip time greater
than when he and the assistant were only a few yards apart. While he could reach no

conclusion on whether light propagated instantaneously, he recognized that the distance

between the hilltops was perhaps too small for a good measurement.
Galileo is lesser known for, yet still credited with being one of the first to understand
sound frequency. After scraping a chisel at different speeds, he linked the pitch of sound
to the spacing of the chisel's skips (frequency).
In his 1632 Dialogue Galileo presented a physical theory to account for tides, based on
the motion of the Earth. If correct, this would have been a strong argument for the reality
of the Earth's motion. (The original title for the book, in fact, described it as a dialogue on
the tides; the reference to tides was removed by order of the Inquisition.) His theory
gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and
timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along
the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of
tides, however, his theory was a failure. Kepler and others correctly associated the Moon
with an influence over the tides, based on empirical data; a proper physical theory of the
tides, however, was not available until Newton.
Galileo also put forward the basic principle of relativity, that the laws of physics are the
same in any system that is moving at a constant speed in a straight line, regardless of its
particular speed or direction. Hence, there is no absolute motion or absolute rest. This
principle provided the basic framework for Newton's laws of motion and is the infinite
speed of light approximation to Einstein's special theory of relativity.
MATHEMATICS
While Galileo's application of mathematics to experimental physics was innovative, his
mathematical methods were the standard ones of the day. The analysis and proofs relied
heavily on the Eudoxian theory of proportion, as set forth in the fifth book of Euclid's
Elements. This theory had become available only a century before, thanks to accurate
translations by Tartaglia and others; but by the end of Galileo's life it was being
superseded by the algebraic methods of Descartes.
Galileo produced one piece of original and even prophetic work in mathematics:
Galileo's paradox, which shows that there are as many perfect squares as there are
whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares. Such seeming
contradictions were brought under control 250 years later in the work of Georg Cantor.
TECHNOLOGY
A replica of the earlest surviving telescope attributed to Galileo Galilei, on display at the
Griffith Observatory
Galileo made a few contributions to what we now call technology as distinct from pure
physics, and suggested others. This is not the same distinction as made by Aristotle,
who would have considered all Galileo's physics as techne or useful knowledge, as
opposed to episteme, or philosophical investigation into the causes of things.
In 15951598, Galileo devised and improved a "Geometric and Military Compass"
suitable for use by gunners and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments
designed by Niccolo Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in

addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly
computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials. As
a geometric instrument, it enabled the construction of any regular polygon, computation
of the area of any polygon or circular sector, and a variety of other calculations.
About 1593, Galileo made a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in
a bulb to move water in an attached tube.
In 1609, Galileo was among the first to use a refracting telescope as an instrument to
observe stars, planets or moons.
In 1610, he used a telescope as a compound microscope, and he made improved
microscopes in 1623 and after. This appears to be the first clearly documented use of
the compound microscope.
In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter's satellites, Galileo proposed
that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a
universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked
on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical
problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico
Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for large land surveys; this method, for
example, was used by Lewis and Clark. (For sea navigation, where delicate telescopic
observations were more difficult, the longitude problem eventually required development
of a practical portable chronometer, such as that of John Harrison).
In his last year, when totally blind, he designed an escapement mechanism for a
pendulum clock, a vectorial model of which may be seen here. The first fully operational
pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s.
He created sketches of various inventions, such as a candle and mirror combination to
reflect light throughout a building, an automatic tomato picker, a pocket comb that
doubled as an eating utensil, and what appears to be a ballpoint pen.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

Born 4 January 1643 [OS: 25 December 1642]
Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England
Died 31 March 1727 [OS: 20 March 1727] Kensington, London, England
Occupation Physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher

Sir Isaac Newton, FRS (4 January 1643

31 March 1727) [ OS: 25 December 1642
20 March 1727] was an English physicist,
mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, and
natural philosopher, regarded by many as the
greatest figure in the history of science. His
treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica, published in 1687, described
universal gravitation and the three laws of
motion, laying the groundwork for classical
mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of
planetary motion from this system, he was
the first to show that the motion of objects on
Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by
the same set of natural laws. The unifying
and predictive power of his laws was integral
to the scientific revolution, the advancement
of heliocentrism, and the broader acceptance
of the notion that rational investigation can
reveal the inner workings of nature.
In mechanics, Newton also markedly
enunciated the principles of conservation of
momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he invented the reflecting telescope and
discovered that the spectrum of colours observed when white light passes through a
prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had
claimed in the thirteenth century). Newton notably argued that light is composed of
particles. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling, studied the speed of sound,
and proposed a theory of the origin of stars. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit
with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus. He also demonstrated the
generalized binomial theorem, developed the so-called "Newton's method" for
approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.
French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange often said that Newton was the greatest
genius who ever lived, and once added that he was also "the most fortunate, for we
cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish." English poet Alexander
Pope was moved by Newton's accomplishments to write the famous epitaph:

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.

Biography
Early years
Newton was born at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the
county of Lincolnshire. He was born to a family of farmers who owned animals and land,
thus making them fairly wealthy. The location he was born at was about seven miles
from Grantham, where he later attended school. By his own later accounts, Newton was
born prematurely and no one expected him to live; his mother Hannah Ayscough said
that his body at that time could have fit inside a quart mug. His father, also named Isaac
Newton, had been a yeoman farmer and had died three months before Newton's birth, at
the time of the English Civil War. When Newton was three, his mother remarried and
went to live with her new husband, leaving her son in the care of his maternal
grandmother, Margery Ayscough.
According to E.T. Bell and H. Eves:
Newton began his schooling in the village schools and was later sent to The
King's School, Grantham, where he became the top boy in the school. At Kings,
he lodged with the local apothecary, William Clarke and eventually became
engaged to the apothecary's stepdaughter, Anne Storey, before he went off to
Cambridge University at the age of 19. As Newton became engrossed in his
studies, the romance cooled and Miss Storey married someone else. It is said he
kept a warm memory of this love, but Newton had no other recorded
"sweethearts" and never married.
However, Bell and Eves' sources for this claim, William Stukeley and Mrs. Vincent (the
former Miss Storey - actually named Katherine, not Anne), merely say that Newton
entertained "a passion" for Storey while he lodged at the Clarke house. From the age of
about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School,
Grantham (where his signature can still be seen upon a library window sill). He was
removed from school, and by October 1659, he was to be found at Woolsthorpe-byColsterworth, where his mother attempted to make a farmer of him. He was, by later
reports of his contemporaries, thoroughly unhappy with the work. It appears to be Henry
Stokes, master at the King's School, who persuaded his mother to send him back to
school so that he might complete his education. This he did at the age of eighteen,
achieving an admirable final report.
In June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge. At that time, the college's
teachings were based on those of Aristotle, but Newton preferred to read the more
advanced ideas of modern philosophers such as Descartes and astronomers such as
Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. In 1665, he discovered the generalised binomial
theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that would later become calculus.
Soon after Newton had obtained his degree in 1665, the University closed down as a

precaution against the Great Plague. For the next 18 months Newton worked at home
on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation.
MIDDLE YEARS
Mathematics
Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed calculus independently, using their own unique
notations. Although Newton had worked out his method years before Leibniz, he
published almost nothing about it until 1693, and did not give a full account until 1704.
Meanwhile, Leibniz began publishing a full account of his methods in 1684. Moreover,
Leibniz's notation and "differential Method" were universally adopted on the Continent,
and after 1820 or so, in the British Empire. Newton claimed that he had been reluctant to
publish his calculus because he feared being mocked for it. Starting in 1699, other
members of the Royal Society accused Leibniz of plagiarism, and the dispute broke out
in full force in 1711. Thus began the bitter calculus priority dispute with Leibniz, which
marred the lives of both Newton and Leibniz until the latter's death in 1716. This dispute
created a divide between British and Continental mathematicians that may have
retarded the progress of British mathematics by at least a century.
Newton is generally credited with the generalized binomial theorem, valid for any
exponent. He discovered Newton's identities, Newton's method, classified cubic plane
curves (polynomials of degree three in two variables), made substantial contributions to
the theory of finite differences, and was the first to use fractional indices and to employ
coordinate geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations. He approximated
partial sums of the harmonic series by logarithms (a precursor to Euler's summation
formula), and was the first to use power series with confidence and to revert power
series. He also discovered a new formula for pi.
He was elected Lucasian professor of mathematics in 1669. In that day, any fellow of
Cambridge or Oxford had to be an ordained Anglican priest. However, the terms of the
Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably
so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from
the ordination requirement, and Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this
argument. Thus a conflict between Newton's religious views and Anglican orthodoxy was
averted.
Optics
From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the
refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a
spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the
multicoloured spectrum into white light.
He also showed that the coloured light does not change its properties, by separating out
a coloured beam and shining it on various objects. Newton noted that regardless of
whether it was reflected or scattered or transmitted, it stayed the same colour. Thus the
colours we observe are the result of how objects interact with the incident alreadycoloured light, not the result of objects generating the colour. For more details, see
Newton's theory of colour.

From this work he concluded that any refracting telescope would suffer from the
dispersion of light into colours, and invented a reflecting telescope (today known as a
Newtonian telescope) to bypass that problem. By grinding his own mirrors, using
Newton's rings to judge the quality of the optics for his telescopes, he was able to
produce a superior instrument to the refracting telescope, due primarily to the wider
diameter of the mirror. In 1671 the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his
reflecting telescope. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes On Colour, which
he later expanded into his Opticks. When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's
ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. The two men
remained enemies until Hooke's death.
Newton argued that light is composed of particles, but he had to associate them with
waves to explain the diffraction of light (Opticks Bk. II, Props. XII-L). Later physicists
instead favoured a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for diffraction. Today's
quantum mechanics restores the idea of "wave-particle duality", although photons bear
very little resemblance to Newton's corpuscles (e.g., corpuscles refracted by
accelerating toward the denser medium).
In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit
forces between particles. The contact with the theosophist Henry More, revived his
interest in alchemy. He replaced the ether with occult forces based on Hermetic ideas of
attraction and repulsion between particles. John Maynard Keynes, who acquired many
of Newton's writings on alchemy, stated that "Newton was not the first of the age of
reason: he was the last of the magicians." Newton's interest in alchemy cannot be
isolated from his contributions to science. (This was at a time when there was no clear
distinction between alchemy and science.) Had he not relied on the occult idea of action
at a distance, across a vacuum, he might not have developed his theory of gravity. (See
also Isaac Newton's occult studies.)
In 1704 Newton wrote Opticks, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. He
considered light to be made up of extremely subtle corpuscles, that ordinary matter was
made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical
transmutation "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another,...and may
not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their
Composition?" Newton also constructed a primitive form of a frictional electrostatic
generator, using a glass globe (Optics, 8th Query).
Mechanics and Gravitation
In 1679, Newton returned to his work on mechanics, i.e., gravitation and its effect on the
orbits of planets, with reference to Kepler's laws of motion, and consulting with Hooke
and Flamsteed on the subject. He published his results in De Motu Corporum (1684).
This contained the beginnings of the laws of motion that would inform the Principia.
The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (now known as the Principia) was
published on 5 July 1687 with encouragement and financial help from Edmond Halley. In
this work Newton stated the three universal laws of motion that were not to be improved
upon for more than two hundred years. He used the Latin word gravitas (weight) for the
force that would become known as gravity, and defined the law of universal gravitation.

In the same work he presented the first analytical determination, based on Boyle's law,
of the speed of sound in air.
With the Principia, Newton became internationally recognised. He acquired a circle of
admirers, including the Swiss-born mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, with whom
he formed an intense relationship that lasted until 1693. The end of this friendship led
Newton to a nervous breakdown.
Later life
In the 1690s Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal
interpretation of the Bible. Henry More's belief in the universe and rejection of Cartesian
dualism may have influenced Newton's religious ideas. A manuscript he sent to John
Locke in which he disputed the existence of the Trinity was never published. Later works
The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations Upon the
Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733) were published after his
death. He also devoted a great deal of time to alchemy (see above).
Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England from 1689 to 1690 and in
1701, but his only recorded comments were to complain about a cold draft in the
chamber and request that the window be closed.
Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a
position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of
Halifax, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took charge of England's great recoining,
somewhat treading on the toes of Master Lucas (and finagling Edmond Halley into the
job of deputy comptroller of the temporary Chester branch). Newton became perhaps
the best-known Master of the Mint upon Lucas' death in 1699, a position Newton held
until his death. These appointments were intended as sinecures, but Newton took them
seriously, retiring from his Cambridge duties in 1701, and exercising his power to reform
the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters. As Master of the Mint in 1717
Newton unofficially moved the Pound Sterling from the silver standard to the gold
standard by creating a relationship between gold coins and the silver penny in the "Law
of Queen Anne"; these were all great reforms at the time, adding considerably to the
wealth and stability of England. It was his work at the Mint, rather than his earlier
contributions to science, that earned him a knighthood from Queen Anne in 1705.
Newton was made President of the Royal Society in 1703 and an associate of the
French Acadmie des Sciences. In his position at the Royal Society, Newton made an
enemy of John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, by prematurely publishing
Flamsteed's star catalogue, which Newton had used in his studies.
Newton died in London on March 20th, 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His
half-niece, Catherine Barton Conduitt, served as his hostess in social affairs at his house
on Jermyn Street in London; he was her "very loving Uncle", according to his letter to her
when she was recovering from smallpox. Although Newton, who had no children, had
divested much of his estate onto relatives in his last years he actually died intestate. His
considerable liquid estate was divided equally between his eight half-nieces and halfnephews (three Pilkingtons, three Smiths and two Bartons (including Catherine Barton
Conduitt). Woolsthorpe Manor passed to his heir-in-law, a John Newton ("God knows a

poor representative of so great a man"), who, after six years of "cock[fight]ing, horse
racing, drinking and folly" was forced to mortgage and then sell the manor before dying
in a drunken accident.
After his death, Newton's body was discovered to have had massive amounts of mercury
in it, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits. Mercury poisoning could explain
Newton's eccentricity in late life.
Newton's laws of motion
The famous three laws of motion:
1. Newton's First Law (also known as the Law of Inertia) states that an object at rest
tends to stay at rest and that an object in uniform motion tends to stay in uniform
motion unless acted upon by a net external force.
2. Newton's Second Law states that an applied force, F, on an object equals the
time rate of change of its momentum, p. Mathematically, this is written as
Assuming the mass to be constant, the first term vanishes. Defining the
acceleration to be
results in the famous equation
which states that the
acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force
acting on the object and inversely proportional to its mass. In the MKS system of
measurement, mass is given in kilograms, acceleration in metres per second
squared, and force in newtons (named in his honour).
3. Newton's Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite
reaction.

Ibn al-Haitham
Ab Al al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn alHaytham (9651040) Latinised: Alhacen or
(deprecated) Alhazen), was an Islamic
mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, who
made significant contributions to the principles of
optics and the use of scientific experiments. He
is sometimes called al-Basri, after his birthplace
Basra, Iraq, then part of Buwayhids dynasty,
Persia[1]. He is considered the father of optics
for his writings on and experiments with lenses,
mirrors, refraction and reflection.
The Alhazen crater on the Moon was named in
his honour.
Life
He was born in Basra, Iraq then part of Buwayhids Shia Muslim dynasty, Persia and
probably died in Cairo, Egypt
Ab Al al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham was one of the most eminent physicists,
whose contributions to optics and the scientific method are outstanding. Known in the
West as Alhacen or Alhazen, Ibn al-Haytham was born in 965 A. D. in Basrah, and was
educated there and in Baghdad. One account of his career has him summoned to Egypt
by the mercurial caliph Hakim to regulate the flooding of the Nile. After his field work
made him aware of the impracticality of this scheme, and fearing the caliph's anger, he
feigned madness. He was kept under house arrest until Hakim's death in 1021. During
this time he wrote scores of important mathematical treatises. He later traveled to Spain
and, during this period, he had ample time for his scientific pursuits, which included
optics, mathematics, physics, medicine and development of scientific methods on each
of which he has left several outstanding books.
He made a thorough examination of the passage of light through various media and
discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the
dispersion of light into its constituent colours. His book Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics)
was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, as also was his book dealing with the
colours of sunset. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena such
as shadows, eclipses, and the rainbow, and speculated on the physical nature of light.
He is the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and give a scientific
explanation of the process of vision. He also attempted to explain binocular vision, and
gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the Sun and the Moon
when near the horizon. He is known for the earliest use of the camera obscura. He
contradicted Ptolemy's and Euclid's theory of vision that objects are seen by rays of light
emanating from the eyes; according to him the rays originate in the object of vision and

not in the eye. Through these extensive researches on optics, he has been considered
as the father of modern optics.
The Latin translation of his main work, Kitab al-Manazir, exerted a great influence upon
Western science e.g. on the work of Roger Bacon who cites him by name and Kepler. It
brought about a great progress in experimental methods. His research in catoptrics
centered on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the
important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does
not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics
contain the important problem known as Alhazen's problem. It comprises drawing lines
from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and
making equal angles with the normal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth
degree.
In his book Mizan al-Hikmah, Ibn al-Haytham has discussed the density of the
atmosphere and related it to altitude. He also studied atmospheric refraction. He
discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the Sun is 19 below the horizon
and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He has also
discussed the theories of attraction between masses, and it seems that he was aware of
the magnitude of acceleration due to gravity.
His contribution to mathematics and physics was extensive. In mathematics, he
developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry.
He studied the mechanics of motion of a body and maintained that a body moves
perpetually unless an external force stops it or changes its direction of motion. This is
the first law of motion, later rediscovered by Galileo.
The list of his books runs to 200 or so, yet very few of the books have survived. Even his
monumental treatise on optics survived only through its Latin translation. During the
Middle Ages his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew and other
languages. He has also written on the subject of evolution a book that deserves serious
attention even today.
In his writing, one can see a clear development of the scientific methods as developed
and applied by the Muslims and comprising the systematic observation of physical
phenomena and their linking together into a scientific theory. This was a major
breakthrough in scientific methodology, as distinct from guess and gesture, and placed
scientific pursuits on a sound foundation comprising systematic relationship between
observation, hypothesis and verification.
Ibn al-Haytham's influence on physical sciences in general, and optics in particular, has
been held in high esteem and, in fact, it ushered in a new era in optical research, both in
theory and practice.
Alhacen is featured on the obverse of the Iraqi 10,000 dinars banknote issued in 2003.
The asteroid 59239 Alhazen was also named in his honour. And Iran's largest laser
research facility, located in the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran headquarters in
Tehran is named after Alhacen as well.

Works
Alhacen was a pioneer in optics, engineering and astronomy. According to Giambattista
della Porta, Alhacen was the first to explain the apparent increase in the size of the
Moon and Sun when near the horizon, although Roger Bacon gives the credit of this
discovery to Ptolemy. Alhacen also taught that vision does not result from the emission
of rays from the eye, and wrote on the refraction of light, especially on atmospheric
refraction, for example, the cause of morning and evening twilight. He solved the
problem of finding the point on a convex mirror at which a ray coming from one point is
reflected to another point.
Alhacen's extensive writings influenced many Western intellectuals such as Roger
Bacon, John Pecham, Witelo, and Johannes Kepler.
Optics
His seven volume treatise on optics Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) (written from 1015
to 1021) drastically transformed the ancient Greek understanding of vision. Such ancient
Greeks as Euclid and Ptolemy believed that sight worked by the eye emitting some kind
of rays. The second or "intromission" theory, supported by Aristotle had light entering the
eye. Alhacen argued on the basis of common observations (the eye is dazzled or even
injured if we look at a very bright light) and logical arguments (how could a ray
proceeding from the eyes reach the distant stars the instant after we open our eye?) to
maintain that we cannot see by rays emitted from the eye. Alhacen developed a highly
successful theory which explained the process of vision by rays proceeding to the eye
from each point on the object.
Optics was translated into Latin by an unknown scholar at the end of the twelfth or the
beginning of the thirteenth century. It was printed by Friedrich Risner in 1572, with the
title Opticae thesaurus: Alhazeni Arabis libri septem, nuncprimum editi; Eiusdem liber De
Crepusculis et nubium ascensionibus. This work enjoyed a great reputation during the
Middle Ages. Works by Alhacen on geometrical subjects were discovered in the
Bibliothque nationale in Paris in 1834 by E. A. Sedillot. Other manuscripts are
preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and in the library of Leiden.
In his work on optics, Alhacen described sight as the inference of distinct properties of
two similar and dissimilar objects. The eye perceives the size, shape, transparency
(color and light), position, and motion from cognitive distinction which is entirely different
from perceiving by mere sensation the characteristics of the object. The faculty of the
mind, for Alhacen, includes perceiving through judgment and inference of distinct
properties of similar objects outline and structure. Alhacen continues this body of work
by concluding that the discrimination performed by the faculty of judgment and inference
is in addition to sensing the objects visible form and not by pure sensation alone. We
recognize visible objects that we frequently see. Recognition of an object is not pure
sensation because we do not recognize everything we see. Ultimately, recognition does
not take place without remembering. Recognition is due to the inference because of our
mental capacity to conclude what objects are. Alhacen uses our ability to recognize
species and likening their characteristics to that of similar individuals to support
recognition associated and processed by inference. Alhacen further concludes that we
are processing visual stimuli in very short intervals which allows us to recognize and

associate objects through inference but we do not need syllogism to recognize it. These
premises are stored infinitely in our souls. He is also credited to have invented the
pinhole camera, but the idea was later credited by Della Porta for rediscribing how the
camera works.

Ernest Rutherford
Born
August 30, 1871 Spring Grove, New Zealand
Died
October 19, 1937 Cambridge, England
Residence
UK
Nationality
New ZealandBritish
Field
Physicist
Known for Being "the father" of nuclear physics
Notable Prizes Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1908
Note that he is the father-in-law of Ralph Fowler. Rutherford had a DSc (1900) from the
University of New Zealand.
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford
of Nelson OM PC FRS (30 August 1871 19
October 1937), was a nuclear physicist from
New Zealand. He was known as the "father"
of nuclear physics, he pioneered the orbital
theory of the atom, in his discovery of
Rutherford scattering off the nucleus with the
gold foil experiment.
Rutherford was born at Spring Grove, (now in
Brightwater), near Nelson, New Zealand. He
studied at Nelson College and won a
scholarship to study at Canterbury College,
University of New Zealand. In 1895, after
gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two
years of research at the forefront of electrical
technology, Rutherford travelled to England
for postgraduate study at the Cavendish
Laboratory, University of Cambridge (18951898), and was resident at Trinity College.
There, he briefly held the world record for the
distance over which electromagnetic waves
could be detected. During the investigation of
radioactivity he coined the terms alpha, beta,
and gamma rays.
Middle years
Rutherford's coat of arms, which incorporates Hermes Trismegistus (left) and elements
from his native New Zealand, a kiwi bird (top) and a Mori warrior (right). The Latin

motto Primordia Quaerere Rerum means "To seek the first principles of things", taken
from On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.
In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to the chair of physics at McGill University in
Montreal, Canada, where he did the work which gained him the 1908 Nobel Prize in
Chemistry. He had demonstrated that radioactivity was the spontaneous disintegration of
atoms. He noticed that in a sample of radioactive material it invariably took the same
amount of time for half the sample to decay its "half-life" and created a practical
application for this phenomenon using this constant rate of decay as a clock, which
could then be used to help determine the actual age of the Earth that turned out to be
much older than most scientists at the time believed.
In 1907 Rutherford took the chair of physics at the University of Manchester. There he
directed the Geiger-Marsden experiment that discovered the nuclear nature of atoms
and was the world's first successful "alchemist": he converted nitrogen into oxygen.
While working with Niels Bohr (who discovered that electrons moved in specific orbits)
Rutherford theorized about the existence of neutrons, which could somehow
compensate for the repelling effect of the positive charges of protons by causing an
attractive nuclear force and thus keeping the nuclei from breaking apart.
Later years
Lord Rutherford of Nelson on the New Zealand 100
dollar note

He was knighted in 1914. In 1917 he returned to the Cavendish as Director. Under him,
Nobel Prizes were awarded to Chadwick for discovering the neutron (in 1932), Cockcroft
and Walton for splitting the atom using a particle accelerator and Appleton for
demonstrating the existence of the ionosphere. He was admitted to the Order of Merit in
1925 and in 1931 was created Baron Rutherford of Nelson of Cambridge in the
County of Cambridge, a title which became extinct upon his death.
Impact and legacy
Rutherford was known as
by Eric Gill at the original
Cambridge.

"the crocodile". Engraving

Cavendish
site
in

His research, along with that

Oliphant was instrumental in
Manhattan Project. He is
"In science there is only
collecting." He is also
the idea of using nuclear
power was "moonshine".

of his protege, Sir Mark

the convening
of
the
famously quoted as saying:
physics; all the rest is stamp
reputed to have stated that
reaction to generate useful

JAMES CLERK MAXWELL

13 June 1831
Edinburgh, Scotland
5 November 1879
Died
Cambridge, England
Residence
Scotland
Nationality
Scottish
Field
Mathematician and physicist
Alma Mater
University of Cambridge
Known for
Maxwell's Equations, The Maxwell Distribution
Notable Prizes Rumford Medal, Adams Prize
Religion
Christian
Born

James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 5

November 1879) was an important mathematician
and theoretical physicist. His most significant
achievement was formulating a set of equations
eponymically named Maxwell's equations that
for the first time expressed the basic laws of
electricity and magnetism in a unified fashion. He
also developed the Maxwell distribution, a statistical
means to describe aspects of the kinetic theory of
gases. These two discoveries helped usher in the
era of modern physics, laying the foundation for
future work in such fields as special relativitity and
quantum mechanics. He is also known for creating
the first true-colour photograph in 1861.

[The work of James

Clerk Maxwell is] the
most profound and
the most fruitful that
physics has
experienced since
the time of Newton.

Albert Einstein, The Sunday

Post

The majority of Maxwell's illustrious career took place

at the University of Cambridge, where his
investigations often made use of his mathematical
aptitude, drawing on elements of geometry and
algebra. With these skills, Maxwell was able to
demonstrate that electric and magnetic fields travel
through space, in the form of waves, and at the
constant speed of light. Finally, in 1861, Maxwell
wrote a four part publication in the Philosophical

Magazine called On Physical Lines of Force where he first proposed that light was in fact
a form of the same electromagnetic radiation.
Maxwell is considered by many, especially those within the field of physics, to be the
scientist of the nineteenth century most influential on twentieth century physics. His
contributions to physics are considered by many to be of the same magnitude as those
of Issac Newton and Albert Einstein. In 1931, on the centennial anniversary of Maxwell's
birthday, Einstein described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful
that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."
Biography
Early life and education
James Clerk Maxwell was born on June 13, 1831. in Edinburgh, Scotland (his birthplace,
a historical house at 14 India Street, is now the location of the International Centre for
Mathematical Sciences), to John Clerk and Francess (ne Cay) Maxwell. Interestingly, it
was at this time that physicist Michael Faraday was in the process of completing his
work on magnetic induction, a concept upon which Maxwell would later build.
He first grew up on his father's estate in the Scottish countryside. He was encouraged by
his father to pursue his scientific and mathematical interests, Maxwell entered college at
the age of 16 and eventually graduated with high honors in mathematics.
All indications suggest that Maxwell had maintained an unquenchable curiosity from an
early age. Everything that moved, shone, or made a noise sparked an interest in the
young boy. In fact, his mother in a letter to her sister Jane Cay in 1834, describes this
innate sense of inquisitiveness:
He is a very happy man, and has improved much since the weather got moderate; he
has great work with doors, locks, keys, etc., and 'show me how it doos' is never out of
his mouth. He also investigates the hidden course of streams and bell-wires, the way the
water gets from the pond through the wall...
Recognizing the potential of young Maxwell, his mother Francess took responsibility for
his early education, which in Victorian times, was largely the job of the women.
Tragically, she became ill probably with cancer and died in 1839. His father, John
Clerk Maxwell, undertook the education of his son, with the aid of his sister-in-law Jane
Cay, both of which played pivotal roles in the life of James. His formal education began,
unsuccessfully, under the guide of a hired tutor. Not much is known about the man
James' father hired to instruct his son, except that he was rough on young James. His
educational philosophy was obviously one of coercion, often physical. James never
responded well to the tutor's instruction (who blamed his student for being slow and
wayward), and his father after considerable searching, sent James to a day school,
called the Edinburgh Academy. His school nickname was "Daftie", earned when he
arrived for his first day of school wearing home-made shoes.
Maxwell was captivated by geometry at an early age, rediscovering the regular
polyhedra before any formal instruction. Much of his talent went unnoticed however, and
his academic work remained unremarkable, until, in 1845 at the age of 13, he won the
school's mathematical medal, first prise for English and for English verse. For his first
piece of original work, at the age of 14, Maxwell wrote a paper describing mechanical

means of drawing mathematical curves with a piece of twine and properties of eclipses
and curves with more than two foci. This work , Oval Curves, was published in an issue
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and although it shows the curiosity of Maxwell at a
young age, it is important to note that the work itself was not mathematically profound.
Unlike other great minds, such as Gauss, Pascal or Mozart, Maxwell was not a child
prodigy. Rather, his genius would slowly mature.
Middle years
Maxwell left the academy and began attending class at the
University of Edinburgh. Having the opportunity to attend
Cambridge after his first term, Maxwell decided instead to
complete the full three terms of his undergraduate studies
at Edinburgh. The main reason for this was his father, as
Cambridge was too far away, and he would only have the
opportunity to see his father two times a year. Another
reason was that Maxwell was undoubtedly concerned
about his future. It was his preference to become a
scientist, but at this time, jobs in science were a rarity, and
it would have been difficult to obtain professorship at a
university. Thus, he completed his studies at Edinburgh in
natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and mental philosophy under Sir William Hamilton,
9th Baronet. In his eighteenth year, he contributed two papers for the Transactions of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh one of which, On the Equilibrium of Elastic Solids, laid the
foundation for some important discoveries of his later life: the temporary double
refraction produced in viscous liquids by shear stress.
In 1850, Maxwell left for Cambridge University and initially attended Peterhouse, but
eventually left for Trinity College where he believed it was easier to obtain a fellowship.
At Trinity, he was elected to a secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. In
November 1851, Maxwell studied under the tutor William Hopkins (nicknamed the
"wrangler maker"). A considerable part of the translation of his electromagnetism
equations was accomplished during Maxwell's career as an undergraduate in Trinity.
In 1854, Maxwell graduated with a degree as second wrangler in mathematics from
Trinity (scoring second-highest in the mathematics exam) and was declared equal with
the senior wrangler of his year in the higher ordeal of the Smith's prize examination. For
more than half of his relatively short life, he held a prominent position in the foremost
rank of scientists, usually as a college professor. Immediately after taking his degree, he
read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society a novel memoir, On the Transformation of
Surfaces by Bending. This is one of the few purely mathematical papers he published,
and it exhibited at once to experts the full genius of its author. About the same time, his
elaborate memoir, On Faraday's Lines of Force appeared, in which he gave the first
indication of some of the electrical investigations which culminated in the greatest work
of his life.
From 1855 to 1872, he published at intervals a series of valuable investigations
connected with the Perception of Colour and Colour-Blindness, for the earlier of which
he received the Rumford medal from the Royal Society in 1860. The instruments which
he devised for these investigations were simple and convenient. For example, Maxwell's

discs, seen in the photograph above, were used to compare a variable mixture of three
primary colours with a sample colour by observing the spinning "colour top." In 1856,
Maxwell was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy in Marischal College,
Aberdeen, which he held until the fusion of the two colleges there in 1860.
In 1859, he won the Adams prize in Cambridge for an original essay, On the Stability of
Saturn's Rings, in which he concluded the rings could not be completely solid or fluid.
Maxwell demonstrated stability could ensue only if the rings consisted of numerous small
solid particles, which he called "brickbats". He also mathematically disproved the nebular
hypothesis (which stated that the solar system formed through the progressive
condensation of a purely gaseous nebula), forcing the theory to account for additional
portions of small solid particles.
In 1860, he was a professor at King's College London. In 1861, Maxwell was elected to
the Royal Society. He researched elastic solids and pure geometry during this time.
Kinetic theory
One of Maxwell's greatest investigations was on the kinetic theory of gases. Originating
with Daniel Bernoulli, this theory was advanced by the successive labours of John
Herapath, John James Waterston, James Joule, and particularly Rudolf Clausius, to
such an extent as to put its general accuracy beyond a doubt; but it received enormous
development from Maxwell, who in this field appeared as an experimenter (on the laws
of gaseous friction) as well as a mathematician.
In 1865, Maxwell moved to the estate he inherited from his father in Glenlair,
Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. In 1868, he resigned his Chair of Physics and Astronomy at
King's College, London.
In 1866, he statistically formulated, independently of Ludwig Boltzmann, the MaxwellBoltzmann kinetic theory of gases. His formula, called the Maxwell distribution, gives the
fraction of gas molecules moving at a specified velocity at any given temperature. In the
kinetic theory, temperatures and heat involve only molecular movement. This approach
generalized the previous laws of thermodynamics, explaining the observations and
experiments in a better way. Maxwell's work on thermodynamics led him to devise the
thought experiment that came to be known as Maxwell's demon.
Electromagnetism

A postcard from Maxwell to Peter Tait.

The greatest work of Maxwell's life was devoted to electricity. Maxwell's most important
contribution was the extension and mathematical formulation of earlier work on electricity
and magnetism by Michael Faraday, Andr-Marie Ampre, and others into a linked set of
differential equations (originally, 20 equations in 20 variables, later re-expressed in
quaternion and vector-based notations). These equations, which are now collectively

known as Maxwell's equations (or occasionally, "Maxwell's Wonderful Equations"), were

first presented to the Royal Society in 1864, and together describe the behaviour of both
the electric and magnetic fields, as well as their interactions with matter.
Furthermore, Maxwell showed that the equations predict waves of oscillating electric and
magnetic fields that travel through empty space at a speed that could be predicted from
simple electrical experimentsusing the data available at the time, Maxwell obtained a
velocity of 310,740,000 m/s. Maxwell (1865) wrote:
This velocity is so nearly that of light, that it seems we have strong reason to conclude
that light itself (including radiant heat, and other radiations if any) is an electromagnetic
disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electromagnetic field according
to electromagnetic laws.
Maxwell proved correct, and his quantitative connection between light and
electromagnetism is considered one of the great triumphs of 19th century physics.
At that time, Maxwell believed that the propagation of light required a medium for the
waves, dubbed the luminiferous aether. Over time, the existence of such a medium,
permeating all space and yet apparently undetectable by mechanical means, proved
more and more difficult to reconcile with experiments such as the Michelson-Morley
experiment. Moreover, it seemed to require an absolute frame of reference in which the
equations were valid, with the distasteful result that the equations changed form for a
moving observer. These difficulties inspired Einstein to formulate the theory of special
relativity, and in the process Einstein abandoned the requirement of a luminiferous
aether.
Later years, death and afterwards

The first permanent colour photograph, taken by James

Clerk Maxwell in 1861.

Maxwell also made contributions to the area of optics and colour vision, being credited
with the discovery that colour photographs could be formed using red, green, and blue
filters. He had the photographer Thomas Sutton photograph a tartan ribbon three times,
each time with a different colour filter over the lens. The three images were developed
and then projected onto a screen with three different projectors, each equipped with the
same colour filter used to take its image. When brought into focus, the three images
formed a full colour image. The three photographic plates now reside in a small museum
at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, the house where Maxwell was born.
Maxwell's work on colour blindness won him the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society of
London. He wrote an admirable textbook of the Theory of Heat (1871), and an excellent
elementary treatise on Matter and Motion (1876). Maxwell also was the first to explicitly
use dimensional analysis, also in 1871.

In 1871, he was the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. Maxwell was put
in charge of the development of the Cavendish Laboratory. He supervised every step of
the progress of the building and of the purchase of the very valuable collection of
apparatus paid for by its generous founder, the 7th Duke of Devonshire (chancellor of
the university, and one of its most distinguished alumni). One of Maxwell's last great
contributions to science was the editing (with copious original notes) of the Electrical
Researches of Henry Cavendish, from which it appeared that Cavendish researched
such questions as the mean density of the earth and the composition of water, among
other things.
Maxwell married Katherine Mary Dewar when he was 27 years of age, but they had no
children. He died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer at the age of 48. He had been a
devout Christian his entire life. Maxwell is buried at Parton Kirk, near Castle Douglas in
Galloway, Scotland.
The extended biography The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by his former schoolfellow
and lifelong friend Professor Lewis Campbell, was published in 1882 and his collected
works, including the series of articles on the properties of matter, such as Atom,
Attraction, Capillary Action, Diffusion, Ether, etc., were issued in two volumes by the
Cambridge University Press in 1890.
Personality
From the start of his childhood, religion touched all aspects of Maxwell's life. Both his
father and mother were devout churchgoers (Presbyterian and Episcopalian) and
instilled a strong sense of faith in their son. All information available suggests that neither
in his adolescence, nor in his later years, did Maxwell ever question the fundamental
principles of his Christian faith. Ivan Tolstoy, author of one of Maxwell's biographies,
remarked at the frequency with which scientists writing short biographies on Maxwell
often omit the subject of his religion. It is impossible, however, to fully understand the
man of James Clerk Maxwell without considering his religion. It is also interesting that
the other two mathematical physicists of our time Newton and Einstein were also
moved by a religious spirit. Tolstoy further suggests that such an "introspective, sensitive
and lonely adolescent", would have relied on his religious beliefs for comfort.
As a great lover of British poetry, Maxwell memorized poems and wrote his own. The
best known is Rigid Body Sings closely based on Comin' Through the Rye by Robert
Burns, which he apparently used to sing while accompanying himself on a guitar. It has
the immortal opening lines.
Gin a body meet a body
Flyin' through the air.
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?
A collection of his poems was published by his friend Lewis Campbell in 1882.

RICHARD FEYNMAN
"What I cannot create, I do not understand" Richard P. Feynman
Born
May 11, 1918 Queens, New York
Died
February 15, 1988 Los Angeles, California
Residence
USA
Nationality
American
Field
Physics
Quantum electrodynamics, Particle theory
Known for
Feynman diagrams
Notable Prizes Nobel Prize in Physics (1965), Oersted Medal (1972)
Religion
None
Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 February 15,
1988; surname pronounced FINE-man; /fanmn/) was an
American physicist known for expanding the theory of
quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of
supercooled liquid helium, and particle theory. For his work
on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient
of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, together with Julian
Schwinger and Shin-Ichiro Tomonaga; he developed a way
to understand the behavior of subatomic particles using
pictorial tools that later became known as Feynman
diagrams.
He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and
was a member of the panel that investigated the Space
Shuttle Challenger disaster. Despite his prolific
contributions, Feynman wrote only 37 research papers during his career. In addition to
his work in theoretical physics, Feynman is credited with the concept and early
exploration of quantum computing, and publicly envisioning nanotechnology, creation of
devices at the molecular scale. He held the Richard Chace Tolman professorship in
theoretical physics at Caltech.
Feynman was a keen and influential popularizer of physics in both his books and
lectures, notably a seminal 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty
of Room at the Bottom and The Feynman Lectures on Physics, a three-volume set
which has become a classic text. Known for his insatiable curiosity, wit, brilliant mind and
playful temperament,[1] he is equally famous for his many adventures, detailed in his
books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, What Do You Care What Other People
Think? and Tuva or Bust!. As well as being an inspirational lecturer, bongo player,
notorious practical joker, and decipherer of Maya hieroglyphs, Richard Feynman was
regarded as an eccentric and a free spirit. He liked to pursue multiple seemingly
independent paths, such as biology, art, percussion, and lock picking. Freeman Dyson
once wrote that Feynman was "half-genius, half-buffoon", but later revised this to "allgenius, all-buffoon".
Biography

Richard Phillips Feynman was born on 11 May 1918,[2] in Far Rockaway, Queens, New
York;[3] his parents were Jewish and attended synagogue every Friday, although they
were not ritualistic in their practice of Judaism. Feynman (in common with other famous
physicists, Edward Teller and Albert Einstein) was a late talker; by his third birthday he
had yet to utter a single word. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father,
Melville, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking. From his
mother he gained the sense of humor that endured throughout his life. His sister Joan
also became a professional physicist. As a child, he delighted in repairing radios and had
a talent for engineering.
Education
In high school he was bright, with a measured IQ of 125[4]: high, but "merely respectable"
according to biographer James Gleick.[4] He would later scoff at psychometric testing. By
15, he had mastered differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was
experimenting with and re-creating mathematical topics, such as the half-derivative,
utilizing his own notation. Thus, while in high school, he was developing the
mathematical intuition behind his Taylor series of mathematical operators. His habit of
direct characterization would sometimes disconcert more conventional thinkers; for
example, one of his questions when learning feline anatomy was: "Do you have a map of
the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).
In his last year at Far Rockaway High School, Feynman won the New York University
Math Championship. He applied to Columbia College, but was rejected because of its
Jewish quota.[5] Instead, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where
he received a bachelor's degree in 1939, and in the same year was named Putnam
Fellow. While there, Feynman had taken every physics course offered, taking a graduate
course on theoretical physics while only in his second year. He obtained a perfect score
on the entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics an
unprecedented feat but did rather poorly on the history and English portions.
Attendees at Feynman's first seminar included the luminaries Albert Einstein, Wolfgang
Pauli, and John von Neumann. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1942;
his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. Feynman's thesis applied the principle of
stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, laying the ground work for the
"path integral" approach and Feynman diagrams.
This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there was
no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials
of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become
clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler-Feynman
collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a
frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the
same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau - but few others.
James Gleick , Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
While researching his PhD, Feynman married his first wife, Arline Greenbaum. (Arline's
name is often spelled Arlene). Arline was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a terminal illness
at that time, but she and Feynman were careful, and he never contracted the disease.

Early career
After the project concluded, Feynman began work as a professor at Cornell University,
where Hans Bethe (who proved that the sun's source of energy was nuclear fusion)
worked. However, he felt uninspired there; despairing that he had burned out, he turned
to less useful, but fun problems, such as analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating
dish, as it is being balanced by a juggler. (As it turned out, this work served him well in
future research.) He was therefore surprised to be offered professorships from
competing universities, eventually choosing to work at the California Institute of
Technology at Pasadena, California, despite being offered a position near Princeton, at
the Institute for Advanced Study (which included such distinguished faculty members as
Albert Einstein).
Feynman rejected the Institute on the grounds that there were no teaching duties.
Feynman found his students to be a source of inspiration and, during uncreative times,
comfort. He felt that if he could not be creative, at least he could teach. Another major
factor in his decision was a desire to live in a mild climate, a goal he chose while having
to put snow chains on his car's wheels in the middle of a snowstorm in Ithaca, New York.
Feynman is sometimes called the "Great Explainer"; he took great care when explaining
topics to his students, making it a moral point not to make a topic arcane, but instead
accessible to others. His principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a
freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood. Feynman gained great pleasure from
coming up with such a "freshman level" explanation of the connection between spin and
statistics (that groups of particles with spin 1/2 "repel", whereas groups with integer spin
"clump"), a question he pondered in his own lectures and to which he demonstrated the
solution in the 1986 Dirac memorial lecture.[6] He opposed rote learning and other
teaching methods that emphasized form over function, everywhere from a conference on
education in Brazil to a state commission on school textbook selection. Clear thinking
and clear presentation were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be
perilous to even approach him when unprepared, and he did not forget the fools or
pretenders.[7]
During one sabbatical year, he returned to Newton's Principia to study it anew; what he
learned from Newton, he passed along to his students, such as Newton's attempted
explanation of diffraction.
The Caltech years
Feynman did much of his best work while at Caltech, including research in:

Quantum electrodynamics. The theory for which Feynman won his Nobel Prize is
known for its extremely accurate predictions.[8][9] He helped develop a functional
integral formulation of quantum mechanics, in which every possible path from
one state to the next is considered, the final path being a sum over the
possibilities.[10]

Physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to

display a lack of viscosity when flowing. Applying the Schrdinger equation to the
question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical

behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped enormously with the

problem of superconductivity.

A model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is
a combination of vector and axial (an example of weak decay is the decay of a
neutron into an electron, a proton, and an anti-neutrino). Although E.C. George
Sudharsan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously,
Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal; the theory
was of massive importance, and the weak interaction was neatly described.

He also developed Feynman diagrams, a bookkeeping device which helps in

conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in spacetime, notably the
interactions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. This device
allowed him, and later others, to work with concepts that would have otherwise been
less approachable, such as time reversibility and other fundamental processes.
Feynman famously painted Feynman diagrams on the exterior of his van.
Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, and have even
been extended topologically. Feynman's mental picture for these diagrams started with
the hard sphere approximation, and the interactions could be thought of as collisions at
first. It was not until decades later that physicists thought of analyzing the nodes of the
Feynman diagrams more closely. The world-lines of the diagrams have developed to
become tubes to allow better modelling of more complicated objects such as strings and
M-branes.
From his diagrams of a small number of particles interacting in spacetime, Feynman
could then model all of physics in terms of those particles' spins and the range of
coupling of the fundamental forces.[11] Feynman attempted an explanation of the strong
interactions governing nucleons scattering called the parton model. The parton model
emerged as a rival to the quark model developed by his Caltech colleague Murray GellMann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to
Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for
example, when the fifth quark was discovered, Feynman immediately pointed out to his
students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was duly
discovered in the decade after his death.
After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By
analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free
massless spin 2 field, and was able to derive the Einstein field equation of general
relativity, but little more. However, a calculational technique that Feynman developed for
gravity in 1962 "ghosts" later proved invaluable. In 1967, Fadeev and Popov
quantized the particle behaviour of the spin 1 theories of Yang-Mills -Shaw -Pauli, that
are now seen to describe the weak and strong interactions, using Feynman's path
integral technique. At this time he exhausted himself by working on multiple major
projects at the same time, including his Lectures in Physics.
While at Caltech, Feynman was asked to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates.
After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that would
eventually become the Feynman Lectures on Physics, one reason that Feynman is still
regarded as one of the greatest teachers of physics. He wanted a picture of a drumhead

sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book; the
publishers misunderstood him, and the books instead carried a picture of him playing
drums. Feynman later won the Oersted Medal for teaching, of which he seemed
especially proud. His students competed keenly for his attention; he was once woken
when a student solved a problem and dropped it in his mailbox; glimpsing the student
sneaking across his lawn, he could not go back to sleep, and he read the student's
solution. The next morning his breakfast was interrupted by another triumphant student,
but Feynman informed him that he was too late.
Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1000 prizes
for two of his challenges in nanotechnology. He was also one of the first scientists to
conceive the possibility of quantum computers. Many of his lectures and other
miscellaneous talks were turned into books, including The Character of Physical Law
and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. He gave lectures which his students
annotated into books, such as Statistical Mechanics and Lectures on Gravity. The
Feynman Lectures on Physics[13] required two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and
Matthew Sands as full-time editors for several years. Even though they were not
adopted by the universities as textbooks, the books continue to be bestsellers because
they provide a deep understanding of physics. As of 2005, The Feynman Lectures on
Physics have sold over 1.5 million copies in English, an estimated 1 million copies in
Russian, and an estimated half million copies in other languages.
In 1974 Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of cargo
cult science, which has the semblance of science but is only pseudoscience due to a
lack of integrity on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The
first principle is that you must not fool yourselfand you are the easiest person to fool.
So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not
to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."
In the late 1970's, according to "Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine",
Feynman played a critical role in developing the first parallel-processing computer and
finding innovative uses for it in numerical computing and building neural networks, as
well as physical simulation with cellular automata (such as turbulent fluid flow), working
with Stephen Wolfram at Caltech.
Shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an interview: "I don't like that
they're not calculating anything," he said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I
don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an
explanation - a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.'"
These words have since been much-quoted by
opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle
physics.

DR. ABDUS SALAM

Abdus Salam (January 29, 1926 at Santokdas, Sahiwal
in Punjab 21 November 1996 in Oxford, England) was
a Pakistani theoretical physicist who received the Nobel

Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work in electroweak theory which is the mathematical
and conceptual synthesis of the electromagnetic and weak interactions, the latest stage
in the effort to provide a unified description of the four fundamental forces of nature.
Salam, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg arrived at the theory independently and
shared the prize. The validity of the theory was ascertained through experiments carried
out at the Super Proton Synchrotron facility at CERN in Geneva, particularly through the
discovery of the W and Z bosons.
Abdus Salam was an exceptional student in high school. According to his Nobel Prize
biography, When he cycled home from Lahore, at the age of 14, after gaining the
highest marks ever recorded for the Matriculation Examination at the University of the
Punjab, the whole town [Jhang] 1 turned out to welcome him. His first paper was written
as a student there in 1943 and concerned Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan.
He was awarded an MA from Government College, Lahore, in 1946 then gained a
scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge , where he took a BA, graduating with with
First class honours in mathematics and physics in 1949. In 1950 he won the Smith's
Prize St John's College. His a PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge was awarded
in 1951 and contained fundamental work on quantum electrodynamics which had
already gained him an international reputation, for which he was also awarded the
Adam's Prize.
He returned to Government College, Lahore as a professor of mathematics in 1951-54
and then went back to Cambridge as a lecturer in mathematics.
During the early 1960s Salam played a very significant role in starting Pakistan's Atomic
Energy Commission and Suparco, the country's space agency. Founder and Director of
the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy from 1964 to
December 1993, Salam was a firm believer that "scientific thought is the common
heritage of mankind", and that developing nations needed to help themselves and invest
into their own scientists to boost development and fill the gap between the rich North and
the poor South of the planet, thus contributing to a more peaceful world. Salam also
founded the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and was instrumental in the
creation of a number of international centres dedicated to the advancement of science
and technology.
In 1956 he was invited to take a chair at Imperial College, London, where he and Paul
Matthews created a lively theoretical physics group. He remained a professor at Imperial
until his retirement. In 1964, he founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics,
Trieste in Northeastern Italy. In 1959, he became the youngest Fellow of the Royal
Society (at that time) at the age of 33.
Salam died at 70 in Oxford in 1996, after a long illness. He was buried (without any
official protocol) in Rabwah, Pakistan.
Professor Salam was a devout Muslim who belonged to the Ahmadiyya Community, and
therefore he was never sufficiently recognized by the Pakistani government for being the
country's first and only Nobel Laureate. In 1998, the government issued a stamp with his
picture, but only as part of the series of stamps "Scientists of Pakistan" and without any
special dedication to him.

ABDUL QADEER KHAN

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan is a Pakistani Scientist and
Metallurgical Engineer widely regarded as the founder of
Pakistan's nuclear programme. (His middle name is also,
occasionally, rendered as Quadeer, Qadir or Gadeer
and his given names are often abbreviated to A.Q.). In
January 2004, he confessed to having been involved in a
clandestine international network of nuclear weapons
technology proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, Iran and
North Korea. On February 5, 2004, the President of

Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, announced that he had pardoned Dr. Abdul
Qadeer Khan. Despite this political scandal he is still regarded as the Hero of the
Nation by virtually all Pakistanis.
In a August 23, 2005 interview with Kyodo News General Pervez Musharraf confirmed
that Dr. A.Q. Khan had supplied gas centrifuges and gas centrifuge parts to North Korea
and, possibly, an amount of uranium hexafluoride gas.
Early career
Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in 1935 into a middle-class Pathan Muslim family in
Bhopal, India, which migrated to Pakistan in 1952. He qualified as an engineer at the
University of Karachi, Pakistan, and after graduation went to West Germany, the
Netherlands, and Belgium for further studies, earning a Ph.D. from the Catholic
University of Leuven in Belgium in 1972.
That same year, he joined the staff of the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory, or
FDO, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. FDO was a subcontractor for URENCO, the
uranium enrichment facility at Almelo in the Netherlands, which had been established in
1970 by the United Kingdom, West Germany, and the Netherlands to assure a supply of
enriched uranium for European nuclear reactors. The URENCO facility used Zippe-type
centrifuge technology to separate the fissionable isotope uranium-235 out of uranium
hexafluoride gas by spinning a mixture of the two isotopes at up to 100,000 revolutions a
minute. The technical details of the centrifuge systems are regulated as secret
information by export controls because they could be used for the purposes of nuclear
proliferation.
In May 1974, India tested its first nuclear bomb (Smiling Buddha) to the great alarm of
the government of Pakistan. Around this time, Dr. A.Q. Khan had privileged access to the
most secret areas of the URENCO facility as well as to documentation on the gas
centrifuge technology. A subsequent investigation by the Dutch authorities found that he
had passed highly classified material to a network of Pakistani intelligence agents;
however, they found no evidence that he was sent to the Netherlands as a spy nor were
they able to determine whether he approached his government about espionage first or
whether they had approached him. He left the Netherlands suddenly in January 1976
and was put in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons development programme with the
support of the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
The former Dutch Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers, revealed in early August 2005 that the
Netherlands knew of Dr. A.Q. Khan stealing nuclear secrets but let him go on two
occasions after the CIA expressed their wish to continue monitoring his movements.
Development of nuclear weapons
Dr. A.Q. Khan established the Engineering Research Laboratories at Kahuta,
Rawalpindi, in Pakistan in July 1976, subsequently renamed the Khan Research
Laboratories (KRL) by then-ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, which became the
focal point for developing a uranium enrichment capability for Pakistan's nuclear
weapons development programme. KRL also took on many other weapons development
projects, including the development of the nuclear weapons-capable Ghauri ballistic

missile. KRL occupied a unique role in Pakistani industry, reporting directly to the
Pakistani Prime Minister's office, and having extremely close relations with the Pakistani
military. Former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto has said that during her term
of office, even she was not allowed to visit the facility.
Pakistan, very rapidly, established its own uranium enrichment capability and was
reportedly able to produce highly enriched uranium by 1986. This progress was so rapid
that international suspicion was raised as to whether there was outside assistance to this
programme. It was reported that Chinese technicians had been at the facility in the early
1980s, but suspicions soon fell on Dr. A.Q. Khan's activities at URENCO. In 1983, he
was sentenced in absentia to four years in prison by an Amsterdam court for attempted
espionage; the sentence was later overturned on appeal on a legal technicality. Dr. A.Q.
Khan rejected any suggestion that Pakistan had illicitly acquired nuclear expertise: "All
the research work [at Kahuta] was the result of our innovation and struggle," he told a
group of Pakistani librarians in 1990. "We did not receive any technical know-how from
abroad, but we cannot reject the use of books, magazines, and research papers in this
connection."
In 1987, a British newspaper reported that Dr. A.Q. Khan had openly confirmed
Pakistan's acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability. This article quoted him as
confirming that the U.S. intelligence report "about our possessing the [nuclear] bomb is
correct and so is speculation of some foreign newspapers" and criticised Pakistan's
detractors, who had "told the U.S. that Pakistan could never produce the [nuclear] bomb
and they now know we have done it." Dr. A.Q. Khan's statement was, subsequently,
disavowed by the Government of Pakistan and Dr. A.Q. Khan, himself, initially, denied
giving it, although, he, later, retracted his denial. The Pakistani newspaper Dawn
reported in October 1991 that Dr. A.Q. Khan repeated his claim at a dinner meeting of
businessmen and industrialists in Karachi, which "sent a wave of jubilation" through the
audience.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Western governments became increasingly convinced that
covert nuclear and ballistic missile collaboration was taking place between China,
Pakistan, and North Korea. According to the Washington Post, "U.S. intelligence
operatives secretly rifled Dr. A.Q. [Khan's] luggage ... during an overseas trip in the early
1980s to find the first concrete evidence of Chinese collaboration with Pakistan's
[nuclear] bomb effort: a drawing of a crude, but highly reliable, Hiroshima-sized [nuclear]
weapon that must have come directly from Beijing, according to U.S. officials." The
activities of the Khan Research Laboratories led to the United States terminating
economic and military aid to Pakistan in October 1990; following this, the Pakistani
government agreed to a freeze in its nuclear weapons development programme.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, this came into force in 1991.
However, Dr. A.Q. Khan, later, claimed in a July 1996 interview with the weekly Friday
Times that "at no stage was the programme [of producing nuclear weapons-grade
enriched uranium] ever stopped".
The American clampdown may have prompted an increasing reliance on Chinese and
North Korean nuclear and missile expertise. In 1995, the U.S. learned that the Khan
Research Laboratories had bought 5,000 specialized magnets from a Chinese
government-owned company, for use in the Uranium enrichment equipment. More
worryingly, it was reported that Pakistani nuclear weapons technology was being

exported to other states aspirant of nuclear weapons, notably, North Korea. In May
1998, Newsweek magazine published an article alleging that Dr. A.Q. Khan had offered
to sell nuclear know-how to Iraq, an allegation that he denied. United Nations arms
inspectors apparently discovered documents discussing Khan's purported offer in Iraq,
which Iraqi officials claimed were legitimate but that they had not agreed to work with
Khan, fearing it was a sting operation. A few weeks later, both India and Pakistan
conducted nuclear tests (Pokhran-II and Chagai-I, respectively) that, finally, confirmed
both countries' development of nuclear weapons. The event was greeted with jubilation
in both countries and Dr. A.Q. Khan was feted as a national hero. The President of
Pakistan, Muhammad Rafiq Tarar, awarded a gold medal to him for his role in
masterminding the Pakistani nuclear weapons development programme. The United
States immediately imposed sanctions on both India and Pakistan and publicly blamed
China for assisting the Pakistanis.