Turning points summary

Name	Nationality	Dates	Interesting fact	What did he do?	Significance
Albert Einstein	Austrian	1905	Published over 450 papers, 150 of them non-scientific	Published photon theory of light and used it to explain the photoelectric effect; published theory of special relativity	First to say that light consisted of packets of energy called photons, beginnings of quantum theory
Isaac Newton	British	1704 ish	Built the first telescope	Put forward theory that light was made of particles called corpuscles	Not a lot; he was basically wrong, for once.  Reputation is sometimes more important than facts
Robert A Millikan	American	1915	May have fudged some of his results to make them more convincing	First accurate measurement of the charge on an electron	Found that charge was quantised into multiples of e, 1/6 x 10-19C
Heinrich Hertz	German	1885	Discovered photoelectric emission	Discovered how to produce and detect radio waves	Showed that Maxwell was right – energy as waves can travel from source to detector
James Clark Maxwell	Scottish	1865	Died age 36	Gave mathematical proof that light consists of electromagnetic waves	Showed that light was a wave with a constant speed, also predicted existence of other EM waves outside the visible spectrum
Max Planck	German	1900	His son was executed for his part in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler	Energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency related by h, Planck’s constant	Founder of quantum theory
JJ Thompson	British	1897	Seven of his research assistants and his son won Nobel prizes	Discovered Cathode rays, measured the specific charge of an electron	Showed that e/m for an electron was 1860 times bigger than anything ever measured before
Thomas Young	British	1804	Deciphered the Rosetta Stone	Showed that light behaved as a wave with his double slit experiment	Refuted Isaac Newton’s corpuscular theory once and for all
Christiaan Huygens	Dutch	1678	Invented the pendulum clock	Put forward theory that light is a wave not a particle	He was right but didn’t have a lot of evidence
Louis de Broglie	French	1924	Got his first degree in humanities before turning to Physics	Put forward the idea of electron waves	He proposed the wave particle duality theory of matter, creating a new field in Physics
Albert Michelson and Edward Morley	American	1887	Worked on the atomic weight of oxygen for 11 years	Tried to detect the ether with an interferometer	Showed that there was no ether and also that the speed of light is constant.  Most important failed experiment in this unit