The Scientists club.

[Bobbybroccoli]

This club is for discussing scientific history and its celebrities. This is not the science club, which you can check out here, but a less technical club.

Who: Anyone who has contributed to science, willingly or unwillingly, well known or overshadowed, etc...

What: A discussion of all the trials and methods that these people went through. Whether their hypothesis was completely wrong, or completely right, we can talk about them here.

Feel free to provide a mini biography for any scientist, or to bring up information others might have left out.

You can discuss anyone and any concept you want, or you can post jokes regarding those scientist. Puns are accepted.

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Let me start this up with a lesser known British scientist, voted the second most famous scientist after Isaac Newton by the English public.

Paul Dirac is easily comparable to Newton, both being very smart, and both being antisocial. Both could have been classified with having Aspergers syndrome nowadays.

Paul grew up in Bristol England, and had an aptitude for mathematics. He grew up to become a prominent Quantum physicist, most notably for theorizing anti matter, and proposing a preliminary theory for Quantum electrodynamics (how an electron moves).

He met many other famous figures in atomic and Quantum theory, such as Bohr, Rutherford, Pauli, Heisenburg, among others.

1902-1984.

[Bobbybroccoli]

At 1/27/13 09:06 PM, abbiegale wrote:

At 1/27/13 07:11 PM, Bobbybroccoli wrote:

Sounds good! If that includes social sciences, count me in (you seem pretty open, anyway, so I guess it won't be a problem). Also, I'm not quite sure how this thread will stick to the people and we won't be carried away by their ideas/theories; but maybe as OP you know how to handle that.

Sure, that is perfectly fine to include the social sciences. They are based on experiments and real cases, just as early work in other fields were, and even then early early work was based on pure logic, even though that logic might contradict experiment.

Why does it seem that scientists and smart people in general often have some sort of disability/disorder, and/or anti-social tendencies (after a quick search I found this; I'm not certain of its reliability, but this is not a new concept anyway)? Would you say that physical and emotional inabilities are connected with a high IQ, or that they urge those people to prove what they're worth?

Maybe they feel as if that is the only thing they are good at, so why not go full time? In Dirac's case, he was simply good at math, and he did't really have an interest in making friends, so he simply kept working and he got into Cambridge University.

[ChiralAnomaly]

At 1/27/13 07:11 PM, Bobbybroccoli wrote:

Paul grew up in Bristol England, and had an aptitude for mathematics. He grew up to become a prominent Quantum physicist, most notably for theorizing anti matter

strictly speaking, he did not. at that time, there was a theory which described the evolution of spinless particles in vacuum. but people soon discovered that there was a flaw with the theory itself. the equation was not physical in some sense.

and what dirac actually did was to reformulate the equation by introducing 'extra degrees of freedom' so that it had physical meaning. in the process, he found out that some of the solutions to the equation corresponds to particles that had negative frequencies and moved backwards in time, which could not be discarded.

it turned out that the solutions corresponded to anti particle, and that the equation desribed spin half particles.

nevertheless, dirac contributed sigificantly to modern quantum mechanics.

[Bobbybroccoli]

At 1/28/13 01:10 PM, i-am-ghey wrote:

At 1/27/13 07:11 PM, Bobbybroccoli wrote:

it turned out that the solutions corresponded to anti particle, and that the equation desribed spin half particles.

nevertheless, dirac contributed sigificantly to modern quantum mechanics.

I actually read his biography, at least up until the early 1930s, so I only really reached the part with the QED. I just know he was the first to do something related to antimatter, so thanks for clearing that up.