Science is full of famous names and even more famous stories, and not all of those stories are true. These tiles sort the apple from the legend and bring forward people history nearly left out, from a bookbinder's apprentice to a Nobel laureate who never earned a PhD. You will meet a timid monk with a garden of peas, an astronomer who defended his mother against witchcraft charges and a physicist with a glass of ice water.
Every tile in a Great Scientists game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Physics
nine stories
1What Newton really said about the apple
On the tile: Newton's apple1666Legend
The story goes that a falling apple bonked Isaac Newton on the head. In April 1726, after dinner at his lodgings in Kensington, Newton and his friend William Stukeley drank tea under some apple trees. Newton said the scene was just like the one in which the notion of gravitation first came to him, prompted by the fall of an apple as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why, he had wondered, should an apple always fall straight down? Tradition places that tree at Woolsthorpe, his family home, where he went in 1666 when plague closed Cambridge.
A popular myth says Albert Einstein flunked math. It even appeared in a Ripley's newspaper column, under the headline "Greatest living mathematician failed in mathematics." In 1935 a rabbi in Princeton showed Einstein the clipping, and he laughed. "I never failed in mathematics," he replied. "Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus." The record backs him. In primary school he was at the top of his class in math, and by about age 12 he was teaching himself geometry and algebra over a summer vacation, from textbooks his parents bought him in advance.
The story goes that Galileo dropped two unequal weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, before professors and students, to show that they fall together. The only source placing that test at the tower is a biography by Viviani, his secretary in his final years, and most historians of science doubt it. Galileo himself wrote of testing a cannonball and a musket ball without mentioning any tower. In Delft, though, in about 1586, Simon Stevin really did drop two lead balls of different weights from the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk. They hit the ground at the same time.
4The mathematician who taught under a colleague's name
On the tile: Emmy Noether1918
In 1915 David Hilbert and Felix Klein invited Emmy Noether to Göttingen to help with Hilbert's work on relativity. Women could not then qualify to lecture there, so she worked unpaid while Hilbert advertised her courses under his own name, one as a seminar by "Professor Hilbert, with the assistance of Dr E Noether." Meanwhile she proved what is now called Noether's theorem, published in 1918: every symmetry in the laws of physics goes with a conserved quantity. Energy is conserved, for example, because the laws do not change over time. She won the right to lecture in 1919.
James Clerk Maxwell, the great theorist of electromagnetism, also helped make what came to be celebrated as the first color photograph. At the Royal Institution in London in May 1861, he showed three pictures of a tartan ribbon that photographer Thomas Sutton had taken through red, green and blue filters. Projected together through matching filters, they merged into a full-color image. It hid a puzzle: Sutton's plates were sensitive mainly to blue light. In 1961 Ralph Evans proposed that the ribbon's red dye also reflected ultraviolet light, which the plates did record.
The story goes that Ibn al-Haytham, a scholar from Basra, boasted that he could control the flooding of the Nile. The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim invited him to Cairo to do it. Realizing the plan was impossible, he pretended to be mad to escape the caliph's anger and was kept under what amounted to house arrest. He used the time well. His seven-volume Book of Optics argued that we see because light enters our eyes, not because our eyes send out rays, and he tested his ideas in darkened rooms. In 2015 UNESCO marked the book's 1,000th anniversary.
In June 1924 Albert Einstein received a letter from a physics professor in Dacca, now Dhaka. Satyendra Nath Bose called himself a complete stranger and enclosed a five-page paper deriving Planck's law of radiation in a new way. He had sent it to the journal Philosophical Magazine and never heard back. Einstein called it an important step forward, translated it into German himself and got it published. Their brief exchange led to the prediction of a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate, first detected in 1995. Paul Dirac later dubbed particles of this kind bosons.
8The first nuclear reactor was built in a squash court
On the tile: Enrico Fermi1942
The world's first nuclear reactor was built in a squash court. For the Manhattan Project, crews stacked a 20-foot pile of graphite blocks studded with uranium in an old court under the abandoned football stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, working around the clock for two weeks. On December 2, 1942, with 49 scientists present, Enrico Fermi directed the operators to slowly move the control rods. At 3:53 p.m. the pile achieved a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, the first created by humans. They celebrated by drinking Chianti from paper cups.
At a televised hearing on the Challenger disaster in 1986, physicist Richard Feynman squeezed a piece of O-ring rubber in a small clamp and dunked it in his glass of ice water. Released, it did not spring back: at 32 degrees, close to the launch temperature, the rubber lost its resilience. The clue had traveled a hidden path. Fellow commissioner Sally Ride had quietly given General Donald Kutyna a NASA document on O-rings and cold. Kutyna could not reveal that it came from an astronaut, so he nudged Feynman toward the cold while showing him his car's carburetor.
1Darwin's finches did not open his eyes on the spot
On the tile: Darwin1835Myth busted
The popular story says Charles Darwin saw the finches of the Galápagos in 1835 and grasped evolution on the spot. He did not. He took many of the birds for unrelated kinds, mistaking one for a wren and linking another to meadowlarks and orioles, and he failed to label most of his Galápagos birds by island. Back in England in 1837, the ornithologist John Gould recognized that they were all closely related finches, and Darwin later leaned on shipmates' better-labeled specimens. It was Gould's expert judgments, not an island revelation, that helped push Darwin toward evolution.
In February 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace was suffering attacks of fever in the Moluccas, in what is now Indonesia. Lying down through the fits, he thought about how disease and famine keep populations in check, and the idea of natural selection came to him. He mailed an essay on it to Charles Darwin, who had sketched the same theory in 1842 but never published it. Darwin's friends had both men's work read at the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858, with neither man present. The society's president later said the year had brought no striking, revolutionary discoveries.
Gregor Mendel was a poor fit for parish work. His abbot told the bishop that the young monk was seized by an unconquerable timidity at sickbeds, and later, despite two years at the University of Vienna, he never completed his teaching certification exam. The abbot, curious about heredity, urged him to experiment in the monastery garden instead. Over eight years Mendel bred thousands of pea plants and found that traits pass down in predictable ratios. He presented his results in 1865, and hardly anyone noticed. In 1900, 16 years after his death, three scientists rediscovered his work.
Barbara McClintock found that genes can jump. Studying corn at Cold Spring Harbor in the 1940s, she saw genetic material move from one place on a chromosome to another, switching traits such as kernel color on and off. Her 1951 talk on the idea is often said to have met stony silence, though some who were there disputed that; she was already respected and had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1944. Still, few could fit her evidence into a coherent picture until molecular biology caught up. In 1983, at 81, she won an unshared Nobel Prize.
5The official specimen of humankind is Carl Linnaeus
On the tile: Linnaeus1959
Animal species names are anchored to type specimens, the examples that define them. When Carl Linnaeus named Homo sapiens in 1758, he designated none. In 1959 Professor William Stearn remarked in passing that Linnaeus himself must stand as the type of his Homo sapiens, and under the rules of zoological naming that was enough. So the name-bearing specimen for humankind is a Swedish naturalist whose tomb is in Uppsala Cathedral. A later bid to crown the fossil hunter Edward Drinker Cope was invalid: Cope was born in 1840, long after Linnaeus wrote his description.
6An artist who sailed to Suriname to watch insects
On the tile: Maria Merian1699
In the 1600s many people believed insects sprang to life from mud and rotting matter. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German artist, watched them instead. By 13 she was rearing silkworms and sketching their life cycle. In 1699, at 52, she sold her paintings, made her will and sailed with her daughter Dorothea to the Dutch colony of Suriname, where she drew heavily on the knowledge and help of enslaved people. Her 1705 book, Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, showed creatures at each stage of life alongside the plants they depended on.
To test whether germs float in the air, Louis Pasteur took his experiment up a glacier. In 1860 a mule carried his sealed flasks of broth to the Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice, near Mont Blanc. The first attempt failed when the glare off the ice hid the flame he needed to reseal the flasks. He rigged a brighter lamp, climbed back up and snapped open flasks at about 2,000 meters. Only one of 20 turned cloudy. In the courtyard of the Paris Observatory, all 11 he opened had turned cloudy. Clean mountain air carried far fewer germs.
Jane Goodall had no college degree when she went to study chimpanzees. With no money for college, she trained as a secretary, and the fossil hunter Louis Leakey hired her for that job. In 1960, at 26, she went to what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, with her mother as chaperone. Within months Goodall watched a chimp she named David Greybeard strip leaves off a twig and use it to fish termites from a mound. Leakey told her, she recalled, that "we now have to redefine tool, redefine man, or include chimpanzees with humans."
Nettie Stevens spent years as a teacher and librarian, saving money, before she started at Stanford University in 1896, in her mid-30s. By 1905, working at Bryn Mawr College, she was studying the chromosomes of mealworms. She found that males carried one unusually small chromosome, now called Y, and that sperm carrying it produced males. It was firm evidence that sex is determined by chromosomes. Edmund Wilson published similar findings the same year and has often been given the credit. In 1912 Bryn Mawr offered her a research professorship, but she died of breast cancer before she could begin.
Marie Curie's laboratory notebooks are still radioactive. While she and Pierre were discovering polonium and radium in 1898, the powdery materials they handled without special precautions left radioactive particles in the pages and cloth covers. The notebooks reached France's national library, the BnF, in 1967, where radiation experts assessed and treated them, and they can be consulted only under a strict protocol. Yet the risk from those on display is tiny. Measurements for the library found that ten minutes in front of them gives a dose some 5,000 times smaller than a day of natural background radiation.
2A bad cold, a sheet of paper and a protein's shape
On the tile: Linus Pauling1948
In early 1948 Linus Pauling, then a visiting professor at Oxford, was laid up with a cold that had turned into a sinus infection. For a day or two he read detective stories. Then, bored, he decided to think about the structure of proteins. He sketched a chain of amino acids on paper, keeping the peptide bonds flat, and folded the sheet into a tube until hydrogen bonds could pin each turn in place. That model became the alpha helix. Pauling later won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize, the only person awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes.
In 1935 a young chemist at DePauw University in Indiana told one of the world's leading chemists, in print, that he was wrong. Percy Julian, born in Alabama in 1899 as the grandson of former slaves, was racing Oxford's Robert Robinson to make physostigmine, a glaucoma drug, in the lab. Julian noticed that a key compound Robinson had reported had the wrong melting point. He and Josef Pikl published their own route, stating that the English authors were in error. They were right. Julian faced racism throughout his life, and DePauw denied him a professorship.
4Her leprosy treatment was published under a man's name
On the tile: Alice Ball1915
Alice Ball was 23 when she solved a problem that had frustrated doctors. Oil from chaulmoogra tree seeds could treat Hansen's disease, or leprosy, but taken by mouth it often caused nausea, and injected it caused painful abscesses. At the College of Hawaii, where in 1915 she became the first woman to earn a master's degree, Ball found a way to make the oil injectable. She died in 1916 at 24. The chemist Arthur Dean then published the work as his own, as the Dean Method. The physician Harry Hollmann credited Ball in 1922, but her role was overlooked for decades.
5A Nobel laureate headlined as an Oxford housewife
On the tile: D. Hodgkin1964
When Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on her own, the Daily Mail's headline read "Oxford housewife wins Nobel." Her real work was X-ray crystallography, working out the atomic structures of molecules such as penicillin and vitamin B12. She did it despite rheumatoid arthritis that struck when she was 28; when her hands could no longer work the main switch of her X-ray equipment, she had a long lever made for it. Her first target, insulin, took more than three decades. She finally solved it in 1969, wearing slippers because her ankles were so swollen.
The story goes that August Kekulé, dozing by the fire, saw a snake seize its own tail and woke knowing that the six carbon atoms of benzene form a ring. He told the tale himself in 1890, at a Berlin celebration of the 25th anniversary of his benzene paper, with no record of mentioning it before. Some argue he made it up to bolster his claim to be first, since the Vienna schoolteacher Josef Loschmidt had published a ring among several possible benzene structures in 1861. In the same speech Kekulé advised dreaming, but testing dreams before publishing them.
Stephanie Kwolek wanted to be a doctor but could not afford medical school, so after graduating in chemistry in 1946 she took a research job at DuPont. She liked it so much that she dropped her medical plans. In 1965, while looking for strong, lightweight fibers, she made a polymer solution that was cloudy and almost as thin as water. The man who ran the spinning machine refused at first, sure the cloudiness meant particles that would plug its tiny holes. Kwolek insisted. The fiber proved five times stronger than steel. DuPont sold it as Kevlar.
In 1767 Joseph Priestley became minister of Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds, England, and grew interested in the gas given off by fermenting beer, then called fixed air and now known as carbon dioxide. He worked out how to make the gas and dissolve it in water, one of the earliest simple ways of making what we now call carbonated water, and described the method in a 1772 paper, Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air. He hoped the drink would prevent or treat scurvy among sailors. It did not, but in 1773 the work helped win him the Royal Society's top honor, the Copley Medal.
John Dalton, the English chemist best known for bringing atomic theory into chemistry, saw colors differently. In 1794 he presented the first systematic study of color blindness, a condition later named Daltonism. He guessed that the jelly inside his eyes, the vitreous humor, was tinted blue and filtered the light, so he asked that his eyes be examined after his death. In 1844 a doctor found the fluid perfectly colorless. The eyes were kept, and in 1995 scientists analyzed DNA from a tiny fragment of them. Dalton lacked the gene for the receptor sensitive to green light.
Eratosthenes, who became chief librarian at Alexandria around 240 BC, measured the Earth without leaving Egypt. He heard that at noon on the summer solstice the Sun lit the whole bottom of a well at Syene, now Aswan, so it stood directly overhead. At Alexandria at that moment, a stick's shadow made an angle of about 7.2 degrees. With Syene about 5,000 stadia away, he figured the Earth at about 250,000 stadia around. Depending on the stadium used, that is 24,000 to 29,000 miles; the real figure is about 24,900. His nickname was Beta: very good, but not quite first-rate.
In 499, at just 23, the Indian astronomer Aryabhata finished a book of verses on mathematics and astronomy, the Aryabhatiya. In it he made a startling claim: the heavens only seem to wheel around us because the Earth itself turns on its axis. The idea was so hard to accept that later commentators changed his text to save him from what they considered errors. He also correctly explained the causes of solar and lunar eclipses, which Indian tradition had blamed on a demon called Rahu. In 1975 India named its first satellite Aryabhata in his honor.
3Kepler defended his mother against witchcraft charges
On the tile: Kepler1620
The astronomer Johannes Kepler spent years defending his mother against witchcraft charges. In 1615 a woman in Württemberg claimed Katharina Kepler had poisoned her with a potion. In August 1620 Katharina was imprisoned, accused of 49 counts of witchcraft. Kepler set aside much of his research, hired lawyers and wrote the bulk of a 128-page defense. Officials showed her instruments of torture to frighten her into confessing, but she would admit nothing. In October 1621 she was freed by order of the Duke of Württemberg. Some historians think Kepler's tale of a trip to the Moon, Somnium, fed the rumors.
James Hutton was a Scottish farmer whose work in his fields got him thinking about how rocks and soils form. He came to see the Earth as shaped by slow, repeating cycles of erosion, deposition and uplift. In 1788 he went by boat to Siccar Point on the Berwickshire coast. There, nearly flat red sandstone lies on steeply tilted gray rock that had been worn down first, a gap now put at about 65 million years. His companion John Playfair wrote that "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time."
William Smith noticed that layers of rock appear in the same order and that each holds its own mix of fossils, so a layer can be recognized wherever it turns up. Traveling for years as a canal surveyor, he single-handedly mapped the geology of England, Wales and southern Scotland. His hand-colored 1815 map, about 8.5 by 6 feet, was the first geological map of an entire nation. It did not make him rich: Smith went bankrupt and spent time in debtors' prison. But in 1831 he became the first person to receive the Geological Society of London's Wollaston Medal.
6The word scientist first appeared in a review of her book
On the tile: M. Somerville1834
The word scientist first appeared in print in 1834, in a review of a book by Mary Somerville. As a girl in Scotland she overheard her painting teacher say that Euclid's geometry was the basis for understanding perspective and astronomy, and she set out to learn it. Later, asked to translate Laplace's great work on celestial mechanics, she went far beyond a translation, explaining its mathematics for English readers. Reviewing her On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, William Whewell discussed a new word coined at a British science meeting: scientist. Another, less serious suggestion was nature-poker.
In her 1925 doctoral thesis, Cecilia Payne worked out that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Astronomers then assumed that stars resembled Earth, rich in heavier elements such as iron. The eminent astronomer Henry Norris Russell told her the result was clearly impossible, so she wrote that the amounts of hydrogen and helium she found were almost certainly not real, without changing her conclusion. Four years later Russell reached the same answer and credited her. She stayed at Harvard, doing a professor's work for years without the title. In 1956 she became the first woman promoted to full professor from within Harvard's faculty.
8Dating the Earth led him to fight leaded gasoline
On the tile: C. Patterson1956
Clair Patterson set out to date the Earth and ended up fighting leaded gasoline. In a clean room he designed and built himself, he counted lead atoms in a meteorite from Canyon Diablo, near Arizona's Meteor Crater, and in a 1956 paper put the Earth's age at 4.55 billion years. Along the way he found lead contamination everywhere, including in California mountain snow whose chemical fingerprint matched Los Angeles air and gasoline. His 1965 warning began a long fight, and between 1976 and 1980 the lead added to U.S. gasoline each month fell by more than half.
The Serbian scientist Milutin Milanković was honeymooning in his home village of Dalj, then in Austria-Hungary, in the summer of 1914. When war broke out he was interned, with little more than a briefcase of papers and notes. After six months in a camp, his wife Kristina won him supervised release in Budapest, where he could work in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. There he calculated how slow changes in Earth's orbit and tilt alter the sunlight reaching each latitude, the math behind the ice ages. His theory was largely ignored until a 1976 study of deep-sea sediments bore it out.