Currently, there is a large group of physicists being considered for the “I, Physicist” project.  Their names were preselected from a preliminary scanning of the literature seeking for a great variety of worldviews and experiences in physics (theoretical, experimental, industrial, and physics teaching). As this project evolves more names will be added (especially of women physicists and Latin American experimental physicists.)

As it has been said, “Acquiring a professional identity is a fundamental part of any student’s development…However, developing an identity as a professional physicist and [a] member of the physics community is a complicated process that can take a long time and involve overcoming multiple barriers.” (see, Developing physics identities, Physics Today 69, 5, 46 (2016); DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.3169).

This project involves reading a large number of biographies looking for insights into the practice of physics.

THE PHYSICISTS

Born in the 18th and 19th century

Michael Faraday (1791-1867), George Green (1793-1841), William Thompson (1824-1907), James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925), Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), Michael Pupin (1858-1935), Geoffrey Ingram Taylor (1866-1975), Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951), Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Paul Ehrenfest (1880-1933), James Franck (1882-1964), Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888–1970), Yakov Il’ich Frenkel (1894-1952), Marietta Blau (1894-1970), Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974), Russell Varian (1898–1959), and Isidor Isaac Rabi (1898-1988). 

Born in the 20th century*

John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971), P.A.M. Dirac (1902-1984), Eugene Wigner (1902–1995), Max Delbrück (1906-1981), Hans Bethe (1906-2005), Yukawa Hideki (1907-1981), Lev Davidovich Landau (1908-1968), Victor Weisskopf (1908 – 2002), Wu Chien-Shiung (1912-1997), David Tabor (1913-2005), Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich (1914-1987), Richard Feynman (1918-1988), Rosalyn (Sussman) Yalow (1921-2011), Yang Cheng-Ning (1922-), Freeman Dyson (1923-2020), Theodore (Ted) Brewster Taylor (1925–2004), Huang Ke Sun (“Kerson Huang”) (1928-2016), Rudolf Mössbauer (1929-2011), Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus (1930-2017), Alberto Pignotti (1936-), John Harte (1939-), Shirley Ann Jackson (1946-), Donna Strickland (1959-), Roderick Dewar (c. 1960-), and the seminar conducted by Vladimir Gribov (1930-1997), in the 1960s, in Leningrad, as one example of the collective way of practicing physics.

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(*) Chinese and Japanese names follow Asian naming customs (family name goes first).

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SOBRE EL AUTOR: José G. Álvarez Cornett ( @Chegoyo en Twitter )

Miembro de COENER, y del grupo “Physics and Mathematics for Biomedical Consortium“. Representante de los Egresados ante el Consejo de Escuela de Física, Facultad de Ciencias, UCV. Docente de Historia de la Ciencia en la Escuela de Física, Facultad de Ciencias, UCV.

@Chegoyo 2020