Prominent Physicists of the 20th Century

A CD-ROM Photo Collection

The APS has developed a collection of portraits of late physicists for the APS centennial. The collection was initiated both to provide a pictorial history of distinguished physicists throughout the last century and to help illustrate talks given by speakers included in the APS Centennial Speakers booklet. The approximately 200 portraits of late physicists selected for the collection have been compiled on CD-ROM. The collection is indexed alphabetically and includes birth and death dates, in addition to a short description of the subject's contribution to physics.

How were the names chosen? The selection was done by a committee chaired by APS past President Andrew Sessler, consisting also of physicist-historians Stephen Brush, Gerald Holton, and Spencer Weart. They chose names that were likely to be mentioned in lectures on 20th century physics. But there were two important limitations.

First, the committee did not include anyone who died before 1900, although it included a few physicists (such as Boltzmann and Roentgen) whose most important contributions, while made before 1900, had a major impact on 20th century physics. Second, it excluded persons still alive at the end of 1997. Thus you will not find pictures of Galileo, Newton, or Maxwell; nor, will you find entries in the current generation of active outstanding physicists. On the other hand, it interpreted the term "physicist" broadly, including several mathematicians, astronomers, chemists and earth scientists whose work is widely known and highly valued in the physics community.

A third constraint was that the photo collection had to fit on a single CD-ROM. Thus it could not include every physicist recommended by one of the several groups consulted for suggestions. The selection committee used its judgment to eliminate many names. While we are confident that all the persons included do in fact belong in this collection, it would be surprising if we did not receive complaints about some of the many omissions. We are especially interested in learning how you found the CD-ROM useful and what changes would make it more so.

The production of this CD-ROM was made possible by the resources and cooperation of the staff of the AIP Niels Bohr Library and the Center for History of Physics at the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland, including the Emilio Segre Visual Archives photograph collection. Please note that the images may only be used for projection at lectures; permission to reproduce them in publications or in any other form must be requested from the copyright owner, indicated in the credit line for each photo. The Center for History of Physics, owns the world rights to many of these photos.

The CD-ROM collection was produced with the assistance of Erika Ridgway, Elizabeth Buchan-Higgins, Kim Quigley and other APS staff members, and Stephen Norton, a graduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science Program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The information on the CD-ROM is in pdf format (reader included) and will run on Windows 95, NT, 3.1, 3.11 or later versions, Macintosh, and Unix systems. It will be available for purchase at meetings of the Society throughout 1999.

Alfven, Hannes Olaf Gosta Alvarez, Luis Walter Anderson, Carl David Appleton, Edward Victor Aston, Francis William Ayrton, Hertha Bainbridge, Kenneth T. Bardeen, John Barkla, Charles Glover Becquerel, Antoine-Henri Bell, John Stewart Bhabha, Homi Jehangir Bitter, Francis Blackett, Patrick Maynard Stuart Blau, Marietta Bloch, Felix Blodgett, Katharine Burr Bogolyubov, Nikolai Nikolaevich Bohm, David Bohr, Niels Henrik David Boltzman, Ludwig E. Born, Max Bose, Satyendra Nath Bouchet, Edward Alexander Bragg, William Henry Bragg, William Lawrence Brattain, Walter Houser Breit, Gregory Bridgman, Percy Williams Brillouin, Leon Nicolas Chadwick, James Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan Chapman, Sydney Cherenkov, Pavel Alekseyevich Cockcroft, John Douglas Compton, Arthur Holly Condon, Edward Uhler Crookes, William Curie, Pierre Curie, Marie Sklodowska Davisson, Clinton Joseph DeBroglie, Louis Victor Debye, Petrus Dicke, Robert Henry Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice Du Mond, Jesse William Monroe Eddington, Arthur Stanley Ehrenfest, Paul Ehrenfest-Afanassjeva, T.A. Einstein, Albert Ellis, Robert A., Jr. Fairbank, William Martin Fermi, Enrico Feynman, Richard Phillips Fowler, William Alfred Franck, James Frank, Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, Philipp Franklin, Rosalind Elsie Frenkel Yakov Ilyich Frisch, Otto Robert Fukui, Kenichi Gabor, Dennis Gamow, George Geiger, Hans Wilhelm

Gibbs, Josiah Willard Goppert-Mayer, Maria Goudsmit, Samuel Abraham Grad, Harold Hahn, Otto Hale, George Ellery Heisenberg, Werner Karl Hertz, Gustav Ludwig Hess, Victor Franz de Hevesy, George Hilbert, David Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot Hofstadter, Robert L. Houtermans, Fritz Georg Hubble, Edwin Powell Imes, Elmer Samuel Ioffe, Abram F. Jensen, Johannes Hans Daniel Joliot, Frederic Joliot-Curie, Irene Kamerlingh-Onnes, Heike Kapitza, Pyotr von Karman, Theodore Kastler, Alfred Kemble, Edward Crawford Kerst, Donald William Klein, Oskar Benjamin Kramers, Hendrik A. Kurchatov, Igor Kusch, Polykarp Land, Edwin Herbert Landau, Lev Davidovich Lande, Alfred Langevin, Paul Langmuir, Irving von Laue, Max Lawrence, Ernest Orlando Leavitt, Henrietta Swan Lehmann, Inge Lemaitre, Georges Libby, Willard Frank Livingston, M. Stanley London, Fritz Wolfgang Lonsdale, Kathleen Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon Lyman, Theodore Mach, Ernst Marconi, Guglielmo Marshak, Robert Eugene Matthias, Bernd Teo McMillan, Edwin Mattison Meitner, Lise Michelson, Albert Abraham Millikan, Robert Andrews Minkowski, Hermann von Mises, Richard Moseley, Henry Gwyn-Jeffreys Mott, Nevill Francis Mulliken, Robert Sanderson von Neumann, John Nier, Alfred Otto Carl Noether, Amalie Emmy Occhialini, Giuseppe Onsager, Lars Oppenheimer, J. Robert

Patterson, Clair Cameron Paul, Wolfgang Pauli, Wolfgang Pauling, Linus Carl Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia Peierls, Rudolf E. Perey, Marguerite Catherine Perrin, Jean Baptiste Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Pockels, Agnes Poincare, Jules Henri Powell, Cecil Frank Prandtl, Ludwig Purcell, Edward Mills Rabi, Isidor Isaac Rainwater, Leo James Raman, Chandrasekhara Richardson, Owen Williams Rontgen, Wilhelm Conrad Rossi, Bruno Rutherford, Ernest Sabine, Wallace Clement Sakharov, Andrei Dmitrievich Salam, Abdus Schiff, Leonard Issac Schrodinger, Erwin Schwarzschild, Martin Schwinger, Julian Seymour Segre, Emilio Gino Serber, Robert Shockley, William Siegbahn, Karl Manne Georg Slater, John Clarke Sommerfeld, Arnold Spitzer, Lyman, Jr. Stark, Johannes Stern, Otto Street, Jabez Curry Strutt, John William Rayleigh Szilard, Leo Tamm, Igor Yevgenyevich Thomas, Llewellyn Thomson, George Paget Thomson, Joseph John Tomonaga, Sin-itiro Tuve, Merle Anthony Uhlenbeck, George Eugene Urey, Harold Clayton Van de Graaff, Robert J. Van Hove, Léon Van Vleck, John H. Walton, Ernest Thomas Sinton Weyl, K.H. Herman Wick, Gian-Carlo Wideroe, Rolf Wien, Wilhelm Wiener, Norbert Wigner, Eugene Paul Wood, Robert Williams Wu, Chien-Shiung Yukawa, Hideki Zeeman, Pieter Zel'dovich, Yakov B. Zernike, Fritz Zwicky, Fritz