Stephen Hawkins


Who Was Stephen Hawking?
Stephen Hawking was a British scientist, professor and author who performed groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology, and whose books helped to make science accessible to everyone.

At age 21, while studying cosmology at the University of Cambridge, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Part of his life story was depicted in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything.

among some of his work are the following
A Brief History of Time
The Universe in A Nutshell
The Grand Design
A Briefer History of Time


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0eJRXOOikg

Steven Weinberg (born 1933) shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other scientists for their work in the field of elementary-particle forces.

Steven Weinberg was born on May 3, 1933, in New York City. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1950; one of his classmates was Sheldon Lee Glashow, with whom Weinberg would share the Nobel Prize in 1979. Weinberg received his B.A. from Cornell (1954) and then for a year went to the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen before returning to the United States to complete his Ph.D. at Princeton (1957). Weinberg taught at Columbia University (1957-1959), the University of California at Berkeley (1959-1966), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1969-1973), and Harvard University (1973-1982). In 1982 he became Josey Professor of Science at the University of Texas in Austin, where he remained into the 1990s. He met his wife, Louise, while an undergraduate at Cornell, and they were married in 1954; their only child, Elizabeth, was born in Berkeley in 1963.

Views on religion
Weinberg is an atheist. Weinberg stated his views on religion in 1999:

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-y3DPJRVhE&t=10s

Lawrence Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist and bestselling author, as well as being an acclaimed lecturer. He is currently President of The Origins Project Foundation, which celebrates science and culture by connecting scientists, artists, writers and celebrities with the public through special events, and unique travel opportunities. He is also host of the Origins Podcast, a video podcast involving dialogues with the most interesting people in the world.

His own research interests have focused on the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, including the origin and evolution of the Universe and the fundamental structure of matter. Among his numerous important scientific contributions was the proposal, in 1995, that most of the energy of the Universe resided in empty space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

Who Is Neil deGrasse Tyson?
One of America's best-known scientists, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent much of his career sharing his knowledge with others. He has a great talent for presenting complex concepts in a clear and accessible manner.

After studying at Harvard University, he earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 1991. Tyson went to work for the Hayden Planetarium in 1996 before becoming its director. Additionally, he has served as host of NOVA ScienceNow and the StarTalk Radio podcast. Tyson remains a popular TV science expert today and has amassed over 13 million followers on Twitter.

Career Highlights
Director of the Hayden Planetarium
Tyson eventually became the director of the Hayden Planetarium and worked on an extensive renovation of the facility, assisting with its design and helping raise the necessary funds. The $210 million project was completed in 2000, and the revamped site offered visitors a cutting-edge look at astronomy. One of Tyson's most controversial decisions at the time was the removal of Pluto from the display of planets. He classified Pluto as a dwarf planet, which invoked a strong response from some visitors. While some asked for the planet Pluto back, the International Astronomical Union followed Tyson's lead in 2006. The organization officially labeled Pluto as a dwarf planet.

Host of 'NOVA ScienceNow'
In addition to his work at the planetarium, Tyson has found other ways of improving the nation's scientific literacy. "One of my goals is to bring the universe down to Earth in a way that further excites the audience to want more," he once said. Tyson has taken his message to the airwaves, serving as the host of NOVA ScienceNow documentary series from 2006 to 2011. In addition to breaking down barriers between scientists and the general public, Tyson has brought diversity to astrophysics. He is one of the few African Americans in his field.

Presidential Advisor to George Bush
Tyson has also served as a presidential advisor. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed the astrophysicist to a commission on the future of the aerospace industry. Tyson also served another commission three years later to examine U.S. policy on space exploration.

Celebrity Scientist & TV Appearances
These days, Tyson is one of the most in-demand science experts. He gives talks across the country and is a media favorite whenever there is an important science issue in the news. Tyson is known for his ability to make difficult concepts accessible to every audience, his oratory skills and his sense of humor, which has led to appearances on such shows as Real Time with Bill Maher, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show.

'StarTalk' Podcasts & TV
In 2009, Tyson began hosting the podcast StarTalk Radio, a science-based talk show that features comedic co-hosts. Its success fueled the launch of a StarTalk TV show in 2015, as well as the spinoff podcasts StarTalk All-Stars and StarTalk Playing with Science.

'Cosmos'
In 2014, Tyson hosted and served as the executive editor of a 13-episode television series entitled Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey. The series rebooted the classic science documentary, Cosmos. The original version featured Carl Sagan as host and provided a general audience with a greater understanding of the origin of life and our universe.

Books
Tyson has written several books for the general public, including Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries (2006) and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (2009). After breaking down complex scientific concepts in Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017), he followed with a collection of his responses to fans and critics in Letters from an Astrophysicist (2019).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_m1mPtYzTk

Michio Kaku
Born 1947.
Best known in the world of theoretical physicists, Michio Kaku is the City College of New York’s Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics.

He is a futurist, a great communicator, and a popularizer of science. He is the author of several physics-related books such as Physics of the Impossible published in 2008, and Physics of the Future published in 2011. Michio Kaku has appeared in several television programs, radio programs, films, and makes his work available through his online blogs.

Academic Career and Publications
Kaku has expertise in several fields such as hadronic physics, supersymmetry, supergravity, superstring theory, and quantum physics among others. His knowledge on these topics has been subject of more than 70 publications in different journals covering physics-related subjects such as Physics Review.

Michio Kaku is known as a popularizer of science, and he has authored several popular science textbooks. His first book was released in 1994 – Hyperspace, followed by Beyond Einstein which he wrote with Jennifer Thompson a year later. In 1998, he published Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, then two books in 2004: Einstein’s Cosmos and Parallel Worlds. His most recent works include Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), and The Future of the Mind (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fqRnSfAvbk

Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics, is renowned for his groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory, including the co-discovery of mirror symmetry and of spatial topology change. He is known to the public through his books, The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality, which have collectively spent 65 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. The Washington Post called him “the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today.” Professor Greene hosted two Peabody and Emmy Award winning NOVA miniseries based on his books and is a frequent television guest, joining Stephen Colbert seven times and playing himself in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. He has also had cameo roles in a number of Hollywood films including Frequency, Maze and The Last Mimzy. With producer Tracy Day, Greene co-founded the World Science Festival and he is the Director of Columbia University’s Center for Theoretical Physics.

he has a new book now, Until The End of Time.
he is also the founder of World Science Festival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBrsWPCp_rs

my main man here

Richard Dawkins
BRITISH BIOLOGIST AND WRITER
Richard Dawkins, in full Clinton Richard Dawkins, (born March 26, 1941, Nairobi, Kenya), British evolutionary biologist, ethologist, and popular-science writer who emphasized the gene as the driving force of evolution and generated significant controversy with his enthusiastic advocacy of atheism.

Dawkins spent his early childhood in Kenya, where his father was stationed during World War II. The family returned to England in 1949. In 1959 Dawkins entered Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he received a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1962. He remained at Oxford, earning his master’s and doctorate degrees in zoology in 1966 under famed ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. Dawkins assisted Tinbergen before becoming an assistant professor of zoology (1967–69) at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Oxford to lecture in zoology in 1970.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtkZMAmgHaU&t=1864s

In 1976 he published his first book, The Selfish Gene, in which he tried to rectify what he maintained was a widespread misunderstanding of Darwinism. Dawkins argued that natural selection takes place at the genetic rather than the species or individual level, as was often assumed. Genes, he maintained, use the bodies of living things to further their own survival. He also introduced the concept of “memes,” the cultural equivalent of genes. Ideas and concepts, from fashion to music, take on a life of their own within society and, by propagating and mutating from mind to mind, affect the progress of human evolution. Dawkins named the concept after the Greek word mimeme, meaning “to imitate.” It later spawned an entire field of study called memetics. The book was notable not just because of what it espoused but also because of its approachable style, which made it accessible to a popular audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Daqofc-PXtY

More books followed, including The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), which won the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1987, and River Out of Eden (1995). Dawkins particularly sought to address a growing misapprehension of what exactly Darwinian natural selection entailed in Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). Stressing the gradual nature of response to selective pressures, Dawkins took care to point out that intricate structures such as the eye do not manifest randomly but instead successively increase in sophistication. He also released The Evolution of Life (1996), an interactive CD-ROM with which users could create “biomorphs,” computer-simulated examples of evolution first introduced in The Blind Watchmaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHoxZF3ZgTo&t=9s

Dawkins was named the first Charles Simonyi professor of public understanding of science at Oxford (1995–2008). In that capacity he continued to publish prolifically and produced an array of television programs. His 1996 documentary Break the Science Barrier featured Dawkins conversing with an array of prominent scientists about their discoveries. In the volume Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), Dawkins contended that evolutionary theory is aesthetically superior to supernatural explanations of the world. The Ancestor’s Tale (2004), structured after Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, traced the human branch of the phylogenetic tree back to points where it converges with the evolution of other species. Further publications include The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009), a tribute to, and vehement defense of, the theory of evolution by natural selection, and The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True (2011), a book for young readers that juxtaposed the scientific understandings of various phenomena with mythologies that purported to explain them. He also edited The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (2008).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw

Though much of Dawkins’s oeuvre generated debate for asserting the supremacy of science over religion in explaining the world, nothing matched the response to the polemical The God Delusion (2006). The book relentlessly points out the logical fallacies in religious belief and ultimately concludes that the laws of probability preclude the existence of an omnipotent creator. Dawkins used the book as a platform to launch the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (2006), an organization that, in dual American and British incarnations, sought to foster the acceptance of atheism and championed scientific answers to existential questions. Along with fellow atheists Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel C. Dennett, he embarked on a campaign of lectures and public debates proselytizing and defending a secular worldview. Dawkins launched the Out Campaign in 2007 in order to urge atheists to publicly declare their beliefs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxGMqKCcN6A

In addition to promoting his organization through its Web site and YouTube channel, Dawkins produced several more television documentaries, variously declaiming the problems created by religion and superstition in Root of All Evil? (2006) and The Enemies of Reason (2007) and celebrating the achievements of Darwin in The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008). Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life (2012) explores the implications of living without religious faith. In the memoir An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist (2013), Dawkins chronicled his life up to the publication of The Selfish Gene. A second volume of memoir, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science (2015), recorded episodes from the latter part of his career.

Dawkins was named a fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nAos1M-_Ts

@seun
@donnie
@ubenedictus
@joagbaje
@S400
@cococandy
et al let me distract you guys a bit from where you mostly frequent to this one thread.
@ednut1
@ubunja

@ujsizzle @mkmyers45
please push this thread to the front page. atleast we will have something from science on the front page.
while it will not automatically make people to become science oriented, it can atleast channel their thoughts towards science and hopefully, they will begin to open up more and more to the wonders to the universe. from this, perception changes as they realize things very profound that will help them shape global culture for the better.

it is just about agenda setting. how can the youth not be as empty, hopeless, helpless, defenseless, unmotivated, poor and as unproductive as they are when all they are fed with everyday especially on Nairaland is just the fight between tonto dikeh and her ex husband.

a lot of them don't know these things exist but the more we put in their way, the more likely they will see it and come to realize what they have been missing. they can find another hobby instead of drugs.

The list is incomplete without Elon Musk- Tesla CEO

Jeweltz:
The list is incomplete without Elon Musk- Tesla CEO

i am talking about typical scientists, not entrepreneurs.

walter lewin

He earned his Ph.D. degree in nuclear physics in 1965 at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Walter Lewin came to MIT in January 1966 as a post-doctoral associate, and became an assistant professor later that year. He joined an x-ray astronomy group at MIT and conducted all-sky balloon surveys with George W. Clark. Through the late seventies, there were about twenty successful balloon flights. These balloon surveys led to the discovery of five new x-ray sources, which doubled the number known at the time. Furthermore, some of these x-ray sources were found to be varying, and some were x-ray flares. The rockets used by other researchers could not have discovered that the x-ray sources varied because they were only in the air for a few minutes, whereas the balloons could be in the air for many hours. The surveys also resulted in the discovery of GX 1+4, which was the first slowly rotating X-ray pulsar found.

Walter Lewin received the "2003 Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching" award. Some of his lectures are available online in video format.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJG-rXBbmCc

MiddleDimension:


i am talking about typical scientists, not entrepreneurs.

I might not know much about science or computer, lol. But I think he's a scientist na

Jeweltz:


I might not know much about science or computer, lol. But I think he's a scientist na

he did physics in school but the batteries are not his brain child, i do not think. he is not in the class of the people i have mentioned. he is known more for his entrepreneurship skills than for science. the rockets he is using to to travel to space is actually russian made.

Jeweltz:


I might not know much about science or computer, lol. But I think he's a scientist na

but how can i move this to the front page?

MiddleDimension:
but how can i move this to the front page?

I'm not dating any of the mods

What of Africa and Middle easterners? All you listed are Americans or Europeans.

jesmond3945:
What of Africa and Middle easterners? All you listed are Americans or Europeans.

you are right!
however, we have professors of physics especially who have done their own. the likes of Pro. E.D Mshelia, Prof. Elegba, S; prof. Amagh Nduka (late), and the former president of the NIP, Nigeria Institute of Physics. he is from Bornu state like E.D Mshelia.

We will get there. to get there, i think we need more of us to be interested in how things work. but you know in Africa, we have a culture that discourages thinking differently the from the established norm. we Africans are not alone in this. the Chinese are as well. and so are many other people across the world apart from Europeans and their decendants across the world and also the jewish people who witnessed along side the Europeans that which changed them forever, the reformation, enlightenment and the industrial revolution.

We need to get more people in Africa realize that we came about in an already existing universe, existing on its own terms. and from that realization, see the fluidity of life and the universe; and that we, having the faculty to be open awe and wonder, can understand how it works. We have also understood in part how it works.

Those of you who come across this thread, i encourage you to try to watch the videos i have put up here. I understand it will take some hundreds of MB, but i think it is worth it. start with Richard Dawkins "The Genius of Charles Darwin". please don't believe what he says, i am sure he himself would not want you to believe him, but take a look at the evidence he provided in that documentary. Ask all the question you need to ask and let it inspire you onto a journey of philosophical inquiry. it is really important and it is a journey that is highly rewarding.

MiddleDimension:
you are right!
however, we have professors of physics especially who have done their own. the likes of Pro. E.D Mshelia, Prof. Elegba, S; prof. Amagh Nduka (late), and the former president of the NIP, Nigeria Institute of Physics. he is from Bornu state like E.D Mshelia.

We will get there. to get there, i think we need more of us to be interested in how things work. but you know in Africa, we have a culture that discourages thinking differently the from the established norm. we Africans are not alone in this. the Chinese are as well. and so are many other people across the world apart from Europeans and their decendants across the world and also the jewish people who witnessed along side the Europeans that which changed them forever, the reformation, enlightenment and the industrial revolution.

We need to get more people in Africa realize that we came about in an already existing universe, existing on its own terms. and from that realization, see the fluidity of life and the universe; and that we, having the faculty to be open awe and wonder, can understand how it works. We have also understood in part how it works.

Fear of the unknown will never allow us get out of our comfort zone.

Blakjewelry:

Fear of the unknown will never allow us get out of our comfort zone.

the world outside the so-called comfort zone is actually our friend, as i have found out. please watch the walter lewin's lecture.

nice write up,really enlightening

MiddleDimension:
he did physics in school but the batteries are not his brain child, i do not think. not in the class of the people i have mentioned. he is known more for his entrepreneurship skills than for science. the rockets he is using to to travel to space is actually russian made.

Very wrong!! Spaces makes all hardware on its own. Get your facts right

Faithful007:
Very wrong!! Spaces makes all hardware on its own. Get your facts right

i still can't put him among these people

In Nigeria... We have many geniuses that can as well be at same shoulder level, if not more with these great scientists you have listed, but the problem is that our people do not publish books, they do not organise science symposiums.... And many also do not do much for younger and up coming science generation by not streamlining the learning of science unto a particular area while in the university.
We tend to study broad science even in the university as it we're still in secondary school. Such does not properly groom a good scientist. A physicist will be made to study thermal physics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, theoretical physics, mechanics etc in his/her first degree without being master of any.... But what if the years of study is being channeled unto a particular field? I think that person may graduate to be an authority and will have the motivation to move ahead to make greater researches and publications...

..

Science and the unknown fascinates me..