Nine Luminaries of Science

In this book we look at the lives of nine eminent scientists – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Curie, Bose, Einstein, Raman, Feynman and Hawking – not so much as scientists but as human beings, their family lives, their religious beliefs, their values and their idiosyncrasies

Little known facts:

· Copernicus had a doctorate in Church Law and was a senior official of the Catholic Church till his death

· Einstein invented a new type of refrigerator; Curie could not afford to buy even 1 gram of the element she discovered

· Curie and Einstein thought of suicide; Hawking attempted suicide

· Newton waited at tables and cleaned rooms of rich classmates to pay his college fees; Curie could not afford a full meal during her student days.

· Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Bose were deeply religious; Einstein and Raman were pantheists; Curie was an agnostic; Feynman and Hawking were atheists

· Curie’s died of her own discovery; her notebooks are still radioactive and will remain so for the next 1500 years

· Newton spent the last thirty years of his life in alchemy, Bible studies and catching and putting to death counterfeiters; Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life in a lonely, frustrating attempt to develop the Unified Theory, abandoned and even ridiculed by his fellow scientists.

· Curie’s and Hawking’s parents were highly educated; Newton’s parents were illiterate

· E = mc2 is not Einstein’s full equation; and its negative counterpart led to the idea of antimatter