Famous in STEM · Volume 1

The Greatest Physicists

26 minds who cracked the laws of the universe

A patent clerk who rewrote space and time. A bookbinder’s apprentice who found electricity in a magnet. A woman who boiled down tons of rock in a leaking shed to find a glow. The Greatest Physicists tells the true stories of 26 people who worked out the rules the universe runs on, from Archimedes to Stephen Hawking.

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26 chapters
Ages 13+
Read in any order
2026 edition
By Javier Sanz

About this book

Gravity, electricity, radioactivity, relativity and black holes, told through the people who figured them out.

Each chapter is a short biography with one real piece of physics at its heart, explained in plain words: why the Moon stays up, how a battery works, why light takes time to reach you, what a chain reaction is. Many end with something to try at the kitchen table.

Physics has a reputation for being hard, and some of it is. But the heart of it is simple and a little shocking: the world runs on a few rules, the rules can be written down, and anyone can learn them. The same pull that drops a ball keeps the Moon in its orbit. The spark from a doorknob and a bolt of lightning are the same thing. Light takes time to reach you, so you have never seen anything as it is right now. Nobody gets used to this. The people in these pages never did.

From “Before you start,” the book’s introduction

Who’s inside

All 26 physicists

Each chapter title and big idea, exactly as they appear in the book.

Isaac Newton
1642–1727
The plague year that changed physics

Big ideaThe force that drops an apple is the force that holds the Moon in orbit, and it obeys one simple rule.
Nikola Tesla
1856–1943
The man who made electricity spin

Big ideaAlternating current, which can be sent hundreds of miles and turned into motion with nothing rubbing.
Marie Curie
1867–1934
She boiled down tons of rock to find a glow

Big ideaSome atoms fall apart on their own and give off energy. She named it radioactivity and found two elements that do it.
Albert Einstein
1879–1955
The patent clerk who bent time

Big ideaLight passes everyone at the same speed, so space and time must stretch to fit. Mass is frozen energy: E = mc².
Daniel Bernoulli
1700–1782
The doctor who found that fast air pushes less

Big ideaAlong a smooth flow of fluid, where it moves faster, its pressure is lower. That holds up aircraft and presses racing cars onto the track.
Galileo Galilei
1564–1642
He pointed a spyglass at Jupiter and found four moons

Big ideaTest ideas by measuring. Without air to slow them, all objects fall at the same rate, and the Earth is not the center of everything.
Michael Faraday
1791–1867
The bookbinder’s apprentice who found electricity in a magnet

Big ideaMove a magnet near a wire and electricity flows. Most of the world’s electricity still comes from this.
Max Planck
1858–1947
The reluctant revolutionary

Big ideaEnergy comes in packets. Hot atoms can give off light only in whole packets, and bluer light comes in bigger packets.
Stephen Hawking
1942–2018
The man who made black holes glow

Big ideaBlack holes are not perfectly black. They leak a faint glow and, given enough time, evaporate.
Niels Bohr
1885–1962
The goalkeeper who built the atom out of stairs

Big ideaElectrons can sit only on certain rungs around the nucleus. When one jumps down a rung, the atom gives off light of exactly one color.
James Clerk Maxwell
1831–1879
Four equations, and light fell out of them

Big ideaElectricity and magnetism are one thing, and light is a wave of it. So are radio, X-rays and the signal to your phone.
Ole Rømer
1644–1710
He timed a moon and caught light being slow

Big ideaLight takes time to travel. When you look at anything, you see it as it was, not as it is.
Ernest Rutherford
1871–1937
The farm boy who found the center of the atom

Big ideaAn atom is almost entirely empty space, with nearly all its mass packed into a nucleus a hundred thousand times smaller.
Richard Feynman
1918–1988
The physicist who drew the universe in squiggles

Big ideaEvery way a thing could happen counts a little. Add up all the possibilities and you get what we see.
Alessandro Volta
1745–1827
He stacked coins and wet paper and the world lit up

Big ideaTwo different metals and something salty between them make electricity flow. Stack enough and you have a battery.
Benjamin Franklin
1706–1790
The printer who pulled a spark from a storm cloud

Big ideaLightning is electricity, the same stuff as the spark from a doorknob, and a pointed metal rod can lead it safely into the ground.
Archimedes
c. 287–212 BC
The man who could lift the Earth, given a place to stand

Big ideaWater pushes up on anything in it with a force equal to the weight of the water pushed aside. A long lever multiplies a small push.
Heinrich Hertz
1857–1894
The spark that jumped across the room

Big ideaMaxwell’s invisible waves are real. You can make them with a spark and catch them with a loop of wire.
Johannes Kepler
1571–1630
He threw out a theory over eight minutes of arc

Big ideaPlanets move in ellipses, not circles, speeding up near the Sun. Their orbits follow three rules that Newton later explained with gravity.
Georg Ohm
1789–1854
The schoolteacher who measured the push and the flow

Big ideaCurrent equals voltage divided by resistance. One short rule is behind the design of almost every circuit on Earth.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
1904–1967
The man who ran the project that built the bomb

Big ideaSplit one uranium nucleus and it throws out neutrons that split more. A chain reaction can release the energy locked in matter, all at once.
Enrico Fermi
1901–1954
He lit the first nuclear fire under a football stand

Big ideaSlow a neutron down and it is far more likely to be caught by a nucleus. With that, a chain reaction can be controlled.
James Chadwick
1891–1974
He found the particle with no charge, in less than three weeks

Big ideaThe nucleus holds neutrons: particles as heavy as a proton with no electric charge. They explain atomic weights and make chain reactions possible.
Henri Becquerel
1852–1908
The experiment that worked because the sun did not shine

Big ideaSome substances give off invisible rays with no help from anything. The atom has an energy source of its own.
J. J. Thomson
1856–1940
The clumsy professor who found the first piece of the atom

Big ideaAtoms are not the smallest things. Inside every one are electrons, nearly two thousand times lighter than the lightest atom.
Thomas Edison
1847–1931
The inventor who lit Wall Street and lost the current war

Big ideaA light bulb is useless without a system: a generator, wires, meters and a station to run it. He built the whole system, and then backed the wrong current.

Free sample

Read the opening of Marie Curie’s chapter

The first pages, word for word.

Marie Curie

She boiled down tons of rock to find a glow

Lived: 1867–1934

Big idea: Some atoms fall apart on their own and give off energy. She named it radioactivity and found two elements that do it.

The shed had a leaking glass roof, a tarred floor and no way to clear the poisonous fumes, so the smokiest work had to be done outside in the yard. Through 1898 and the years after, a woman stood over a boiling mass of rock, stirring it with an iron rod nearly as big as herself. Some days she stirred for hours without a break. At night she and her husband would walk back to the shed and stand in the dark, looking at the bottles and tubes on the tables. They glowed, faint as fairy lights, all by themselves.

Marie Curie later wrote that she and Pierre spent the best and happiest years of their lives in that miserable shed.

A student who forgot to eat

She had come to Paris from Warsaw in the autumn of 1891, around her twenty-fourth birthday. Poland was ruled by Russia, and the university in Warsaw did not take women. Maria Skłodowska had studied in secret at the “Flying University,” classes that moved from house to house to stay ahead of the police, and had worked for years as a governess to pay for her sister’s medical degree. Now it was her turn.

She rented an attic room, lived mostly on bread and tea, and, the story goes, once fainted from not eating. In 1893 she finished first in her physics degree; the next year she took a second degree in mathematics. In 1894 she met Pierre Curie, a quiet physicist eight years older who studied magnetism and crystals. They married the next summer and spent their honeymoon on bicycles.

The chapter goes on. So do 25 more.

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From the book

See it, try it, think about it

The gold foil experiment from above: a radioactive source firing alpha particles at a thin gold foil, a curved fluorescent screen around it; most tracks pass straight through, a few bend, one bounces back toward the source — Most alpha particles went straight through the gold. A very few came back. Only a tiny, heavy nucleus could do that.Illustration from the chapter on Ernest Rutherford

Try this

Hold a strip of paper by one end just below your bottom lip, so that it droops. Blow hard across the top of it. The strip rises toward the horizontal. You have made a wing out of paper. The air bends to follow the curve of the paper, and air flowing around a bend presses less on the inside of it, so the still air below pushes the strip up.

Look around you

Find a wind turbine, a hand-crank flashlight or a bicycle light that works without batteries. Inside each one, a magnet or electromagnet moves past a coil, the same trick Faraday used on his bench in 1831. What has changed in two centuries is mostly the size and the power.

First lines

How other chapters begin

In 1963 a twenty-one-year-old graduate student at Cambridge was told he had perhaps two years to live.

In 1905 a twenty-six-year-old clerk at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, spent his days judging whether other people’s inventions would work.

On February 11, 1986, a committee was meeting in Washington to find out why the space shuttle Challenger had exploded two weeks earlier, killing seven astronauts.

At 5:29 in the morning on July 16, 1945, in the desert of southern New Mexico, a group of scientists waited in and around a bunker nine kilometers from a steel tower.

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Questions

About The Greatest Physicists

Which physicists are in the book?

Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Daniel Bernoulli, Galileo Galilei, Michael Faraday, Max Planck, Stephen Hawking, Niels Bohr, James Clerk Maxwell, Ole Rømer, Ernest Rutherford, Richard Feynman, Alessandro Volta, Benjamin Franklin, Archimedes, Heinrich Hertz, Johannes Kepler, Georg Ohm, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, James Chadwick, Henri Becquerel, J. J. Thomson and Thomas Edison: 26 in all.

Does my teen need to know physics first?

No. Every idea is explained from scratch, in plain language, through the story of the person who found it.

Do I need to read the other Famous in STEM books first?

No. The Greatest Physicists is Volume 1 of seven, and every volume stands on its own. Each chapter does too, so readers can start with whoever interests them most.

What age is it for?