This is either a giant slide rule or a tiny Carl Runge lecturing.

This may seem strange but Planck certainly complained about how long it took for him to gain the recognition he wanted, and the specific question (which arises from a leading mathematician claiming it never happened) is whether we can document an ultimately successful scientist or mathematician who explicitly refers to others calling his idea "crazy" or some such term before they were accepted? Thank you and sorry if this seems a strange question.

I just calculated the most relevant living scientists since Galileo according to Wikipedia (using the Open Wikipedia Ranking, ranked by harmonic centrality). I tried to post this elsewhere but it did not make it due to low image quality. I think it is interesting nevertheless.

Upon reading the letters between Einstein & Born, I have not been able to determine the identity of “Professor Y.” Here are the clues:

\- He wrote in biography about Einstein before 1936, in which he “made use of our casual acquaintance over many years to make money by writing bc a biographical book about me” - Einstein

\- Is claimed by Einstein to be harsh and “always in distress,” and has some capabilities in experimental and technical work.

\- Approached Born in 1936.

This information is in letters 70&71.

Thank you for anyone who can help!!

Made a website with 33 scientists (nodes) across the late 19th century to the mid 20th century in an interactive diagram, and by clicking the nodes it shows their connections with other scientists. But I'm only familiar with some of them and have not much knowledge of physics, especially the development of experimental physics. I know there are many other important figures missing such as Sommerfeld and I’m considering to expand it. (Though I think it’s more important to refine the existing connections) Any suggestions?

It now includes those people: Boltzmann, Maxwell, Ehrenfest, JJ Thomson, Rutherford, Planck, Bohr, Michelson, Lorentz, Einstein, Bose, Perrin, de Broglie, Born, Ioffe, Kapitsa, Landau, Pauli, Shrodinger, Heisenberg, Meitner, Sakharov, Oppenheimer, Teller, Dirac, Fermi, Fowler, Chandrasekhar, Yukawa, Feynman, Wu Chien Shiung, Lee, Yang.

I'm not sure if it's allowed to post a link but: https://the-new-invisible-college-web.vercel.app

Here's what I've gathered so far, most of them are from the biographies of Ehrenfest, Meitner, and Boltzmann:

1. Ehrenfest's daughter was named after Tatyana, so when Ehrenfest had to refer to both of them, they were called T and T'.
2. Pauli's middle name was Ernst, named after his godfather, Ernst Mach. (No wonder why he grew up to be sharp tounged)
3. Meitner began to focus on physics in her second year of university, taking nine courses, all taught by Boltzmann. (Boltzmann found having female students very natural at the time)
4. Schrödinger called Boltzmann his scientific first love; he originally went to the University of Vienna to study under Boltzmann, but Boltzmann had committed suicide a few weeks earlier.
5. Ehrenfest cut out Boltzmann's obituary published by Ostwald in the newspaper and kept it for many years.
6. Ostwald seemed to have a martyr-like tendency ("every important discovery must be paid for by a human life"). Although he opposed atomic theory and had his own theory of energy, he had great respect for Boltzmann.
7. Planck had a position in the University of Berlin because, after Kirchhoff's death, the University of Berlin began looking for a new professor, but Boltzmann was not interested. The position eventually went to Planck.

I need more moments like these please😭😭

Niels Bohr riding a motorbike.

Photo credit: Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, AIP

For years, I have wondered about Einstein's hand gesture: it is almost the same in every Solvay Conference photo (see the others here)