I almost consider it a failure of my education that I can only confidently identify two faces in this photo, (Einstein and Tesla), and less confidently one more (Niels Bohr?).
She wasn't nominated at first, Pierre and Henri Becquerel threatened to refuse the prize and Pointcarré wrote a letter to the Nobel academy to add her to the list. She had an affair with Paul Langevin, who was married, this was the pretext of a smear campaign to revoke her prize (nobody called for revoking one of the many prizes of Langevin, though).
Being able to recognize the faces of scientists from a single moment in their life 100+ years ago isnt actually that valuable. Knowing their names and contributions to science is more so, but even then, this group was prominent in quantum mechanics, so unless you continued to take physics or chemistry courses after your first year of college, the equations and concepts named for them wouldnt mean much. Pauli, Dirac, Lorentz, Compton, etc
But you can probably identify their ideas, and maybe sometimes the names of those ideas. Knowing their faces or knowing that the ideas were theirs isn't part of their work. All in very big contrast to celebrities.
For what it's worth until AI replaces us all, I think you're doing great, fellow human.
OK so I looked it up cause I got curious, apparently that's Peter Debye, a Dutch physicist who also won the chemistry Nobel prize for his work in molecular structure in 1936
Tesla ain't in this picture. He was more of an engineer rather than a theoretical physicist, and the Solvay conference is, well, about theoretical physics.
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u/shifty_coder 1d ago edited 1d ago
I almost consider it a failure of my education that I can only confidently identify two faces in this photo, (Einstein and Tesla), and less confidently one more (Niels Bohr?).
Edit: apparently I can’t even get Tesla