Presentation Speech by Professor Hj. Théel, President of on December 10, 1902 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics to Professor Dr. Hendrik Antoon Lorentz of Leiden and Professor Dr. Pieter Zeeman of Amsterdam for their pioneering work…

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  The Nobel Prize in Physics 2004         Inside the proton The three quarks within the proton are held together by the powerful force mediated by the gluons, depicted here as coiled springs. As the distance between the quarks increases, so does the force between them.   Contents: |  |  |   |  |  |  |  |  | |  …

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Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born on March 27, 1845, at Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of Germany, as the only child of a merchant in, and manufacturer of, cloth. His mother was Charlotte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam, a member of an old Lennep family which had settled in Amsterdam. When he was three years…

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was born on September 21, 1853, at Groningen, The Netherlands. His father, Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, was the owner of a brickworks near Groningen; his mother was Anna Gerdina Coers of Arnhem, the daughter of an architect. After spending the allotted time at the “Hoogere Burgerschool” in his native town (secondary school without…

Charles Thomson Rees Wilson was born on the 14th of February, 1869, in the parish of Glencorse, near Edinburgh. His father, John Wilson, was a farmer, and his ancestors had been farmers in the South of Scotland for generations. His mother was Annie Clerk Harper. At the age of four he lost his father, and…

Wolfgang Pauli was born on April 25th, 1900 in Vienna. He received his early education in Vienna before studying at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld. He obtained his doctor’s degree in 1921 and spent a year at the University of Göttingen as assistant to and a further year with at Copenhagen. The years…

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