#TBT #throwbackthursday
A rare picture of Albert Einstein, Hideki Yukawa, John Wheeler, and Homi J Bhabha (from L to R) in conversation as they walk through Marquand Park in Princeton, N.J, 1954. Each of the four physicists in this picture has played a unique role in the history of science.
Albert Einstein was a German physicist who developed the special and the general theory of relativity. Besides his work on gravity, Einstein gave a theoretical explanation of the photoelectric effect, laid the foundation of the theory of lasers, worked on Brownian motion, and was one of the pioneers of the old quantum theory.
Beside him is Hideki Yukawa, a Japanese particle physicist who was one of the first scientists to study the nature of the strong force. Yukawa explained what keeps the protons and neutrons together inside a nucleus despite an enormous repulsive Coulomb force. He predicted the existence of pions in 1935. The particles were discovered in 1947. Yukawa played an influential role in the early days of particle physics.
To his right is John Wheeler, the American physicist who coined the term 'black holes.' He studied the Einstein-Rosen bridge, coining a word which would suit it better, namely wormhole. Also, he stumbled upon another gravitational trick, singularities, which are places infinitely small but with infinitely great density.
And finally, we have Homi J Bhabha, an Indian nuclear physicist who gained international prominence after deriving a correct expression for the probability of scattering positrons by electrons, a process now known as Bhabha scattering. Besides Bhabha's work on cosmic rays and electron showers, he is also known for pioneering India's atomic energy program. He was the founding director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).
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