Cosmology

Athenian philosopher who founded the Academy, the centre of Greek mathematics in the fourth century BC, and whose Timaeus built a cosmos from ratios and the five regular solids.

philosophy, philosophy of mathematics, cosmology

Greek philosopher and student of Plato who founded the Lyceum and wrote the first systematic treatises on motion, the cosmos, formal logic, zoology and meteorology, which framed natural science until the Scientific Revolution.

natural philosophy, physics, cosmology

Alexandrian Christian commentator on Aristotle who proposed an impressed force for projectiles, argued that falling times barely depend on weight, defined place as extension, denied the aether, and argued from the infinite that the world had a beginning.

natural philosophy, mechanics, cosmology

Paris arts master who named and developed the theory of impetus, a motive power growing with quantity of matter and speed, weighed the daily rotation of the Earth, and wrote the most widely taught nominalist logic of the late Middle Ages.

natural philosophy, mechanics, logic

Creator of special and general relativity, of the light-quantum hypothesis and of the theory of Brownian motion, and founder of relativistic cosmology.

theoretical physics, relativity, quantum theory

Founder of the theory of stellar interiors, proposer of hydrogen fusion as the source of stellar energy, and leader of the 1919 eclipse test of general relativity.

astrophysics, stellar structure, general relativity

Physicist who explained alpha decay as quantum tunnelling, developed the hot Big Bang theory of element formation, posed the genetic coding problem and wrote the Mr Tompkins books.

nuclear physics, astrophysics, cosmology