Strokes of Genius: Physics' Greatest Beards
Joseph Swan. Image: Author unknown, probably 1807

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Strokes of Genius: Physics' Greatest Beards

Throughout time, physicists have been repping some very serious facial hair with the same sort of aplomb as Santa Claus or, I don't know, the dudes from seminal sludge crust band, "The Body":http://m.indyweek.com/imager/b/mobilemagnum/1641412/98b5/0...

Throughout time, physicists have been repping some very serious facial hair with the same sort of aplomb as Santa Claus or, I don't know, the dudes from seminal sludge crust band, The Body. I spent too long combing the internet for the 10 greatest of these nearly-Newton-defying-beards, and I will now judge them based on the entirely arbitrary 10-point Motherbeard scale. Bask in their glory.

Democritus

This dude, aka "the father of science," was a pre-Socratic thinker who generated an atomic model of the universe. OG. Motherbeard: 7.

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Archimides

This guy was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor and stargazer. He laid the foundations of hydrostatistics and statics and also an explanation for the workings of levers. Motherbeard: 7.

James Clerk Maxwell

This dude was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. His most profound achievement was cobbling together classical electromagnetic theory, which joined all hitherto unrelated observations and experiments and formulas of electricity, magnetism and optics into one compact model. Motherbeard: 7.7.

Ludwig Boltzmann

This fella right here was an Austrian physicist. Dude's probably best known for having laid groundwork for both statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He also advanced the scientific model of an atomic theory when that idea was still under fire. Motherbeard: 8.

Joseph Swan

A British physicist and chemist, this guy invented the first incandescent light bulb, for which he held the first patent in 1878. his place in Gateshead, England, was the first electric-light illuminated house ever. Motherbeard: 9.5.

John Tyndall

This dude you're looking at was a well known 19th Century Irish physicist. He gained some notoriety in the 1850s with his study of diamagnetism, but really made his mark with later studies of thermal radiation. He also made a bunch of discoveries regarding the workings of the atmosphere. Motherbeard: 5.6.

William Crookes

Dude was a British physicist and chemist. He dabbled in spectroscopy and pioneered vacuum tubes, even inventing his very own Crookes tubes. Motherbeard: 8.3.

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Wilhelm Röntgen

This dude was a German physicist. On November 8, 1895, he created and observed the very first electromagnetic radiation in a certain range of wavelength, aka Röntgen rays, aka X-rays. This earned him the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. Motherbeard: 7.76.

Gersh Budker

A Soviet nuclear physicist, dude is probably best known for electron cooling, a method he invented in 1968 to reduce the emittance of particle beams via thermalization with a co-generating particle beam. Motherbeard: 6.52.

Boris Chirikov

This dude was a Soviet and Russian physicist. He founded the theory of Hamiltonian chaos and made some pretty rad original contributions to the idea of quantum chaos. He also invented the Chirikov criterion. Motherbeard: 8.7.

Reach this freshly shaven writer at brian@motherboard.tv.