Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy for promoting the heliocentric model of the solar system. The Catholic Church made him recant the truth, after which he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Sir Isaac Newton is said to have practiced alchemy and even tried to turn base metals into gold.
Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive and can only be handled with protective gear.
Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel but declined the offer.
Nikola Tesla was obsessed with the number 3 and often did things in sets of 3.
Charles Darwin ate every animal he discovered during his travels, including iguanas and giant tortoises.
Thomas Edison was afraid of the dark and always slept with a light on. After a while, he switched from gas lights to electric lights since he made electric lighting available.
Leonardo da Vinci was ambidextrous and often wrote backwards. He was also known for demonstrating feats of strength.
Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography data was used by James Watson and Francis Crick to discover the structure of DNA, but she was not given credit until after her death.
Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote a novel, “Contact,” which was later turned into a movie starring Jodie Foster.
Neil deGrasse Tyson was once a competitive ballroom dancer.
Werner Heisenberg, the physicist behind the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, was also a talented pianist.
The father of microbiology, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, was also a successful cloth merchant.
Margaret Mead, an anthropologist, once famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Marie Tharp, a geologist, helped map the ocean floor, and her work revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and helped prove the theory of plate tectonics.
Edwin Hubble, the astronomer who discovered the expanding universe, was also a skilled basketball player and played on the University of Chicago team.
Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who is considered the world’s first computer programmer, was also an accomplished musician and writer.
Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was known for playing bongos and cracking safes as hobbies.
Max Planck, the physicist who originated quantum theory, was also an accomplished pianist.
Alfred Wegener, the scientist who proposed the theory of continental drift, was not widely accepted in his time but is now recognized as a pioneer in the field of geology.
Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist, led the team that developed the software for NASA’s Apollo missions and coined the term “software engineering.”
Rosalyn Yalow, a physicist and medical researcher, was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977.
Alan Turing, the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, was also a skilled long-distance runner and cracked the Nazi’s Enigma code during World War II.
Katsuko Saruhashi, a geochemist, was the first woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Tokyo and discovered the harmful effects of nuclear testing on the environment.
Paul Erdős, a mathematician, was known for his nomadic lifestyle and collaborative work with other mathematicians around the world.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astrophysicist, discovered pulsars but was not awarded the Nobel Prize for her work, which went to her male supervisor instead.
