Isaac Newton 

The English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists of all time. His theories revolutionized scientific thinking and laid the foundations of modern physics. His book Principia Mathematics is one of the most important works in the history of modern science. Newton discovered the law of gravity, and developed the three laws of motion that are still in use today. He was the first person to split white light into the colors of the spectrum, and his research into light led him to design a reflecting telescope.

James Clerk Maxwell 

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell has been described as the most brilliant scientist of the 1800s. His best-known work established a link between electromagnetism and light. This research later helped the German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) to build the first radio-wave transmitter. During his carrier, Maxwell produced new theories on many scientific problems of the day: the physical properties of gases; the nature of the planet Saturn's rings; how humans perceive colors; and a demonstration of color photography. However, the complexity of his theories meant that he received little public recognition.

Max Planck 

The German theoretical physicist Max Planck is regarded as the father of quantum theory. He was the first person to propose that light is neither purely a wave nor purely a particle, but is a combination of both. He suggested that the energy in radiation was not continuous but was divided into tiny packets, or quanta. In 1900 he produced a formula to describe the size of a quantum of energy. This formula included a universal constant, Planck's constant, which is used to explain the behavior of matter and energy on a microscopic scale. Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918 for these discoveries.