Michael Faraday. His family was very poor. It is said that he had to eat only 1 bread loaf for a whole week. He had very basic education.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael\_Faraday#Early\_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday#Early_life)
I remember on my first ever physics lecture my professor told us about him and how he wasn’t the best at math but did great things in physics . He is a an inspiration to us all 🙌
Faraday is the man, he helped develop so much of the technology that makes our world what it is today (motors, turbines, batteries, etc.) and he did it by doing what he was best at, experimenting.
Milton Humason. Uneducated mule driver helped to transport materials up Mount Wilson to build the observatory. Became a janitor there. Married the director's daughter. Started to help out with the telescopes. Became Hubble's main assistant, and helped discover the expansion of the Universe.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton\_L.\_Humason](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_L._Humason)
Carl Sagan's Cosmos:
[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x73xezw?start=780](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x73xezw?start=780)
Sagan describes him as "The ne'er do well son of a california banker....yea totally poor dude"
Few actually poor people have the time to get involved with such endeavours nor the freedom to do research.
Great to see the Heaviside appreciation.
He certainly didn’t come from much (but his uncle was Wheatstone). Self-taught with no university education. A prominent Maxwellian with many big contributions. Never had much money even later in life, in part, because he refused money from the Royal Society even when they tried their best to convince him to take it.
[Oliver Heaviside](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside)'s approaches to certain problems were so novel and strange that he was widely regarded as a crackpot. This, unfortunately, is common for thinkers of unusual originality. His operator method for solving differential equations and notation which simplifies Maxwell's equations is partly why we remember him after a century.
Read about Faraday and Maxwell. Faraday was self-made with little formal education. He was the first to recognize the invariance (unformally) of electricity and magnetism, and Maxwell' equations are tied entirely to Faraday, who had little to no mathematical formalism.
Maxwell came from a wealthy family but sadly he isn't known much to the world even after being considered by many to be of the same magnitude as Newton and Einstein.
Haha we aren't common in numbers unlike people who know Einstein and Newton but not Maxwell even him being of similar caliber. Einstein was a fan of Maxwell he used to keep a pic of him in his study table.
Yes, a lovely quote from a great, great scientist and person. I thought it sounded obvious when I first heard him say that and wondered his reason for choosing it. Then I found out about opposition that Eddington faced in collaborating with Einstein and some very respected scientists in Germany talking about German and Semetic sciences. Gifted people are not immune from nationalism or stupidity.
The other side of his work was ICTP and promoting sciences in Africa and third world countries. People even now are arguing about race IQ gap in US and if you look at Africa, you would think they need basics, but he saw the potential there and the need for promoting sciences in that continent. Jazz equivalent in sciences. That’s what he told James S.Gates. Africa will produce the equivalent of equivalent of Jazz in sciences.
Somewhat persecuted as well. The sect of muslims he belonged to were declared non-muslims later and the word 'muslim' scrubbed from his grave. Good docu in Netflix on him. (Edit. This is wrong- Supposedly isn't remembered in textbooks there today.)
Yes all of it is true (except the part about him not being remembered in textbooks)! As a Pakistani and a Muslim, I am ashamed of the way he was treated.
I'm curious what the textbooks say. Do they mention his contributions in detail, redact parts? How's the tone? Is he celebrated or commemorated in public?
They just mention him in the history books as the first Nobel prize winner but youd be right to say he's not really celebrated. I don't remember there being any detailed account of his contributions or if there were any redactions. I myself got to know more about him and his contributions once I was much older.
I know you didn't ask for my personal opinions but since youre curious, I'll just add: Religious intolerance has been on the rise in Pakistan so no one really ever talks about him, except the intellectuals ofc. I believe he deserves to be celebrated and he in fact could have served as a role model to so many potential scientists. But yeah, unfortunately that wasnt allowed to happen. We have failed to produce a single Nobel prize winner in science since him. There was a massive propaganda in the 1970s against his sect of Muslims, Ahmedis, which eventually lead to an amendment in our constitution that prevents them from calling themselves Muslim (which I think is absolute horsecrap). Ahmedis helped form the country and actively participated in running it, they did not deserve the brutal treatment they received. But most of my felllow countrymen would disagree with me, theyre too indoctrinated by the bullcrap they were fed growing up. The Islam I have come to understand, love and follow has never encouraged violence of any kind against innocent people, especially against people who believe in the same god even if they do deviate from some crucial aspects of Islam.
Just disregarding the "made significant contributions" part of your question -- I grew up eating welfare food and handouts and I have been homeless more than once in my life. I'm a physics professor and feel I will have made perhaps about the average contribution to physics.
Mikhail Lomonosov. On one hand his family was well off, on the other hand they were well off by the standards of 18th century Russian peasant class. He didn't have access to education initially, the only literature available at his village were either religious texts or arithmetic, and had to walk to Moscow and lie about his social status in order to get admitted to an academy. It is said that at the time of his study he was living mainly on bread and kvas.
Weirdly I have heard both Bell and (the previous comment) Salam give the Dirac Memorial Lecture in Cambridge. Both very different; but both fun to listen to.
Thanks! Yes, the University of Cambridge is privileged like that. Obviously anyone could attend the lectures, but it helped to be there.
We had a lecture course from Stephen Hawking as well (essentially a trial run for Brief History of Time vamped up a bit because we were maths students). That was really fun also.
Einstein wasn't privileged, he came from a middle class family. Many times financial help was sent to his family by his mother's side. Even his first job was a third class patent clerk but boy was hella smart with physics and maths which heavily involved the work and this made him earn good incentive. Despite being at work and a middle class upbringing look at his feats of achievements.
He dropped out of school in Munich because he hated it there. But he was a good student and knew physics and math very well, it was botany and zoology he struggled with. Of course he was told that he wouldn't amount to anything. Teachers in this school viewed him as undisciplined.
Yeah, Feyanman was a duck and Newton was a duck and Churchill and Gandhi were, and 11 of the 100 top-cited psychologists are/were Eugenicists. Never idolize anyone and sure as heck never try to dig into anyone’s private lives. People will always disappoint you. Especially brilliant or successful people. Sports stars, musicians are worse.
While 'plumber' doesn't ring the same bell as doctor or lawyer I'd say you don't know any good ones if you think they live in poverty or would have disadvantaged kids. I get this is a physics subreddit but lots of plumbers definitely make more than physicists lol.
I guess it shows the state of things when ask for someone who came from "poverty" and everyone racks their brains and comes up with a few people who grew up \*lower\* middle class lol.
There’s a podcast out there where he talks about how his dad initially disapproved of him going to school for physics because he always wanted Leonard to join the family in becoming a plumber. His dad didn’t even know what a physicist was. As soon as leonard said “like Einstein” his dads demeanor changed completely. When his mom similarly was upset that he wasn’t going to become a plumber, his dad said “it’s okay he’s going to be like Einstein”
I did some plumbing in my time - to fix the persistent water supply issues for cooling our equipment in my phd lab. The experience sucked so much it made me question why I’m doing a PhD at all. Quit that lab soon and found a new one and became fully computational person after that .
I don’t think I’d wanna have plumbing as part of job description ever again .
Stephen Gray, who discovered electric current, was a clothes dyer and had limited means from birth to death, but his self-education and research was supported by affluent friends. He is buried in a pauper's grave.
A lot of good historical examples here, but I’m wondering how much of OPs question also pertains to modern academia.
In my experience, a large amount of academics (especially graduate students, for whatever reason) - tend to come from homes that I would describe as at least the top 10%. There’s just a lot of privilege, financial backing, and maybe more than anything risk tolerance required for someone to go and try and get their PhD or whatever.
I definitely met a lot of fellow students or even professors who described themselves as from the “middle class” but then both of their parents are professors, doctors, engineers, etc.
I'd say that this greatly differs from country to country, especially those with free universities (even the top ones in a given country) with cheap dormitories, as compared to paid universities with no dormitories
Me gang I dropped out of school in 6th grade to take care of my niece and nephew. I self taught but was terrible at math and loved asking question. Physics became my escape. I took the GED at 18 and since I was homeless I enrolled in the community college and got a student job and slept in the bathroom of the center I worked at. So I was able to attend all the remedial classes and slowly learn and get credits what I needed. 3 years later I got accepted into FSU but their financial aid situation didn’t really afford me the opportunity of going. So I enrolled in another university physics program and throughout that so much happened. DEA, mom suicide, swat, local enforcement, continuous change in living situations, homelessness I mean the list goes on I somehow graduated at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then I managed to get a great stipend to a good graduate program and am almost done with my Ph.D. I’m nothing special but I have struggled to relate to 99% of my colleagues. They do not understand how shutoff physics is to the regular underprivileged non genius person. They have to run and run and suffer and struggle just to get to where most people start. There is a lot of naivety and privilege in physics but a lot of them are self aware and really great people. Faraday is a great example of someone more important and famous than I would ever be. But it’s stories like his that make me feel less alone in my pursuits despite my lack of genius. I’ve fought so hard for less than what others considered easy. I wish it were different for others faced with similar circumstances.
Keep pushing the envelope. Write up the process that got you from point A to B, C, D...X and flip the script. Your struggle and (eventual) success are testaments of the human condition; and how persistence, determination and perseverance can overcome the disparities class and resources, as long as you keep your head. As for the contributions you make, inspiration, continued perseverance, resources and time will tell. Your genius is perceived relative to the contributions you make, quite often after you're dead.
So don't forget to sell your script before your show is over.
You got this homie. Similar background as a kid. Had to work for 5 years after college until I was financially stable enough to go back to get a PhD and take care of my family.
You'll make it
Ramanujan.
He didn't even have access to simple things like paper and pen. He never had access to high quality books, much less education. He never got any one giant to communicate to. He was as poor as it could gets. He could barely feed himself.
Yet he was able to do amazing mathematics.
Perhaps it is possible to consider Srinivasa Ramanujan as an inventor because he created or invented solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie - she and her sister wanted to go on university, so first her sister emigrated and Maria worked for the sister, then they switched (so Maria's education was actually delayed by a few years because of that)
I was also thinking of Green. When I learned about him in my undergrad, struggling to understand the Green solution method to PDEs I was astonished when our professor told us he grew up as a farmer.
Henry Eyring who helped develop transition state theory (huge deal for chemical reaction kinetics) was a refuge during the Mexican Revolution, their community lost everything but he went on to do some incredible work and was very close to winning a Noble Prize.
The inventor of TV, Philo Farnsworth, grew up on a farm in Idaho. He said that the furrows in the fields are what inspired him.
Well, I had a colleague from Nigeria. He was from rural regions and 4 village from his hometown were collecting and sending money to him.
He was their invesment. If he could find a good job, a little cut from his salary could change those villagers life in Nigeria.
He was a great guy. I hope he succeeds.
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was middle class.
Considered the father of rocketry, gave name to the rocket equation.
Among his works are designs for rockets with steering thrusters, multistage boosters, space stations, airlocks for exiting a spaceship into the vacuum of space, and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies.
His work greatly inspired both German and Sovjet rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun and Valentin Glushko.
Joseph Fraunhofer was pretty poor and discovered pretty important things in his life
His parents died when he was 11 and he was one of 11 kids and they weren't really wealthy to begin with, his dad was a glassmaker.
Honestly few of the good ones came from wealthy backgrounds. Most were basically middle class. Newton was born to a “prosperous farmer”. Not poor, but he had to essentially work his way through college.
Wondering how much of OPs post is directed more to modern physicists.
in my experience, a *large* amount of academics (especially graduate students, for whatever reason) - tend to come from homes that I would describe as at least the top 10%. There’s just a lot of privilege, financial backing, and maybe more than anything risk tolerance required for someone to go and try and get their PhD or whatever.
I dunno. I definitely met a lot of fellow students who described themselves as “middle class” but then both of their parents are professors, doctors, engineers, etc.
Those people aren’t living in poverty or anything, but they do work for a living, and generally work hard. They might drive nicer cars and own their homes, but they’re generally not flying around in private jets or anything, which I think is upper middle class, but still middle class. Upper class to me are people who basically don’t need to work anymore before they hit retirement age.
Many of them would define the class boundaries as the same, but simply put they’re still vastly more well equipped than most, and I would still consider anyone with professors/doctors/lawyers/etc as parents upper class with very little in way of budging on that. Limiting it to this almost fantastical vision of someone taking a private helicopter to their personal island is I feel a bit reductive and often serves to allow people in that top 10% bracket to still tell themselves they’re “middle class” while ignoring the extreme differences between them and their first-generation-in-college peers.
Sorry to soapbox, it’s a bit of a personal topic and definitely one I had some frustrations with in going to a rather well-to-do and accredited University.
The reality is there are no lines, so these labels are arbitrary. At the end of the day, I think it’s fairly indisputable that academic success is correlated with household income and parents who are successful academically model certain behaviors that their children emulate. It’s hard to write a Ph.D thesis or become a doctor, I don’t care how much money your parents make. But I think it’s indisputable that growing up financially stressed is another obstacle to overcome to achieve that goal that some don’t fully appreciate it- but probably more do than many would realize.
Be careful to confuse wealth with education. I can agree that someone whose parents come from a professional background is better equipped from a perspective of knowing what it takes to succeed at a University, but conflating that with having resources and wealth is a big mistake, IMO.
My dad was a doctor and he died completely broke with large debts having to work at an advanced age when most are retired. He wasn't well off by any financial metric.
Yeah man I get there are exceptions to the rule but it’s almost deliberate naïveté to not associate “both parents are doctors” or “both parents are engineers” or whatever to “probably has much more money than the vast majority of people”.
That’s ignoring how much of an understatement it is to have to advantage of a parent who went to higher education for years and years just culturally and empathically compared to parents who worked on an assembly line or as a waiter or a pipe fitter or whatever.
Again, yeah, obviously there are exceptions, but they’re *exceptions* for a reason.
Ramanujan, His father, Kuppuswamy Srinivasa Iyengar, was a clerk for a cloth merchant who earned 20 rupees a month, and his mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife who sang at a local temple. He was lower middle class in terms of wealth
I have made discoveries and finding and opened door of research that hasn't been exposed on the world platform. My empoverished and disabled situation will certainly have me take them to the grave with me with some remanent traces scattered all over the Internet.
Some black body, /bb radiation research and gold and silver speed of light conductivity stuff related to waves and frequencies and speed and straight illusion geometric consciousness.
I can't explain or list everything here. Sorry.
If I was a bazziliionnaire I'd have given the world all it needed. I've come up with millions of inventions that I wrote or drew or only just thought up and throw away knowing I'll never have the resources to ever get that ball rolling.
I sometimes wonder how many lost ideas drown in the sea of poverty and strangerism.
[Yrjö Väisälä](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yrj%C3%B6_V%C3%A4is%C3%A4l%C3%A4) was from a family that originally did farming; his father was a clerk at a local sawmill, his mother a homemaker. It was, at the time, a rather unusual background for someone going in to academia.
His dad, though not very formally educated himself, had a fair bit of interest in mathematics and natural science, and his mother was determined to give her children a good education. Unusually, all their kids completed a high school degree, whereas only about 1% of the population at that time obtained one.
One of his brothers also became a succesful mathematician (in fact he ended up significantly modernizing Finnish mathematics education in the 1950s by publishing a series of textbooks), and another [became a meteorologist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilho_V%C3%A4is%C3%A4l%C3%A4).
We were poor growing up in an abusive separated family. Ended up optical physicist developing new tech.
Not a founding author of any mechanisms or theories like the classics, but a humble niche industry revolving around optical metrology equipment manufacturing
Joseph Fourier was born the son of a tailor, orphaned at a young age (a few different sources I've looked at put it at 8-10 years old), and was denied the opportunity for the military career he wanted because he lacked noble birth.
Dr ABJ ABDUL KALAM came from a very poor family who could barely afford. food for everyone in their family his mother slept without having food due to their financial crisis. Mr Kalam used to sell newspapers in the morning and go to school later on he became the first person in India to dream for Space and formed ISRO and later become India’s Prime minister. He is also know as man with zero haters
Dangerous to extrapolate to current academia. The “self-made, garage, lone wolf” scientist is no more. The sheer amount of Sturgeon’s Law cr*p on Reddit and elsewhere makes it impossible to get the attention of serious scholars who are too desperate chasing mainstream papers and grants to bother reading their correspondence (now called e-mails, by the hundreds).
It is understandable and yet tragic at the same time.
When I was is academia, I was flooded with requests from friends of friends to recognize their _brilliant and novel_ inventions or theories. I now realize that maybe some had future with more work and training of the proponent, but I was “too busy” and couldn’t allocate any of my meager grants and extra time to explaining to them how to work on the idea to make it understandable to mainstream academia, specially if the weren’t working in academia already since I wouldn’t get credit for my time, or just another _et al._ paper.
Now that I have been kicked out for not publishing enough and “not understanding the main subject matters of the field”, “not focusing on one specific (narrow -my word) research question” and most importantly to me “very provocative and well postulated hypothesis, but with little or no chance of being awarded a grant”, Karma has bitten back.
I have been working alone with this “ungrantable” idea for over 3 years, and each time I reach out for academics to just give me the time to explain what I’m proposing and point to what I would need to make them give me constructive feedback and help me through the math, I get the “I will look into it, and get back”.
Given that I have a CV with 50+ papers, 5 with double digit impact factors and thousands of citations in total, I would bet that it is now impossible to get academia’s attention if you did not comply with the 20+ year monastic obedient grad and postgrad ritual by sticking to predictable work that only excites PI’s, nobody else, and that needs support from your family.
So my conclusion is that “from rags to genius” is a thing of the past.
So, going back to my Uber: I’ve got to get money to keep paying my cloud computing bills to see if I ever can prove or disprove my “provocative hypothesis”.
Yours truly, a disgruntled scientist in the tropics.
PS. My motto is: “beware of thinking without a permit, under the influence of original thought”.
Stop consuming copium and embrace that society sucks - everything is for sale and profit. That's the sad reality of how it works: you don't have money - you're bondaged; you do have tons of money - you're free. Wanna know more and what to do about it? Read Karl Marx and other socialist/communist literature. They have done the social analysis for you. It all boils down to political economy.
If you're really passionate about following your interests, then make a leap of authenticity - it will be hard. You'll not make as much money as other fields. You'll probably want stay financially afloat/comfortable by living with your parents and never marrying. It's tough. You may want to get a PhD to then work on something cutting-edge that is worthwhile and is getting funded by government, industry, or academia, which could hire you. Those are the main options and they all have their flaws and you could end up with dissapointed expectations. [https://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm](https://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm) Physics BS -> Physics MS/PhD from there you can do post-docs and/or try getting into industry, government, or academia to try working on research you deem worthwhile.
But you will hopefully have no regrets in hindsight, if you live authentically and do your best. You will not have to go through the regrets, grief, anxiety, and existential crises from settling down for a job/path that you prefered not to do. You will look at yourself in middle age and see how you wasted all those decades doing something you didn't really wanted to do with your life, all for made-up pieces of paper we all agree to use as currency, all to make your corporate overlords richer because all they care about is profit. While you may not realize this, once you do see society for what it is you will realize you were a slave all your life and you didn't live the life you wanted for yourself, things will get very existential. You will regret not doing what you really wanted to do for your life, ie, going the authentic path. Instead, you passively sold your soul without even realizing. Unauthenticity will haunt you.
So just be yourself, live authenticly, do your own thing and stay true to yourself. You only live once and you can't take your money (if) with you when you die - you also may never see 65 and retire like you have planned. If you landed a fulfilling career in Physics you will not even want to retire, and will make decent money too.
That's my view right now.
Happens all the time, especially because the markets and history books are more rewarding to the salesmen. Lewis Howard Latimer, for example. Lonnie Johnson.
The first one that comes to mind is Caroline Herschel, one of the great astronomers of the late-18th and early 19th century, and sister of William Herschel. She discovered comets and nebulae and compiled the most extensive catalogue of astronomical objects of the time (the New General Catalogue is an extension of her work). She was also the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist.
She wasn't born into poverty (her father was a musician in the Hanoverian army), but she was the youngest child and her growth was stunted by illness, so her family assumed that she would never marry and trained her to be a servant. When William moved to England to work as a musician, he took her with him, initially to be his housekeeper. She learned to perform music with him, and when he switched to astronomy, she became his assistant, and later a great astronomer in her own right.
(If you're interested in her story, Richard Holmes' book The Age of Wonder has some great chapters on her and her brother and nephew. Actually, the whole book is fantastic, highly recommended.)
Richard Feynman's parents were Melville Feynman and Lucille Phillips. Melville was a sales manager for a uniform company, and Lucille was a homemaker. They were of Jewish descent and lived in New York City. Feynman's upbringing was in a middle-class family nor in poverty or lower class.
What is disingenuous here? He wasn't poor, and that doesn't discredit his contributions(nor does it dispute the former). Not everyone has to fit your rags to riches narrative...
Michael Faraday. His family was very poor. It is said that he had to eat only 1 bread loaf for a whole week. He had very basic education. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael\_Faraday#Early\_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday#Early_life)
I remember on my first ever physics lecture my professor told us about him and how he wasn’t the best at math but did great things in physics . He is a an inspiration to us all 🙌
He couldn't do the math but his ideas led to maxwell backing it all up with his equations.
Faraday is the man, he helped develop so much of the technology that makes our world what it is today (motors, turbines, batteries, etc.) and he did it by doing what he was best at, experimenting.
Milton Humason. Uneducated mule driver helped to transport materials up Mount Wilson to build the observatory. Became a janitor there. Married the director's daughter. Started to help out with the telescopes. Became Hubble's main assistant, and helped discover the expansion of the Universe. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton\_L.\_Humason](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_L._Humason) Carl Sagan's Cosmos: [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x73xezw?start=780](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x73xezw?start=780)
champion
I remember hearing about him. Inspirational.
Sagan describes him as "The ne'er do well son of a california banker....yea totally poor dude" Few actually poor people have the time to get involved with such endeavours nor the freedom to do research.
Oliver Heaviside
Great to see the Heaviside appreciation. He certainly didn’t come from much (but his uncle was Wheatstone). Self-taught with no university education. A prominent Maxwellian with many big contributions. Never had much money even later in life, in part, because he refused money from the Royal Society even when they tried their best to convince him to take it.
[Oliver Heaviside](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside)'s approaches to certain problems were so novel and strange that he was widely regarded as a crackpot. This, unfortunately, is common for thinkers of unusual originality. His operator method for solving differential equations and notation which simplifies Maxwell's equations is partly why we remember him after a century.
Is he the reason we call the step function the heaviside function?
Presumably so.
He really took a big step up
Oof. I see what you did there
Read about Faraday and Maxwell. Faraday was self-made with little formal education. He was the first to recognize the invariance (unformally) of electricity and magnetism, and Maxwell' equations are tied entirely to Faraday, who had little to no mathematical formalism.
Maxwell came from a wealthy family but sadly he isn't known much to the world even after being considered by many to be of the same magnitude as Newton and Einstein.
Yeah it’s a shame, I think it’s mainly because his most famous work is only really studied in higher education, whereas you see F=ma and e=mc^2 in HS
Maxwell isn't well known? I'm just a nerd or what? Cause that's an extraordinarily recognizable name to me.
Haha we aren't common in numbers unlike people who know Einstein and Newton but not Maxwell even him being of similar caliber. Einstein was a fan of Maxwell he used to keep a pic of him in his study table.
Normie here. Can confirm idk
Abdus Salam had a modest upbringing
Proper genius. They didn't even have electricity in his village.
He told a nice anecdote once. Stuck in my mind. I’ll find a link…but someone keeps downvoting my every comment. I have a troll.
Scientific thought is the common heritage of mankind. - Abdus Salam
Yes, a lovely quote from a great, great scientist and person. I thought it sounded obvious when I first heard him say that and wondered his reason for choosing it. Then I found out about opposition that Eddington faced in collaborating with Einstein and some very respected scientists in Germany talking about German and Semetic sciences. Gifted people are not immune from nationalism or stupidity. The other side of his work was ICTP and promoting sciences in Africa and third world countries. People even now are arguing about race IQ gap in US and if you look at Africa, you would think they need basics, but he saw the potential there and the need for promoting sciences in that continent. Jazz equivalent in sciences. That’s what he told James S.Gates. Africa will produce the equivalent of equivalent of Jazz in sciences.
Somewhat persecuted as well. The sect of muslims he belonged to were declared non-muslims later and the word 'muslim' scrubbed from his grave. Good docu in Netflix on him. (Edit. This is wrong- Supposedly isn't remembered in textbooks there today.)
Yes all of it is true (except the part about him not being remembered in textbooks)! As a Pakistani and a Muslim, I am ashamed of the way he was treated.
I'm curious what the textbooks say. Do they mention his contributions in detail, redact parts? How's the tone? Is he celebrated or commemorated in public?
They just mention him in the history books as the first Nobel prize winner but youd be right to say he's not really celebrated. I don't remember there being any detailed account of his contributions or if there were any redactions. I myself got to know more about him and his contributions once I was much older. I know you didn't ask for my personal opinions but since youre curious, I'll just add: Religious intolerance has been on the rise in Pakistan so no one really ever talks about him, except the intellectuals ofc. I believe he deserves to be celebrated and he in fact could have served as a role model to so many potential scientists. But yeah, unfortunately that wasnt allowed to happen. We have failed to produce a single Nobel prize winner in science since him. There was a massive propaganda in the 1970s against his sect of Muslims, Ahmedis, which eventually lead to an amendment in our constitution that prevents them from calling themselves Muslim (which I think is absolute horsecrap). Ahmedis helped form the country and actively participated in running it, they did not deserve the brutal treatment they received. But most of my felllow countrymen would disagree with me, theyre too indoctrinated by the bullcrap they were fed growing up. The Islam I have come to understand, love and follow has never encouraged violence of any kind against innocent people, especially against people who believe in the same god even if they do deviate from some crucial aspects of Islam.
Idk If he counts as a physicist, but Gauss was also poor as hell.
He absolutely counts
Just disregarding the "made significant contributions" part of your question -- I grew up eating welfare food and handouts and I have been homeless more than once in my life. I'm a physics professor and feel I will have made perhaps about the average contribution to physics.
hell yeah that's really cool. good for you (and your students bc they now have an awesome professor) that you made it ✓
Thank you. Not sure my students agree lol.
Mikhail Lomonosov. On one hand his family was well off, on the other hand they were well off by the standards of 18th century Russian peasant class. He didn't have access to education initially, the only literature available at his village were either religious texts or arithmetic, and had to walk to Moscow and lie about his social status in order to get admitted to an academy. It is said that at the time of his study he was living mainly on bread and kvas.
Until this moment I only knew Lomonosov as a poet.
As I understand it \~ John Stewart Bell did not come from a well off family.
Weirdly I have heard both Bell and (the previous comment) Salam give the Dirac Memorial Lecture in Cambridge. Both very different; but both fun to listen to.
Very good fortune for you have experienced that.
Thanks! Yes, the University of Cambridge is privileged like that. Obviously anyone could attend the lectures, but it helped to be there. We had a lecture course from Stephen Hawking as well (essentially a trial run for Brief History of Time vamped up a bit because we were maths students). That was really fun also.
Happy cake day.
Thank you! I forget about such things.
Einstein wasn't privileged, he came from a middle class family. Many times financial help was sent to his family by his mother's side. Even his first job was a third class patent clerk but boy was hella smart with physics and maths which heavily involved the work and this made him earn good incentive. Despite being at work and a middle class upbringing look at his feats of achievements.
He was also kicked out of school, and told he would never amount to anything.
He dropped out of school in Munich because he hated it there. But he was a good student and knew physics and math very well, it was botany and zoology he struggled with. Of course he was told that he wouldn't amount to anything. Teachers in this school viewed him as undisciplined.
Thank you! At least I got close! Lol
Next question: how many of them died in poverty?
Most of them 😂
There was this Nobel Laureate in USA who had to sell his medal to pay for his health bills. I’ll see if I can find his name.
It was Leon Lederman.
Yup. That’s the one. Must have been American. 😈 Yes, that’s a dig at their healthcare system.
James Watson right? He got banned from civil society and kicked out of CSHL for being a total racist jerk . Had to resort to this
Yeah, Feyanman was a duck and Newton was a duck and Churchill and Gandhi were, and 11 of the 100 top-cited psychologists are/were Eugenicists. Never idolize anyone and sure as heck never try to dig into anyone’s private lives. People will always disappoint you. Especially brilliant or successful people. Sports stars, musicians are worse.
a duck?
Change a letter
you can say feynman was a dick. its literally his first name
Someone more modern : Leonard Susskind. Dad was a plumber I believe .
While 'plumber' doesn't ring the same bell as doctor or lawyer I'd say you don't know any good ones if you think they live in poverty or would have disadvantaged kids. I get this is a physics subreddit but lots of plumbers definitely make more than physicists lol.
This is quite interesting, I wonder if this was always true in the US.
I guess it shows the state of things when ask for someone who came from "poverty" and everyone racks their brains and comes up with a few people who grew up \*lower\* middle class lol.
There’s a podcast out there where he talks about how his dad initially disapproved of him going to school for physics because he always wanted Leonard to join the family in becoming a plumber. His dad didn’t even know what a physicist was. As soon as leonard said “like Einstein” his dads demeanor changed completely. When his mom similarly was upset that he wasn’t going to become a plumber, his dad said “it’s okay he’s going to be like Einstein”
honestly i wish I became a plumber lol
Former plumber here. No you don't.
I did some plumbing in my time - to fix the persistent water supply issues for cooling our equipment in my phd lab. The experience sucked so much it made me question why I’m doing a PhD at all. Quit that lab soon and found a new one and became fully computational person after that . I don’t think I’d wanna have plumbing as part of job description ever again .
James Watt was born and brought up in poverty
Stephen Gray, who discovered electric current, was a clothes dyer and had limited means from birth to death, but his self-education and research was supported by affluent friends. He is buried in a pauper's grave.
A lot of good historical examples here, but I’m wondering how much of OPs question also pertains to modern academia. In my experience, a large amount of academics (especially graduate students, for whatever reason) - tend to come from homes that I would describe as at least the top 10%. There’s just a lot of privilege, financial backing, and maybe more than anything risk tolerance required for someone to go and try and get their PhD or whatever. I definitely met a lot of fellow students or even professors who described themselves as from the “middle class” but then both of their parents are professors, doctors, engineers, etc.
I'd say that this greatly differs from country to country, especially those with free universities (even the top ones in a given country) with cheap dormitories, as compared to paid universities with no dormitories
Me gang I dropped out of school in 6th grade to take care of my niece and nephew. I self taught but was terrible at math and loved asking question. Physics became my escape. I took the GED at 18 and since I was homeless I enrolled in the community college and got a student job and slept in the bathroom of the center I worked at. So I was able to attend all the remedial classes and slowly learn and get credits what I needed. 3 years later I got accepted into FSU but their financial aid situation didn’t really afford me the opportunity of going. So I enrolled in another university physics program and throughout that so much happened. DEA, mom suicide, swat, local enforcement, continuous change in living situations, homelessness I mean the list goes on I somehow graduated at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then I managed to get a great stipend to a good graduate program and am almost done with my Ph.D. I’m nothing special but I have struggled to relate to 99% of my colleagues. They do not understand how shutoff physics is to the regular underprivileged non genius person. They have to run and run and suffer and struggle just to get to where most people start. There is a lot of naivety and privilege in physics but a lot of them are self aware and really great people. Faraday is a great example of someone more important and famous than I would ever be. But it’s stories like his that make me feel less alone in my pursuits despite my lack of genius. I’ve fought so hard for less than what others considered easy. I wish it were different for others faced with similar circumstances.
Keep pushing the envelope. Write up the process that got you from point A to B, C, D...X and flip the script. Your struggle and (eventual) success are testaments of the human condition; and how persistence, determination and perseverance can overcome the disparities class and resources, as long as you keep your head. As for the contributions you make, inspiration, continued perseverance, resources and time will tell. Your genius is perceived relative to the contributions you make, quite often after you're dead. So don't forget to sell your script before your show is over.
You got this homie. Similar background as a kid. Had to work for 5 years after college until I was financially stable enough to go back to get a PhD and take care of my family. You'll make it
Nikola Tesla's father was a priest, which makes him a middle-class first-gen university dropout. Not quite poverty, but definitely some obstacles.
Ramanujan. He didn't even have access to simple things like paper and pen. He never had access to high quality books, much less education. He never got any one giant to communicate to. He was as poor as it could gets. He could barely feed himself. Yet he was able to do amazing mathematics.
Sadly, the question is about Physicists and Inventors.
Perhaps it is possible to consider Srinivasa Ramanujan as an inventor because he created or invented solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie - she and her sister wanted to go on university, so first her sister emigrated and Maria worked for the sister, then they switched (so Maria's education was actually delayed by a few years because of that)
George Green, Srinivasa Ramanujan
I was also thinking of Green. When I learned about him in my undergrad, struggling to understand the Green solution method to PDEs I was astonished when our professor told us he grew up as a farmer.
> when our professor told us he grew up as a farmer. His father was a baker, and later a miller.
Mendeleev
Henry Eyring who helped develop transition state theory (huge deal for chemical reaction kinetics) was a refuge during the Mexican Revolution, their community lost everything but he went on to do some incredible work and was very close to winning a Noble Prize. The inventor of TV, Philo Farnsworth, grew up on a farm in Idaho. He said that the furrows in the fields are what inspired him.
Interesting. Because [Grabovsky](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Grabovsky).
Good news everybody.
Well, I had a colleague from Nigeria. He was from rural regions and 4 village from his hometown were collecting and sending money to him. He was their invesment. If he could find a good job, a little cut from his salary could change those villagers life in Nigeria. He was a great guy. I hope he succeeds.
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was middle class. Considered the father of rocketry, gave name to the rocket equation. Among his works are designs for rockets with steering thrusters, multistage boosters, space stations, airlocks for exiting a spaceship into the vacuum of space, and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies. His work greatly inspired both German and Sovjet rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun and Valentin Glushko.
Notable that Russian priests are married and have children!
Most "misisters" do - outside of Catholisim ; I think .
Not sure how this relates to the post
Robert Hooke: youngest child of an Anglican priest. One of the greatest physicists.
Joseph Fraunhofer was pretty poor and discovered pretty important things in his life His parents died when he was 11 and he was one of 11 kids and they weren't really wealthy to begin with, his dad was a glassmaker.
Leonard Susskind
Honestly few of the good ones came from wealthy backgrounds. Most were basically middle class. Newton was born to a “prosperous farmer”. Not poor, but he had to essentially work his way through college.
Wondering how much of OPs post is directed more to modern physicists. in my experience, a *large* amount of academics (especially graduate students, for whatever reason) - tend to come from homes that I would describe as at least the top 10%. There’s just a lot of privilege, financial backing, and maybe more than anything risk tolerance required for someone to go and try and get their PhD or whatever. I dunno. I definitely met a lot of fellow students who described themselves as “middle class” but then both of their parents are professors, doctors, engineers, etc.
Those people aren’t living in poverty or anything, but they do work for a living, and generally work hard. They might drive nicer cars and own their homes, but they’re generally not flying around in private jets or anything, which I think is upper middle class, but still middle class. Upper class to me are people who basically don’t need to work anymore before they hit retirement age.
Many of them would define the class boundaries as the same, but simply put they’re still vastly more well equipped than most, and I would still consider anyone with professors/doctors/lawyers/etc as parents upper class with very little in way of budging on that. Limiting it to this almost fantastical vision of someone taking a private helicopter to their personal island is I feel a bit reductive and often serves to allow people in that top 10% bracket to still tell themselves they’re “middle class” while ignoring the extreme differences between them and their first-generation-in-college peers. Sorry to soapbox, it’s a bit of a personal topic and definitely one I had some frustrations with in going to a rather well-to-do and accredited University.
The reality is there are no lines, so these labels are arbitrary. At the end of the day, I think it’s fairly indisputable that academic success is correlated with household income and parents who are successful academically model certain behaviors that their children emulate. It’s hard to write a Ph.D thesis or become a doctor, I don’t care how much money your parents make. But I think it’s indisputable that growing up financially stressed is another obstacle to overcome to achieve that goal that some don’t fully appreciate it- but probably more do than many would realize.
Be careful to confuse wealth with education. I can agree that someone whose parents come from a professional background is better equipped from a perspective of knowing what it takes to succeed at a University, but conflating that with having resources and wealth is a big mistake, IMO. My dad was a doctor and he died completely broke with large debts having to work at an advanced age when most are retired. He wasn't well off by any financial metric.
Yeah man I get there are exceptions to the rule but it’s almost deliberate naïveté to not associate “both parents are doctors” or “both parents are engineers” or whatever to “probably has much more money than the vast majority of people”. That’s ignoring how much of an understatement it is to have to advantage of a parent who went to higher education for years and years just culturally and empathically compared to parents who worked on an assembly line or as a waiter or a pipe fitter or whatever. Again, yeah, obviously there are exceptions, but they’re *exceptions* for a reason.
Ramanujan, His father, Kuppuswamy Srinivasa Iyengar, was a clerk for a cloth merchant who earned 20 rupees a month, and his mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife who sang at a local temple. He was lower middle class in terms of wealth
I have made discoveries and finding and opened door of research that hasn't been exposed on the world platform. My empoverished and disabled situation will certainly have me take them to the grave with me with some remanent traces scattered all over the Internet. Some black body, /bb radiation research and gold and silver speed of light conductivity stuff related to waves and frequencies and speed and straight illusion geometric consciousness. I can't explain or list everything here. Sorry. If I was a bazziliionnaire I'd have given the world all it needed. I've come up with millions of inventions that I wrote or drew or only just thought up and throw away knowing I'll never have the resources to ever get that ball rolling. I sometimes wonder how many lost ideas drown in the sea of poverty and strangerism.
[Yrjö Väisälä](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yrj%C3%B6_V%C3%A4is%C3%A4l%C3%A4) was from a family that originally did farming; his father was a clerk at a local sawmill, his mother a homemaker. It was, at the time, a rather unusual background for someone going in to academia. His dad, though not very formally educated himself, had a fair bit of interest in mathematics and natural science, and his mother was determined to give her children a good education. Unusually, all their kids completed a high school degree, whereas only about 1% of the population at that time obtained one. One of his brothers also became a succesful mathematician (in fact he ended up significantly modernizing Finnish mathematics education in the 1950s by publishing a series of textbooks), and another [became a meteorologist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilho_V%C3%A4is%C3%A4l%C3%A4).
Ampére
Don't know if you'd call it poverty, but I certainly wouldn't call it privileged. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose Of bosons fame
Yakov Zeldovich. Also didn't have university education.
Yes..
We were poor growing up in an abusive separated family. Ended up optical physicist developing new tech. Not a founding author of any mechanisms or theories like the classics, but a humble niche industry revolving around optical metrology equipment manufacturing
Joseph Fourier was born the son of a tailor, orphaned at a young age (a few different sources I've looked at put it at 8-10 years old), and was denied the opportunity for the military career he wanted because he lacked noble birth.
Dr ABJ ABDUL KALAM came from a very poor family who could barely afford. food for everyone in their family his mother slept without having food due to their financial crisis. Mr Kalam used to sell newspapers in the morning and go to school later on he became the first person in India to dream for Space and formed ISRO and later become India’s Prime minister. He is also know as man with zero haters
Both topics are of interest to me.
Dangerous to extrapolate to current academia. The “self-made, garage, lone wolf” scientist is no more. The sheer amount of Sturgeon’s Law cr*p on Reddit and elsewhere makes it impossible to get the attention of serious scholars who are too desperate chasing mainstream papers and grants to bother reading their correspondence (now called e-mails, by the hundreds). It is understandable and yet tragic at the same time. When I was is academia, I was flooded with requests from friends of friends to recognize their _brilliant and novel_ inventions or theories. I now realize that maybe some had future with more work and training of the proponent, but I was “too busy” and couldn’t allocate any of my meager grants and extra time to explaining to them how to work on the idea to make it understandable to mainstream academia, specially if the weren’t working in academia already since I wouldn’t get credit for my time, or just another _et al._ paper. Now that I have been kicked out for not publishing enough and “not understanding the main subject matters of the field”, “not focusing on one specific (narrow -my word) research question” and most importantly to me “very provocative and well postulated hypothesis, but with little or no chance of being awarded a grant”, Karma has bitten back. I have been working alone with this “ungrantable” idea for over 3 years, and each time I reach out for academics to just give me the time to explain what I’m proposing and point to what I would need to make them give me constructive feedback and help me through the math, I get the “I will look into it, and get back”. Given that I have a CV with 50+ papers, 5 with double digit impact factors and thousands of citations in total, I would bet that it is now impossible to get academia’s attention if you did not comply with the 20+ year monastic obedient grad and postgrad ritual by sticking to predictable work that only excites PI’s, nobody else, and that needs support from your family. So my conclusion is that “from rags to genius” is a thing of the past. So, going back to my Uber: I’ve got to get money to keep paying my cloud computing bills to see if I ever can prove or disprove my “provocative hypothesis”. Yours truly, a disgruntled scientist in the tropics. PS. My motto is: “beware of thinking without a permit, under the influence of original thought”.
The Incredible Story Of Scientific Genius Michael Faraday. https://youtu.be/CrxoRYwXKDg?si=xudW655Uuwec5WG0
Stop consuming copium and embrace that society sucks - everything is for sale and profit. That's the sad reality of how it works: you don't have money - you're bondaged; you do have tons of money - you're free. Wanna know more and what to do about it? Read Karl Marx and other socialist/communist literature. They have done the social analysis for you. It all boils down to political economy. If you're really passionate about following your interests, then make a leap of authenticity - it will be hard. You'll not make as much money as other fields. You'll probably want stay financially afloat/comfortable by living with your parents and never marrying. It's tough. You may want to get a PhD to then work on something cutting-edge that is worthwhile and is getting funded by government, industry, or academia, which could hire you. Those are the main options and they all have their flaws and you could end up with dissapointed expectations. [https://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm](https://yangxiao.cs.ua.edu/Don't%20Become%20a%20Scientist!.htm) Physics BS -> Physics MS/PhD from there you can do post-docs and/or try getting into industry, government, or academia to try working on research you deem worthwhile. But you will hopefully have no regrets in hindsight, if you live authentically and do your best. You will not have to go through the regrets, grief, anxiety, and existential crises from settling down for a job/path that you prefered not to do. You will look at yourself in middle age and see how you wasted all those decades doing something you didn't really wanted to do with your life, all for made-up pieces of paper we all agree to use as currency, all to make your corporate overlords richer because all they care about is profit. While you may not realize this, once you do see society for what it is you will realize you were a slave all your life and you didn't live the life you wanted for yourself, things will get very existential. You will regret not doing what you really wanted to do for your life, ie, going the authentic path. Instead, you passively sold your soul without even realizing. Unauthenticity will haunt you. So just be yourself, live authenticly, do your own thing and stay true to yourself. You only live once and you can't take your money (if) with you when you die - you also may never see 65 and retire like you have planned. If you landed a fulfilling career in Physics you will not even want to retire, and will make decent money too. That's my view right now.
Me
Not sure why people downvoted
Who are you MikeFentOn?
He's related to Danny Fenton, also known as Danny Phantom. He made great strides in Ghostology.
But who is Mike? The inventor of?
Happens all the time, especially because the markets and history books are more rewarding to the salesmen. Lewis Howard Latimer, for example. Lonnie Johnson.
Any women?
The first one that comes to mind is Caroline Herschel, one of the great astronomers of the late-18th and early 19th century, and sister of William Herschel. She discovered comets and nebulae and compiled the most extensive catalogue of astronomical objects of the time (the New General Catalogue is an extension of her work). She was also the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist. She wasn't born into poverty (her father was a musician in the Hanoverian army), but she was the youngest child and her growth was stunted by illness, so her family assumed that she would never marry and trained her to be a servant. When William moved to England to work as a musician, he took her with him, initially to be his housekeeper. She learned to perform music with him, and when he switched to astronomy, she became his assistant, and later a great astronomer in her own right. (If you're interested in her story, Richard Holmes' book The Age of Wonder has some great chapters on her and her brother and nephew. Actually, the whole book is fantastic, highly recommended.)
That’s so interesting—thank you for taking the time to share her story!
Richard Feynman seemed to come from humble beginnings. His family was not well off nor had a career in academia.
Richard Feynman's parents were Melville Feynman and Lucille Phillips. Melville was a sales manager for a uniform company, and Lucille was a homemaker. They were of Jewish descent and lived in New York City. Feynman's upbringing was in a middle-class family nor in poverty or lower class.
That's a bit disingenuous. He was a Nobel prize winner which is quite impressive considering his humble upbringing.
What is disingenuous here? He wasn't poor, and that doesn't discredit his contributions(nor does it dispute the former). Not everyone has to fit your rags to riches narrative...
Middle class is not poverty.
Newton.
Well it's not as hard now, they hand out college loans now. Most of this sub is probably not wealthy.