Who was awarded NOBEL PRIZE in PHYSICS in 1901 ?
In 1901, when the first Nobel Prizes were awarded, the classical areas of physics seemed to rest on a firm basis built by great 19th century physicists and chemists. Hamilton had formulated a very general description of the dynamics of rigid bodies as early as the 1830s. Carnot, Joule, Kelvin and Gibbs had developed thermodynamics to a high degree of perfection during the second half of the century. Maxwell’s famous equations had been accepted as a general description of electromagnetic phenomena and had been found to be also applicable to optical radiation and the radio waves recently discovered by Hertz. Everything, including the wave phenomena, seemed to fit quite well into a picture built on mechanical motion of the constituents of matter manifesting itself in various macroscopic phenomena. Some observers in the late 19th century actually expressed the view that, what remained for physicists to do was only to fill in minor gaps in this seemingly well-established body of knowledge.
