5 Physicists Who Won Nobel Prize In Chemistry

All science is either physics or stamp collecting. This is how physicist Ernest Rutherford compared physics, the king of all sciences to other less fundamental sciences. Quite ironically, Rutherford won a Nobel Prize in chemistry later on.

In this post, let us take a look at physicists who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry:

1. Ernest Rutherford

Rutherford was a New Zealand physicist who is known for proposing the nuclear model of atom. Rutherford is also called the father of nuclear physics, courtesy of his gold foil experiment. He won a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1908 for his services to studies into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances.

2. Marie Curie

Madame Curie was a physicist and chemist who won two Nobel prizes in both the sciences. The first prize was received in physics, for investigations on radioactivity. The second Nobel, which was for chemistry, was won in 1911 for discovering radium and polonium.

3. Walter Kohn

Walter Kohn was an Austrian American physicist who won the 1998 Nobel prize in chemistry for understanding the electronic properties of materials. Kohn had received MA degree in mathematics from University of Toronto and PhD in physics from Harvard university in 1948.

4. John Pople

John Pople shared the 1998 Nobel prize in chemistry with Kohn, he won the coveted prize for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry. Pople got a PhD degree in maths from Cambridge university in 1951. He then worked as head of physics division at national physical laboratory in London.

5. Venki Ramakrishnan

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the 2009 Nobel prize in chemistry for research on ribosomes. He got his bachelor of science degree in physics in 1971. After that Venki Ramakrishnan received his PhD in physics from Ohio university in 1976. He spent the next two years making a transition from physics to biology.