Freeman John Dyson was an English-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. He was Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources that are naturally replenished on a human timescale. It includes sources such as sunlight, wind, the movement of water, and geothermal heat. Although most renewable energy sources are sustainable, some are not. For example, some biomass sources are considered unsustainable at current rates of exploitation. Renewable energy often provides energy for electricity generation to a grid, air and water heating/cooling, and stand-alone power systems.
Svante August Arrhenius was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate. In 1905, he became director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.
Edwin Mattison McMillan was an American physicist credited with being the first-ever to produce a transuranium element, neptunium. For this, he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg.
Masatoshi Koshiba was a Japanese physicist and one of the founders of neutrino astronomy. His work with the neutrino detectors Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in detecting solar neutrinos, providing experimental evidence for the solar neutrino problem.
Steven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
Rajendra Kumar Pachauri was the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2002 to 2015, during the fourth and fifth assessment cycles. Under his leadership the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and delivered the Fifth Assessment Report, the scientific foundation of the Paris Agreement. He held the post from 2002 until his resignation in February 2015 after facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment. He was succeeded by Hoesung Lee. Pachauri assumed his responsibilities as the Chief Executive of The Energy and Resources Institute in 1981 and led the institute for more than three decades and demitted office as Executive Vice Chairman of TERI in 2016. Pachauri, universally known as Patchy, was an internationally recognized voice on environmental and policy issues, and his leadership of the IPCC contributed to the issue of human-caused climate change becoming recognized as a matter of vital global concern.
Ian Russell McEwan, is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
Val Logsdon Fitch was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered. This demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry.
A solar neutrino is a neutrino originating from nuclear fusion in the Sun's core, and is the most common type of neutrino passing through any source observed on Earth at any particular moment. Neutrinos are elementary particles with extremely small rest mass and a neutral electric charge. They only interact with matter via the weak interaction and gravity, making their detection very difficult. This has led to the now-resolved solar neutrino problem. Much is now known about solar neutrinos, but the research in this field is ongoing.
Stanford Robert Ovshinsky was an American engineer, scientist and inventor who over a span of fifty years was granted well over 400 patents, mostly in the areas of energy and information. Many of his inventions have had wide-ranging applications. Among the most prominent are: the nickel-metal hydride battery, which has been widely used in laptop computers, digital cameras, cell phones, and electric and hybrid cars; flexible thin-film solar energy laminates and panels; flat screen liquid crystal displays; rewritable CD and DVD discs; hydrogen fuel cells; and nonvolatile phase-change memory.
Arthur Hinton Rosenfeld was a UC Berkeley physicist and California energy commissioner, dubbed the "Godfather of Energy Efficiency", for developing new standards which helped improve energy efficiency in California and subsequently worldwide.
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
Leona Harriet Woods, later known as Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb.
Arthur Bruce McDonald, P.Eng is a Canadian astrophysicist. McDonald is the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration and held the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 2006 to 2013. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita.
Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions is a book by author, blogger, physicist and climate expert Joseph J. Romm. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and former Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, Romm writes about methods of reducing global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency, green energy technologies and green transportation technologies.
Herbert Hwa-sen Chen was a theoretical and experimental physicist at the University of California at Irvine known for his contributions in the field of neutrino detection. Chen's work on observations of elastic neutrino-electron scattering provided important experimental support for the electroweak theory of the standard model of particle physics. In 1984 Chen realized that the deuterium of heavy water could be used as a detector that would distinguish the flavors of solar neutrinos. This idea led Chen to develop plans for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory that would eventually make fundamental measurements demonstrating that neutrinos were particles with mass.
Popularly known internationally as the Green Maharaja, the London born owner of RRB Energy, Rakesh Bakshi was an Indian climate change activist, professor and businessman credited as one of the pioneers in the field of renewable energy sources in India and is the founder of Solchrome Private Limited and RRB Energy Limited. He last held the position of Chairman and Managing Director at RRBEL. In 1991, Rakesh Bakshi was awarded Padma Shri, India's 4th highest civilian award by the then President of India Shri. R. Venkataraman in recognition of his commendable contributions to the field of renewable energy sources. He is the first Indian to be honoured with this award for working in the field of renewable energy.
Varun Srinivasan Sivaram is an American physicist and political advisor on clean energy technology and climate change policy. He is senior advisor to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry as his senior director for clean energy, innovation, and competitiveness. He has previously served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ReNew Power, India's largest renewable energy company, on the faculty of Columbia University, as the director of the energy and climate program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and as a senior energy advisor to the mayor of Los Angeles and governor of New York.
Planet of the Humans is a 2019 American environmental documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jeff Gibbs. The film was executively produced by Michael Moore. Moore released it on YouTube for free viewing on April 21, 2020, the eve of the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.
