9. Marie Curie - (1867-1934): polish physicist; w/ her husband, discovered that radium constantly emits subatomic particles and thus does not have a constant atomic weight.
10. Max Planck - (1858-1947); German physicist; showed in 1900 that subatomic energy is emitted in uneven little spurts, which he called "quanta" and not in a steady stream as previously believed; his discovery called into question the old sharp distinction between matter and energy, that they were possibly different forms of the same thing.
11. Albert Einstein - (1878-1955); German genius; went further than the Curies and Planck in challenging Newtonian physics; famous theory of special relativity postulated that time and space are not absolute, but relative to the viewpoint of the observer.
12. Marcel Proust - (1871-1922); French novelist; in his semi-autobiographical Remembrance of Things Past, recalled bittersweet memories of childhood and youthful love and tried to discover their innermost meaning; lived like a hermit in a soundproof apartment for 10 years, withdrawing from the present to dwell on the past.
13. Virginia Woolf - (1882-1941); novelist; turned novel, Jacob's Room, into a series of internal monologues, in which ideas and emotions from different periods of time bubble up randomly .
14. Oswald Spengler - (1880-1936); German high school teacher; published The Decline of the West (1918), which quickly became an international sensation; according to Spengler, every culture experiences a life cycle of growth and decline and Western civilization was in its old age, and death was approaching in the form of conquest by the yellow race.
15. T.S. Eliot - (1888-1965); poet; in his poem, The Waste Land, he depicted a world of growing desolation, although after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, he came to hope cautiously for humanity's salvation.
16. Franz Kafka - (1883-1924); German novelist; in several of his novels and short stories he portrays helpless individuals crushed by inexplicably hostile forces .
