TRAVEL | SCIENCE | VACATION

Our Dream of a Really Unusual European Vacation

Yes, it’s not what you think

When you say “European Vacation,” most people think of taking selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower, leaning against the Leaning Tower of Pizza, visiting the Louvre, or dipping into the beautiful waters of Majorca.

Not me.

For more than a decade, me and my wife are dreaming about a very different sort of European vacation:

Visiting the houses where the giants of Western science have lived.

Here are our top 12 stops on the Giants of Western Science Vacation Tour that we could never take for one reason or another:

Home of Isaac Newton — Woolsthorpe Manor, England

Newton was a polymath mathematician and physicist who formulated the three laws of universal motion and developed the present day notation for the differential and integral calculus (simultaneously with Leibniz).

Home of Galileo Galilei — Costa San Giorgio, Italy

Galileo applied mathematics to empirical observations. Einstein considered him the “first scientist” in history. He discovered the telescope, five moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and paid a heavy personal price for going against the Catholic Church’s dogmas.

Home of Nicolaus Copernicus — Frombork and Olsztyn, Poland

Copernicus was the first to assert a heliocentric world view, in contrast to the Ptolemaic view which placed earth in the center of the solar system. He described how earth was a planet turning both around its axis and also around the sun like all the other planets.

Home of Louis Pasteur — Dole, France

Father of bacteriology and microbiology. He is famous for his experimental refutation of “spontaneous generation” thesis. We owe him the revolutionary germ theory of diseases.

The house where he actually lived.

Home of Marie Curie

Working with her husband, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium in 1898. In 1903 they won the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering radioactivity. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for isolating pure radium.

Pierre and Marie Curie’s home in Paris, France

Home of Tycho Brahe — Hven Island, Sweden

Tycho Brahe made accurate observations of the stars and planets for many years. His meticulous measurements were later used by Kepler to help him discover the laws of planetary motion.

Tyco Brahe’s home in Prague, Czech Republic.

Home of Johannes Kepler — Prague, Czech Republic

Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion by using Tycho Brahe’s data. His works laid the foundation for Newton’s theory of universal gravitation.

Home of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Hanover, Germany

Leibniz was a polymath mathematician who developed the present day notation for the differential and integral calculus (simultaneously with Newton).

Home of Charles Darwin — Kent, England

Darwin discovered the theory of evolution through natural selection. One corollary of his revolutionary theory was that all species of life have descended from a single common ancestor: still a shocking assertion for most people.

Home of Sigmund Freud — Vienna, Austria

Father of psychoanalysis who changed our view of human psychology forever.

Home of Albert Einstein — Bern, Switzerland

Some of Albert Einstein’s achievements:

• Quantum Theory of Light. …
• Special Theory of Relativity. …
• Avogadro’s Number. …
• The Bose-Einstein Condensate. …
• General Theory of Relativity. …
• The Photoelectric Effect. …
• Wave-Particle Duality.

Home of Nikola Tesla — Smiljan, Croatia

Nikola Tesla was a genius and king of engineers who discovered the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. While Thomas Edison defended direct-current, Tesla’s alternating-current proved to be the right current to use in homes and factories. We owe our current AC generation and transmission technology to the one and only Tesla.

This is our precious “bucket list.” I hope we’ll live long enough to make this unusual vacation a reality.