How Many Galileos Are in a Darwin Again?

Winning a Nobel Prize may be science’s ultimate claim to fame, but many giants of the discipline are immortalized in another way: having units of measurement named in their honor. There’s the einstein (used to measure energy and named for Albert), the newton (for force, named for Isaac), and the watt (for power, named for James). This form of tribute doesn’t always last forever, though. The standard measurement for radioactivity used to be the curie (for Marie and

Pierre), but it was changed in the 1970s to the becquerel—named for Antoinehenri

Becquerel, who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with the Curies.