The Real Heroes That Must Have Your Attention
Movies based on comic book heroes are colossal cash machines for film studio moguls and producers. This year alone, much-awaited releases from Disney Studios “The Black Panther” and “Avengers: Infinity War” made a combined total of close to $6 billion US at the box office.
However, while the heroes in these movies are entertaining and inspiring, there are real-life heroes that are just as deserving of your attention. Despite their lack of super powers, these people have made our lives better, and we can’t imagine living in a world without their contribution. Let us take a quick look at who they are:
Albert Einstein
Perhaps the most recognizable name on this list is Albert Einstein as no one can deny he is a household name. With his trademark untamed hair and wild mustache, the poster with him sticking his tongue out has adorned many bedrooms of aspiring scientists, doctors, engineers, and mathematicians. As a child, Albert already was ahead of everyone else in his age group, and it was only natural that as a teenager, he was already writing post-graduate-level papers.
Albert is best known for his paper on the theory of relativity in 1905, one of the most popular scientific theories of the 20th century, which gave birth to the famous equation E=mc2, which implied that matter and energy were of equal quantity and that a single particle of matter can be transformed into a huge quantity of energy. To this day, we have him to credit for understanding the motions of planets and the history and expansion of the universe, as well as the physics of black holes.
Marie Curie
When it comes to trailblazing female scientists, one of the first names – if not the first – that comes to mind is Marie Curie. Not only did Marie face hurdles in her aspirations due to her gender, she also had to battle her family’s poverty and the political turmoil during the time in her native Warsaw, Poland. By the time Marie finished regular schooling, her family couldn’t afford to send her and her three sisters abroad to pursue higher education. During this time, women were not allowed to enroll at their local university.
Despite these difficulties, Marie found a way and headed to Paris, France, where her illustrious career in science started. Together with her husband, Pierre, the two examined minerals and went on to discover polonium and later on radium. The couple went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity in 1903. Marie lost his husband a few years later, but she persevered and went on to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. To this day, she remains the only person to win Nobel prizes in two different fields.
Steve Jobs
Hands down, Steve Jobs, is one of the few modern-day heroes that truly matters – and not just because he gave us the greatest modern-day invention there is: the iPhone. Steve had far more to offer than the revolutionary device that everyone covets at Christmastime. For one, behind the scenes, Steve managed to successfully deal with tribulations in his personal life to be one of the most successful inventors, designers, and entrepreneurs of all time.
Steve was a fresh college dropout when he founded Apple in his parents’ garage with Steve Wozniak in 1976. It grew to a $2 billion company later on, but due to personal reasons, he had to leave in 1985. He rejoined in 1995, where the rest, as they say, is history. In 2005, he gave a commencement speech in Stanford University that still inspires people – young and old alike – up to this day. In his address, he talked openly about his pancreatic cancer diagnosis for the first time and shared, “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Elon Musk
Elon Musk may be more famous now for his social media antics than his contributions to science and technology, but he is one who is deserving of a place in this list and would be in many years to come. Like with everyone else in this list, Elon showed signs of his brilliance at a young age—selling a game called “Blastar” to a computer magazine for $500 when he was only 12 years old.
By 28 years old, he founded X.com which later became the Paypal as we all know now. Before even reaching 30, he was already a multimillionaire, as he founded two other companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors. In 2012, Elon hogged the headlines for launching its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. Meanwhile, for Tesla Motors, he aims to focus on producing mass-market electric cars that are within everyone’s reach.
Those are just a few real-life heroes we can aspire to be. Do you have a favourite one in mind?
SOURCES:
https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/theory-of-relativity
https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/instant-expert-general-relativity/
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