It is one thing to make discoveries and bag Nobels and it is altogether different thing to have the discovery named after you. It had to be unique enough, surprising enough and perhaps crazy enough so that people want to make sure that the discoverer is continually blamed for it. Here are some of the most famous scientific discoveries named after their discoverers and they tell such beautiful concepts applicable to our daily life that we can't help getting bemused by them.

Archimedes' Principle:
Third century BC., the King Hiero II in Sicily is dumbfounded how to catch the jeweler who mixed silver in his gold ornaments. Archimedes is called in to solve the mystery. All Archimides knew that gold is heavier than silver but how to calculate the adulteration in a mixture; for that he must know the volumes. Well, he goes home, sits in a bath tub and contemplates when it strikes to him that feels lighter in water. "Eureka," he screams and runs naked out of the tub to King Hiero. He had solved the problem. All things when placed under water, displace the amount of water equal to their volume. The crown with silver mixed will displace more water because it was less dense. From that point on it was ships floating and balloons rising.

Fibonacci Series:
The 13th century Pisa was a boring place without colour television. The bored Fibonacci began writing a series of numbers beginning with 1 (what an idea!), then added to it the number before it: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21....got the idea? He wrote about ten thousand numbers and he liked it. But what he did not know that he has stumbled upon one of the nature's best kept secrets. the Fibonacci would not only tell how rabbits will multliply, this will determine the esthetic visual values. Any pair of adjavent Fibonacci numbers divided give a ratio of 1.618, the same ratio in opposing spirals around a pine fone, in bumps arond pineapple and the seeds at the center of sunflower. The Golden Section is a line divided into a larger and smaller segment such that the ratio of the larger section to the whole line is same as the ratio of the small segment to the larger segment. The only way you can have it if the ratio is 1.618. Bingo!The ratio 1.618 is also the most pleasing ratio to the eye and a big deal in art and architecture and you can see it in the facades of Parthenon and in the paintings of Leonardo to Mondarin.

The Linnaen System:
When things got out of control on how to identify various plants, Carlos Linnaen divided them into 24 groups and used a two-word system. The first word will be called the genus and the second species (ala Homo sapiens). The classification was based on the sexual characteristics of plants, the pistils etc. What was crazy about this sytem was that he used names of his friends, foes and then made up some to label whatever was known at that time. Now we live with strange names of people and places and then some as if they are the real names.

Brownian Movement:
The zigzag, irregular dance done by minute particles of matter when suspended in a liquid is named after Robert Brown, who in 1827 made the observation with pollen grains under a microscope. Einstein concluded that this is due to continuous and random bombardment of water molecules and as temperature increases the movement of suspended particles also increases because now the water molecules are moving around faster. A new theory of kinetics was thus discovered and now we know why all systems mix well and become homogeneous when left alone, except for human beings.

The Doppler Effect:
Sound and light waves are characterized by wave length, the difference between the peak and valley and a frequency, i.e., how many low and highs in a second. Both can be easily measured. The early 19th century physicist Christian Doppler noticed that the waves bounced off a moving object had a different frequency than the waves that were bounced on it. If the object were moving away, the waves got shorter and their wavelength increased. In physical terms, the light bounced-off appeared more bluish and sound became high-pitched. (We all know it by the screeching train whistle moving away from us). If the object were moving towards us then the light will become redder and sound will have a lower pitch. This theory allowed Edwin Hubble (1929) to declare that the Universe is still expanding because he saw a red-shift in the light coming from other planets. Police use Doppler radar to track speeding motorists and when you watch Wimbledon, the IBM radar picks up the speed of Navratalova's aces using the shift in sound waves bounced off the wall.

Boolean Algebra:
The 19th century English mathematician George Boole just had about enough of inaccuracies, ambiguities and related hysteria that messes up our thinking and language. Somehow human mind had a block in describing things objectively and clearly. No more words, he said. Let us use symbols to say what we really mean. The a, b, x, P, Q would do the talking and we will use symbols to describe if they are equal, dependent, opposed, unequal or whatever. And reduce everything to 1 (true) or 0 (false). And that's Boolean Algebra that allowed construction of truth tables now in vogue in court rooms and a specialty known as symbolic logic. Today's computer only know one language, the Boolean, as zeros or ones--the binary digits.

Mbbius Strip:
Geometric transformations have long fascinated man but the simple Mbbius strip teaches us some very good lessons. Take a strip of paper, give it a half-twist and tape the two ends. Now take a red marker and draw a line on one side and a blue marker to draw line on the other side of the strip. You will find that there are no two sides! Splice along the middle, you do not end up with two strips and if you further strip it, the results are mind boggling. What it teaches us is that life is holistic, not reductionistic and we should not consider the parts of things or else we will miss the whole. The brain, the neurons and mind are all one and not components. The two surfaces of the Mbbius strip brilliantly show how they merge into one and tells us how flawed our view is of topography.

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem:
Kurt Godel, a Czech-born theoretician made a remarkable conclusion in 1931 that it is not possible to have a perfect provable theory. Statements like 1 = 1 are accepted without proof but if you need to prove something you end up with more statements than the ones you are trying to prove which makes the system even more complex requiring more statements and so on. Thus all logical systems are incomplete and that's why we will never build a computer smarter than man because it will required programming a set of axioms and we do not know them all. It also emphasizes the power of language to come up with new ways to express new ideas. In the end, we will never understand ourselves, since our mind, like any other system can only be sure of what it knows about itself by relying on what it knows. (Now, who said, you can't play with words.)

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle:
Werner Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel for stating that you can not measure the velocity and position of a particle simultaneously. As you measure velocity, the very process of measurement changes the velocity because there has to be some interaction with outside energy to fix the position. Theoretically, therefore as you gaze at the moon, you change its course! Viola! In more practical terms, the Heisenberg's Principle tells us that no matter how accurately we measure things moving we can never be too sure about it since the process of measurement changes what is measured. (How come then we always figure out how far our loved-ones have run away from us?)