Aligning image and text on top, with minipages

The only solution I've seen is to add \vspace{0pt} at the top of each minipage.

From what i can see, it unfortunately adds a small spacing on top of both minipages, but the both columns are aligned exactly. This is how the genmpage package does it for the T and B options.

The multicol enviroment can also align from the top of the contents instead of the first baseline.

It would be interesting to see if there is a simpler solution, some way to tell minipage to align at the top, completely ignoring baselines.

Here's a nifty way to do it:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[demo]{graphics}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{p{5cm} p{7cm}}
    \vspace{0pt} 
    \includegraphics{test}
    & 
    \vspace{0pt}
    He was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of
    statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He was one of the most
    important advocates for atomic theory at a time when that scientific model was 
    still highly controversial.\\
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

What happens here is that you change the reference point of the image with the \vspace{0pt}, which allows top aligning the the text and the image.

When you want to use \paragraph to style the name, the vertical spacing is still broken. Hopefully somebody will shed some extra light how to fix that (I found that using \vspace{-3ex} before the text seems to do the job).

Disclaimer: I used the idea of Stefan Kottwitz from this blog post, and rephrased his explanation. That's why this is a CW answer.