Documents for "Physics: Biographies":

• Ångström, Anders Jöns 1814-74, Swedish physicist. He was educated at the Univ. of Uppsala and in 1839 became a member of its faculty. He is particularly noted for his study of light, especially spectrum analysis. He...

• Abbe, Ernst 1840-1905, German physicist. He was appointed professor at the Univ. of Jena in 1870 and director of its astronomical and meteorological observatories in 1878. From 1866 he was associated with the...

• Aepinus, Franz Ulrich Theodosius 1724-1802, German physicist. He studied at Jena and Rostock and taught mathematics at Rostock from 1747 to 1755. After a brief stay in Berlin he went to St. Petersburg as professor of physics and...

• Alvarez, Luis Walter 1911-88, American physicist, b. San Francisco, grad. Univ. of Chicago, 1932, Ph.D. 1936. He was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of a large number of residence states...

• Amici, Giovanni Battista 1786-1863, Italian astronomer, mathematician, and naturalist. He became director of the observatory and professor of astronomy at Florence and published papers on various scientific subjects. His...

• Ampère, André Marie 1775-1836, French physicist, mathematician, and natural philosopher. He was professor of mathematics at the École Polytechnique, Paris, and later at the Collège de France. Known for his...

• Anderson, Carl David 1905-91, American physicist, b. New York City, grad. California Institute of Technology (B.S., 1927; Ph.D., 1930). Associated with the institute's physics department from 1930, he became professor...

• Anderson, Philip Warren 1923-, American physicist, b. Indianapolis, Ind., Ph.D. Harvard, 1949. After graduation he worked at Bell Laboratories; in 1975 he became a professor of physics at Princeton Univ. In 1977 he was...

• Appleton, Sir Edward Victor 1892-1965, English physicist, grad. St. John's College, Cambridge. After returning from active service in World War I, he became assistant demonstrator in experimental physics at the Cavendish...

• Arago, Dominique François 1786-1853, French physicist and astronomer. He is noted for his discoveries in magnetism and optics as well as for his astronomical observations. Arago was an ardent supporter of the wave theory...

• Arsonval, Arsène d' 1851-1940, French physicist and physician. He worked under Claude Bernard and under C. E. Brown-Séquard (whom he succeeded in 1897 at the Collège de France) and was professor at the Sorbonne from...

• Avogadro, Amedeo, conte di Quaregna 1776-1856, Italian physicist, b. Turin. He became professor of physics at the Univ. of Turin in 1820. In 1811 he advanced the hypothesis, since known as Avogadro's law, that equal volumes of gases...

• Bardeen, John 1908-91, American physicist, b. Madison, Wis., grad. Univ. of Wisconsin (B.S. 1928, M.S. 1929), Ph.D. Princeton, 1936. He was a research physicist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1945 to...

• Barkla, Charles Glover 1877-1944, English physicist. He was professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh from 1913. For his discovery of the characteristic X rays of elements he received the 1917 Nobel Prize in Physics...

• Basov, Nikolai Gennadiyevich 1922-2001, Russian physicist and educator, b. Usman. He worked with A. M. Prokhorov to develop a technique for amplifying microwave signals in spectroscopic experiments, ultimately leading to the construction of a maser (1952). For this fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics Basov shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Prokhorov and C. H. Townes. Basov taught at the Lebedev Institute of Physics and at the Moscow Institute of Physical Engineers, and also served in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1982-1989). He was the head of the...

• Beccaria, Giambattista 1716-81, Italian physicist. He joined the Piarist order in 1732 and studied in Rome and Narni. After teaching at various Italian universities he became professor of physics at Turin in 1748...

• Becquerel family of French physicists. Antoine César Becquerel, 1788-1878, was a pioneer in electrochemical science. He was professor of physics at the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle from 1838 until his death. Becquerel made a special study of the voltaic cell,...

• Bednorz, Johannes Georg 1950-, German physicist. After earning his doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he began (1982) work at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory with Karl Alex Müller. In 1983 they discovered superconductivity in a ceramic fragment at temperatures much higher than had been previously thought possible. Their discovery made possible applications in power lines,...

• Beeckman, Isaac 1588-1637, Dutch physicist. An early proponent of mathematical reasoning and experimental verification in natural philosophy, he contributed to the modern conception of inertia and free fall and...

• Bethe, Hans Albrecht 1906-2005, American physicist, b. Strassburg, Germany (now Strasbourg, France), educated at Frankfurt and Munich universities. Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he came (1935) to the United States to...

• Bhabha, Homi Jehangir 1909-66, Indian physicist, b. Bombay (now Mumbai). He was educated at the Royal Institute of Science, Bombay, and at Cambridge, England, where he studied cosmic rays and atomic physics. He was the...

• Binnig, Gerd 1947-, German physicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Frankfurt, 1978. At the IBM Research Laboratory in Zürich, Binnig and fellow researcher Heinrich Rohrer built the first scanning tunneling microscope,...

• Biot, Jean Baptiste 1774-1862, French physicist, grad. École Polytechnique (1797). He taught mathematics at Beauvais before becoming (1800) professor of mathematical physics at the Collège de France and later...

• Birkeland, Kristian 1867-1917, Norwegian physicist. From 1898 Birkeland was a professor at the Univ. of Christiania (now Oslo). Noted for his work on magnetics, he aided in establishing magnetic observatories in the...

• Blackett, Patrick Maynard Stuart 1897-1974, English physicist. He was professor of physics at the Univ. of Manchester (1937-53) and in 1953 became professor at the Univ. of London. For his work in improving and extending the use...

• Bloembergen, Nicolaas 1920-, American physicist, b. Dordrecht, the Netherlands. Educated in the Netherlands, he began work at Harvard in 1946, first as a researcher and later as a professor. He shared the 1981 Nobel...

• Bohr, Aage Niels 1922-, Danish physicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Copenhagen, 1954. He worked with his father Niels Bohr (who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922) in the 1940s on the development of the atomic bomb and succeeded (1963) him as director of the Niels Bohr Institute of Theoretical Physics. Bohr and...

• Bohr, Niels Henrik David 1885-1962, Danish physicist, one of the foremost scientists of modern physics. He studied at the Univ. of Copenhagen (Ph.D. 1911) and carried on research on the structure of the atom at Cambridge under Sir James J. Thomson and at Manchester under Lord Ernest Rutherford. In 1916, Bohr became professor of theoretical physics at the Univ. of Copenhagen, and in 1920 he was made...

• Boltzmann, Ludwig 1844-1906, Austrian physicist, b. Vienna, educated at Univ. of Vienna. He began teaching (1869) at Graz Univ. In 1873 he became mathematics professor at Vienna and then physics professor at Graz...

• Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso 1608-79, Italian physiologist, physicist, astronomer, and mathematician; son of a Spanish infantryman. His wide interests led to original contributions in many fields, including anatomy,...

• Born, Max 1882-1970, British physicist, b. Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Göttingen, 1907. He was head of the physics department at the Univ. of Göttingen from 1921 to 1933. When Nazi policies forced him to leave...

• Boscovich, Ruggiero Giuseppe 1711-87, Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He became a Jesuit and taught at Rome, Pavia, and Milan. Later he was director of optics for the French navy. An early advocate of...

• Bouguer, Pierre 1698-1758, French mathematician and hydrographer. He made some of the first photometric measurements, calculating the intensity of the light of the sun as compared with that of the moon, and...

• Bragg, Sir William Henry 1862-1942, English physicist, educated at King William's College, Isle of Man, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served on the faculties of the Univ. of Adelaide in Australia (1886-1908), the...

• Bragg, Sir William Lawrence 1890-1971, English physicist, b. Adelaide, Australia, educated in Australia and at Trinity College, Cambridge; son of W. H. Bragg. He was professor of physics at Victoria Univ., Manchester, from...

• Braun, Karl Ferdinand 1850-1918, German physicist. Braun taught at the Univ. of Marburg, Strasbourg Univ., Karlsruhe's Technische Hochschule, and the Univ. of Tübingen before being named director of Physics institute...

• Brewster, Sir David 1781-1868, Scottish physicist and natural philosopher. He is noted especially for his research into the polarization of light (the invention of the kaleidoscope was one result of his studies). He improved the spectroscope and persuaded the British government to adopt his dioptric system of lighthouse illumination. For 21 years Brewster was principal of the United College of St. Salvator and St. Leonard, in St...

• Bridgman, Percy Williams 1882-1961, American physicist, b. Cambridge, Mass., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1904; Ph.D., 1908). From 1910 he taught at Harvard, as professor from 1919. He won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his...

• Brockhouse, Bertram 1918-2003, Canadian physicist, b. Lethbridge, Alta. Educated at the Univ. of British Columbia and Univ. of Toronto (Ph.D., 1950), he was a research officer (1950-59) and head of the neutron physics...

• Broglie, Louis Victor, duc de 1892-1987, French physicist. In 1928 he became professor in the faculty of sciences, Univ. of Paris. It was known from the earlier quantum theory that light waves sometimes exhibited a particlelike behavior. De Broglie hypothesized (1924) that particles should also exhibit certain wavelike properties, a prediction that led to the development...

• Broglie, Maurice, duc de 1875-1960, French physicist; brother of Louis Victor, duc de Broglie. His contributions include notable work on X rays and in atomic physics, radioactivity, and electricity. He became a member of the...

• Canton, John 1718-72, English physicist. He is known for his research in magnetism and in electricity, especially his experiments in electrostatic induction. Canton was the first in England to verify Benjamin...

• Carnot, Nicolas Léonard Sadi 1796-1832, French physicist, a founder of modern thermodynamics; son of Lazare N. M. Carnot. His famous work on the motive power of heat ( Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu, 1824) is concerned with the relation between heat and mechanical energy. Carnot devised an ideal engine in which a gas is allowed to expand to do work, absorbing heat in the process, and is...

• Cavendish, Henry 1731-1810, English physicist and chemist, b. Nice. He was the son of Lord Charles Cavendish and grandson of the 2d duke of Devonshire. He was a recluse, and most of his writings were published...

• Chadwick, Sir James 1891-1974, English physicist, grad. Manchester Univ., 1908. He worked at Manchester under Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity. He was assistant director of radioactive research in the Cavendish...

• Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan 1910-95, American astrophysicist, b. Lahore, India (now Pakistan). He became a professor at the Univ. of Chicago in 1938 and remained associated with the university until his death. In 1953 he...

• Charles, Jacques Alexandre César 1746-1823, French physicist. He confirmed Benjamin Franklin's electrical experiments, became interested in aeronautics, and was the first to use hydrogen gas in balloons. In this type of balloon,...

• Charpak, Georges 1924-, French physicist, b. Poland. Affiliated with CERN , Charpak won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of several particle detectors that have greatly aided scientific experimentation in particle physics. Of these detectors, the...

• Cherenkov, Pavel Alekseyevich 1904-90, Soviet physicist. He shared with the Soviet physicists I. M. Frank and I. Y. Tamm the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery (1934) of Cherenkov radiation. His research opened the...

• Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich 1756-1827, German physicist. An authority on acoustics, he made studies of the transmission of sound in various gases and of vibrating plates of glass and metal covered with sand, on which were...

• Clausius, Rudolf Julius Emanuel 1822-88, German mathematical physicist. A pioneer in the science of thermodynamics, he introduced the concept of entropy and restated the second law of thermodynamics: heat cannot of itself pass...

• Coblentz, William Weber 1873-1962, American physicist, b. North Lima, Ohio, grad. Case School of Applied Science (B.S., 1900) and Cornell (Ph.D., 1903). From 1905 to 1945 he was physicist with the National Bureau of...

• Cockcroft, Sir John Douglas 1897-1967, English physicist, educated at the Univ. of Manchester and St. John's College, Cambridge. He was a fellow of St. John's College (1928-46) and professor of natural philosophy at Cambridge...

• Compton, Arthur Holly 1892-1962, American physicist, b. Wooster, Ohio, grad. College of Wooster (B.S., 1913), Ph.D. Princeton, 1916. He was professor and head of the department of physics at Washington Univ., St. Louis...

• Compton, Karl Taylor 1887-1954, American physicist, b. Wooster, Ohio, grad. College of Wooster (Ph.B., 1908), Princeton (Ph.D., 1912); brother of A. H. Compton. He taught at Princeton from 1915 to 1930 (as professor...

• Cormack, Allan MacLeod 1924-98, American physicist, b. Johannesburg, South Africa. After studying at the Univ. of Cape Town (B.S. physics, 1944, M.S. crystallography, 1945), Cambridge, and Harvard, Cormack became a...

• Cornu, Marie Alfred 1841-1902, French physicist. From 1867 he was professor at the École polytechnique, Paris. He measured the velocity of light and made important contributions to spectrum analysis, astronomy, and...

• Coulomb, Charles Augustin de 1736-1806, French physicist. In 1789 he retired from his posts as military engineer and as superintendent of waters and fountains and devoted himself to continuing his scientific research. He was...

• Cronin, James Watson 1931-, American nuclear physicist, b. Chicago, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1955. Cronin and co-researcher Val Logsdon Fitch were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by...

• Curie family of French scientists. Pierre Curie, 1859-1906, scientist, and his wife, Marie Sklodowska Curie, 1867-1934, chemist and physicist, b. Warsaw, are known for their work on radioactivity and...

• Darwin, Charles Galton 1887-1962, English physicist and administrator. Educated at Cambridge, he worked under Ernest Rutherford at Manchester, where he collaborated with H. G. J. Moseley in fundamental work on X-ray diffraction by crystals. Following World War I he became a fellow and lecturer at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he and R. H. Fowler developed new methods of...

• Davisson, Clinton Joseph 1881-1958, American physicist, b. Bloomington, Ill. He joined the engineering department of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1917. Davisson worked on thermionics, magnetism, and electron...

• Debye, Peter Joseph Wilhelm 1884-1966, American physicist, b. the Netherlands. He was professor at the universities of Zürich, Utrecht, Göttingen, Leipzig, and Berlin. In 1940 he came to the United States and served as...

• Dehmelt, Hans Georg 1922-, American physicist, b. Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Göttingen, 1950. A professor at the Univ. of Washington in Seattle, Dehmelt worked with Wolfgang Paul from the Univ. of Bonn to develop an ion trap technique, which made possible the detailed study of subatomic particles. For this invention, Dehmelt and Paul shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics...

• Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice 1902-84, English physicist. He was educated at the Univ. of Bristol and St. John's College, Cambridge, and became professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1932. In 1928, Dirac published a version...

• Drude, Paul Karl Ludwig 1863-1906, German physicist. Drude first experimented with the physical determinants of optical constants, measuring the optical constants of a variety of substances to an unprecedented degree of...

• Duane, William 1872-1935, American physicist, b. Philadelphia, grad. Harvard, 1893, Ph.D. Univ. of Berlin, 1897. He taught at the Univ. of Colorado (1898-1907), worked at the Curie radium laboratory in Paris...

• Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie 1861-1916, French physicist and philosopher and historian of science. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure he taught at Lille (1887-1893), Rennes (1893-1894), and Bordeaux (1894-1916)...

• Ehrenfest, Paul 1880-1933, Austrian physicist. In 1904, Ehrenfest received his doctorate in theoretical physics in Vienna and married the Russian mathematician Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanassyewa. Together they wrote...

• Einstein, Albert 1879-1955, American theoretical physicist, known for the formulation of the relativity theory, b. Ulm, Germany. He is recognized as one of the greatest physicists of all time.

• Ewing, Sir James Alfred 1855-1935, Scottish engineer and physicist. As professor at Tokyo (1878-83), Dundee (1883-90), and Cambridge (1890-1903), he helped establish programs in engineering. Ewing was director of naval...

• Faraday, Michael 1791-1867, English scientist. The son of a blacksmith, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder at the age of 14. He had little formal education, but acquired a store of scientific knowledge through...

• Fermi, Enrico 1901-54, American physicist, b. Italy. He studied at Pisa, Göttingen, and Leiden, and taught physics at the universities of Florence and Rome. He contributed to the early theory of beta decay and...

• Ferraris, Galileo 1847-97, Italian physicist and electrical engineer. He is noted for his work on alternating current and for his discovery (1885) of the rotary magnetic field, through which he promoted the...

• Feynman, Richard Phillips 1918-88, American physicist, b. New York City, B.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1939, Ph.D. Princeton, 1942. From 1942 to 1945 he worked on the development of the atomic bomb. He taught...

• Fitch, Val Logsdon 1923-, American nuclear physicist, b. Merriman, Neb., Ph.D. Columbia Univ., 1954. Fitch and co-researcher James Watson Cronin were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by...

• Fitzgerald, George Francis 1851-1901, Irish physicist. Fitzgerald was born in Dublin and studied and taught at Trinity College there. He is best known for suggesting how the ether , by causing the contraction of bodies moving...

• Fizeau, Armand Hippolyte Louis 1819-96, French physicist. The first to measure (1849) the velocity of light in air, he also determined its speed in water. He made valuable discoveries on the polarization of light and the...

• Foucault, Jean Bernard Léon 1819-68, French physicist. Known especially for his research on the speed of light, he determined its velocity in air and found that its speed in water and other media diminished in proportion to...

• Fowler, William Alfred 1911-95, American nuclear astrophysicist, b. Pittsburgh. While a professor at the California Institute of Technology, Fowler studied how chemical elements are formed in nuclear reactions,...

• Franck, James 1882-1964, German physicist. He was professor of physics at Göttingen and at Johns Hopkins (1935-38) and professor of physical chemistry at the Univ. of Chicago from 1938. He specialized in atomic...

• Fresnel, Augustin Jean 1788-1827, French physicist and engineer. He is known for his research on light, especially on conditions governing interference phenomena in polarized light and on double refraction. His work...

• Friedman, Jerome Isaac 1930-, American physicist, b. Chicago, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1956. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Friedman won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard E. Taylor and Henry W. Kendall for a series of experiments (1967-73) that showed that protons and neutrons are not fundamental particles of matter but are composed of smaller particles known as quarks. This evidence allowed...

• Gamow, George 1904-68, Russian-American theoretical physicist and author, b. Odessa. A nuclear physicist, Gamow is better known to the public for his excellent books popularizing abstract physical theories. He...

• Geiger, Johannes Wilhelm (Hans Geiger) , 1882-1945, German physicist. Geiger received a doctorate in physics at Erlangen in 1906, then went to Manchester, where he assisted British chemist Ernest Rutherford. They devised an...

• Gell-Mann, Murray 1929-, American theoretical physicist, b. New York City, grad. Yale 1948, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1951. In 1953, he and the Japanese team of T. Nakano and Kazuhiko Nishijima...

• Gibbs, Josiah Willard 1839-1903, American mathematical physicist, b. New Haven, Conn., grad. Yale, 1858. He studied abroad and was professor of mathematical physics at Yale from 1871. His great contributions to physical...

• Glashow, Sheldon Lee 1932-, American physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Harvard, 1959. He became a professor at the Univ. of California at Berkeley in 1961 before moving to Harvard in 1967. He helped develop important...

• Gray, Stephen 1666-1736, English physicist. Gray, a dyer by trade, cultivated science as a hobby. In 1696 he published an account of a magnifying glass that interested the Royal Society and from then on he...

• Grimaldi, Francesco Maria 1618?-1663, Italian physicist and mathematician. A Jesuit and professor at Bologna, he studied in detail and named the dark areas on the moon. Noted for his discoveries in the field of optics, he...

• Guericke, Otto von 1602-86, German physicist, noted for his study of pneumatics. He carried out his most important researches while burgomaster (1646-81) of Magdeburg. In the course of his attempts to create a...

• Haas, Arthur Erich 1884-1941, American physicist and educator, b. Bohemia. He was professor of physics at Vienna, Leipzig, London, and, from 1936, the Univ. of Notre Dame, South Bend, Ind. After first doing work in...

• Hansen, William Webster 1909-49, U.S. physicist, b. Fresno, Calif. Hansen received his doctorate in physics from Stanford in 1933 and joined the faculty there in 1934. He invented the high-quality cavity resonator on...

• Hawking, Stephen William 1942-, British theoretical physicist, b. Oxford, England, grad. University College, Oxford, 1962, Ph.D. Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1966. In 1962 Hawking was diagnosed as having an incurable muscular...

• Heaviside, Oliver 1850-1925, English physicist. He did valuable work in telephony and in the theory of electrical conduction in cables and other areas of electric theory. He suggested (1902) the existence of a...

• Heisenberg, Werner 1901-76, German physicist. One of the founders of the quantum theory, he is best known for his uncertainty principle , or indeterminacy principle, which states that it is impossible to determine with arbitrarily high accuracy both the position and momentum (essentially velocity) of a subatomic particle like the...

• Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von 1821-94, German scientist. Although known especially as a physicist and biologist, he was also a physician, mathematician, philosopher, and lecturer on popular science. He extended the application...

• Henry, Joseph 1797-1878, American physicist, b. Albany, N.Y., educated at Albany Academy. He taught (1826-32) mathematics and natural philosophy at Albany Academy and was professor of natural philosophy...

• Hertz, Gustav 1887-1975, German physicist. He is noted for his work on the atom, and he shared with James Franck the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics for research (1914) on the effects of the impact of electrons on...

• Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf 1857-94, German physicist. He confirmed J. C. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and in the course of experiments (1886-89) produced and studied electromagnetic waves (known also as hertzian waves,...

• Herzberg, Gerhard 1904-99, Canadian physicist, b. Hamburg, Germany. He studied at Darmstadt, Göttingen, and Bristol, England, receiving a doctorate in engineering physics from Darmstadt Technical Institute in 1928...

• Hess, Victor Francis 1883-1964, American physicist, b. Austria, Ph.D. Univ. of Graz, 1906. After teaching at the universities of Graz and Innsbruck, he came to the United States in 1938 and was later naturalized. He...

• Hooke, Robert 1635-1703, English physicist, mathematician, and inventor. He became curator of experiments for the Royal Society (1662), professor of geometry at Gresham College (1665), and city surveyor of...

• Huygens, Christiaan 1629-95, Dutch mathematician and physicist; son of Constantijn Huygens. He improved telescopic lenses and discovered (1655) a satellite of Saturn and studied the rings of Saturn. His findings were...

• Joffe, Abram 1880-1960, Soviet scientist, b. Ukraine, grad. St. Petersburg Technological Institute, 1902. From 1902 to 1906 he worked in Munich as an assistant to W. C. Roentgen. In 1932, Joffe became director...

• Joliot-Curie French scientists who were husband and wife. Frédéric Joliot-Curie , 1900-1958, formerly Frédéric Joliot, and Irène Joliot-Curie , 1897-1956, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, were married in 1926. Both were assistants at the Radium Institute in Paris, of which Irène, succeeding her mother, was director in 1932. Together...

• Joule, James Prescott 1818-89, English physicist. His scientific researches began in his youth when he invented an electromagnetic engine. Joule made valuable contributions to the fields of heat, electricity, and...

• Kamerlingh Onnes, Heike 1853-1926, Dutch physicist. He was, from 1882, professor of physics at the Univ. of Leiden. He made important studies of the properties of helium and, in attempting to solidify it, produced a...

• Kapitza, Peter 1894-1984, Russian physicist, educated at the polytechnic institute of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and at Cambridge. He developed equipment (for a laboratory at Cambridge) capable of producing...

• Karle, Jerome 1918-, American physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Univ. of Michigan, 1943. He worked on the Manhattan Project before beginning a career at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. There, with Herbert...

• Kayser, Heinrich Gustav Johannes 1853-1940, German physicist. He was professor at Bonn from 1894 to 1920. He is known for his work in sound and, in association with C. D. T. Runge, in spectrum analysis. He wrote a handbook of spectroscopy...

• Kelvin, William Thomson, 1st Baron 1824-1907, British mathematician and physicist, b. Belfast. He was professor of natural philosophy at the Univ. of Glasgow (1846-99). He is known especially for his work on heat and electricity. In thermodynamics his work of coordinating the theories of heat held by various leading scientists of his time established firmly the law of the conservation of energy as proposed by Joule. He introduced the Kelvin temperature scale , or absolute scale, of temperature. He also discovered the Thomson effect in thermoelectricity. The importance of the discoveries and improvements that he made in connection with the transmission of messages by submarine cables led to his establishment as a leading authority in this field...

• Kendall, Henry Way 1926-99, American physicist. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kendall won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor for a series of experiments...

• Kirchhoff, Gustav Robert 1824-87, German physicist. He served as professor of physics at the universities of Breslau (1850-54), Heidelberg (1854-74), and Berlin (from 1875). He is known especially for his work with the spectroscope...

• Lamont, Johann von 1805-79, Scottish-German astronomer and magnetician, b. Scotland. In 1817 he went to Ratisbon to study at the seminary. He remained in Germany to work in the new observatory at Bogenhausen. Lamont...

• Landau, Lev Davidovich 1908-68, Soviet physicist, b. Baku, Azerbaijan. A child prodigy in mathematics, he entered Baku Univ. at 14; at 21 he received a doctorate from the Univ. of Leningrad. In 1934 he worked with Niels...

• Langevin, Paul 1872-1946, French physicist and chemist. He was professor of experimental physics at the Collège de France from 1909 and at the École municipale de Physique et de Chimie, Paris, from 1904...

• Laue, Max von 1879-1960, German physicist, studied under Max Planck. From 1919 he was professor of theoretical physics at the Univ. of Berlin. He worked out a method for measuring X-ray wavelengths, in which a...

• Lawrence, Ernest Orlando 1901-58, American physicist, b. Canton, S. Dak., grad. Univ. of South Dakota, 1922, Ph.D. Yale, 1925. Affiliated with the Univ. of California from 1928 onward, he became a professor in 1930 and...

• Lebedev, Pyotr Nikolaevich 1866-1912, Russian physicist. The most noted Russian physicist of his time, he studied at Strasbourg and Berlin and was professor at Moscow Univ. He was the first to measure the pressure of light,...

• Lederman, Leon Max 1922-, American physicist, Ph.D. Columbia Univ., 1951. He was a professor at Columbia until he became director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. (1979-89). In the early...

• Lee, Tsung-Dao 1926-, American physicist, b. China, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1950. He was a member (1951-53) of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; and professor of theoretical physics there (1960-63)...

• Lenard, Philipp Eduard Anton 1862-1947, German physicist, b. Bratislava. After serving as professor at the universities of Kiel (1898-1907) and Heidelberg (1896-98, 1907-31), he headed the Philipp Lenard Institute at...

• Lindemann, Frederick Alexander (Viscount Cherwell) , 1886-1957, British physicist and government official. He studied with W. H. Nernst and developed with him the Nernst-Lindemann theory of specific heat. His achievements also include the Lindemann...

• Lodge, Sir Oliver Joseph 1851-1940, English physicist, grad. University College, London (B.S., 1875; D.Sc., 1877). He made valuable contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy and conducted research on...

• Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon 1853-1928, Dutch physicist, a pioneer in formulating the relations between electricity, magnetism, and light. He was one of the first to postulate the existence of electrons. On this he based his...

• Müller, Karl Alexander 1927-, Swiss physicist, Ph.D. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 1958. In 1983, Müller and co-researcher Johannes Georg Bednorz discovered superconductivity in a ceramic fragment at temperatures much higher than had been previously thought possible. Their discovery made possible applications in power lines, generators, and...

• Mach, Ernst 1838-1916, Austrian physicist and philosopher, b. Moravia. He taught (1864-67) mathematics at Graz and later, until his retirement in 1901, was professor of physics at Prague and Vienna. Mach, one...

• Magnus, Heinrich Gustav 1802-70, German chemist, physicist, and educator. In 1831 he became lecturer and in 1834 professor of physics and technology at the Univ. of Berlin. A brilliant and highly popular teacher, Magnus...

• Malus, Étienne Louis 1775-1812, French artillery officer and physicist. In 1810 he stated his discovery of the polarization of light by reflection and published a memoir of his theory of double refraction.

• Marconi, Guglielmo, Marchese 1874-1937, Italian physicist, celebrated for his development of wireless telegraphy (see radio ). In the field of electromagnetic waves he correlated and improved inventions of H. R. Hertz , Édouard Branly, and other scientists and invented a practical antenna. Experimenting with homemade apparatus, in 1895 he sent long-wave signals over a distance of more than a mile. He patented his...

• Mariotte, Edme 1620?-1684, French physicist. His De la nature de l'air (1676) includes a statement of Boyle's law (see gas laws ), which he discovered independently and which is sometimes called Mariotte's law in France. One of the founders of experimental physics, Mariotte investigated a wide range of phenomena, including...

• Maxwell, James Clerk 1831-79, great Scottish physicist. After a brilliant career at Edinburgh and Cambridge, where he won early recognition with mathematical papers, he was professor at Marischal College, Aberdeen...

• Mayer, Julius Robert von 1814-78, German physician and physicist, studied medicine at Tübingen, Munich, and Paris. From a consideration of the generation of animal heat, he was led to determine the general relationship...

• McLennan, Sir John Cunningham 1867-1935, Canadian physicist, grad. Univ. of Toronto (B.A., 1892; Ph.D., 1900). He taught at the Univ. of Toronto from 1892 to 1932, was professor of physics from 1907, and was dean of the school...

• McMillan, Edwin Mattison 1907-91, American physicist, b. Redondo Beach, Calif., grad. California Institute of Technology, 1928, Ph.D. Princeton, 1932. On the faculty of the Univ. of California from 1932, he was appointed...

• Meitner, Lise 1878-1968, Austrian-Swedish physicist and mathematician. She was professor at the Univ. of Berlin (1926-33). A refugee from Germany after 1938, she became associated with the Univ. of Stockholm...

• Melloni, Macedonio 1798-1854, Italian physicist. Known especially for his investigations of heat, he pointed out the similarity of heat to light, showing that it also is refracted, reflected, and polarized.

• Michelson, Albert Abraham 1852-1931, American physicist, b. Strelno, Prussia, grad. Annapolis, 1873, and studied at Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris. He was professor of physics at Clark Univ. (1889-92) and later was head of...

• Millikan, Robert Andrews 1868-1953, American physicist and educator, b. Morrison, Ill., grad. Oberlin College, 1891, Ph.D. Columbia, 1895, studied in Germany. He taught (1896-1921) physics at the Univ. of Chicago and from...

• Moseley, Henry Gwyn Jeffreys 1887-1915, English physicist, grad. Trinity College, Oxford, 1910. He began his research under Ernest Rutherford while serving as lecturer at the Univ. of Manchester and soon devoted himself...

• Mott, Sir Nevill 1905-96, British physicist. A professor at the Univ. of Bristol (1933-54) and the Univ. of Cambridge (1954-71), Mott won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977 for a lifetime of research into the...

• Mottelson, Benjamin Roy 1926-, Danish physicist, b. Chicago, Ph.D. Harvard, 1950. Raised and educated in the United States, he moved to Denmark, where he began work as a nuclear physicist. Mottelson and colleague Aage Bohr...

• Newton, Sir Isaac 1642-1727, English mathematician and natural philosopher (physicist), who is considered by many the greatest scientist that ever lived.

• Nollet, Jean Antoine 1700-1770, French clergyman, experimental physicist, and leading member of the Paris Academy of Science. He constructed one of the first electrometers and developed a theory of electrical...

• Oersted, Hans Christian 1777-1851, Danish physicist and chemist. He was professor at Copenhagen from 1806. His discovery (1819) that a magnetic needle is deflected at right angles to a conductor carrying an electric...

• Ohm, Georg Simon 1787-1854, German physicist. He was professor at Munich from 1852. His study of electric current led to his formulation of the law now known as Ohm's law. The unit of electrical resistance (see ohm...

• Onnes, Heike Kamerlingh see Kamerlingh Onnes, Heike.

• Oppenheimer, J. Robert 1904-67, American physicist, b. New York City, grad. Harvard (B.A., 1925), Ph.D. Univ. of Göttingen, 1927. He taught at the Univ. of California and the California Institute of Technology from 1929...

• Papin, Denis 1647-1712?, French physicist and inventor. He was an assistant of Christian Huygens and of Robert Boyle and was professor of mathematics at the Univ. of Marburg (1687-96). He invented (1679) a...

• Paul, Wolfgang 1913-93, German physicist, Ph.D. Technical Univ., Berlin, 1939. A professor at the Univ. of Bonn since 1952, Paul worked with Hans Dehmelt to develop an ion trap technique (known as the Paul trap), which made possible the detailed study of subatomic particles. For this invention, Dehmelt and Paul shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics...

• Pauli, Wolfgang 1900-1958, Austro-American physicist, b. Vienna. He studied first with A. Sommerfeld at Munich and then with Niels Bohr at Copenhagen. After lecturing (1923-28) at the Univ. of Hamburg, Pauli was...

• Penzias, Arno Allan 1933-, German-American physicist, b. Munich, Germany, Ph.D. Columbia Univ., 1962. He fled Nazi Germany with his family and after finishing school began work at Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1964...

• Peregrinus, Petrus (Peter the Pilgrim) , c.1220-?, medieval scholar and soldier. The tutor of Roger Bacon, he wrote the first important study of magnetism, Epistola de Magnete, in which he described simple magnetic attraction and repulsion. He improved the compass by placing the lodestone on a pivot and surrounding it with a graduated directional scale. His ideas were...

• Perrin, Jean Baptiste 1870-1942, French physicist. From 1910 to 1940 he was professor at the Univ. of Paris, and in 1941 he came to the United States. Perrin specialized in the Brownian movement of particles. For his...

• Planck, Max 1858-1947, German physicist. Seeking to explain the experimental spectrum (distribution of electromagnetic energy according to wavelength) of black body radiation, he introduced the hypothesis (1900) that oscillating atoms absorb and emit energy only in discrete bundles (called quanta) instead of continuously, as assumed in classical physics. The...

• Poggendorff, Johann Christian 1796-1877, German physicist and chemist. He founded (1824) and edited the important Annalen der Physik und Chemie and edited the first two volumes (1863) of Biographisch-literarisches Handwörterbuch....

• Poynting, John Henry 1852-1914, British physicist. He was educated at Liverpool and Cambridge and was professor of physics at the Univ. of Birmingham for most of his life. He is best known for the Poynting vector,...

• Prokhorov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich 1916-2002, Russian physicist, b. Atherton, Queensland, Australia. In 1923 he was taken to the Soviet Union by his parents, who had emigrated to Australia to escape the czarist regime. In 1947 he...

• Pupin, Michael Idvorsky 1858-1935, American physicist and inventor, b. Idvor, Hungary (now in Serbia), grad. Columbia (B.A., 1883). He came to the United States in 1874 and from 1889 was associated with Columbia (as...

• Réaumur, René Antoine Ferchault de 1683-1757, French physicist and naturalist. He invented an alcohol thermometer (1731) and the Réaumur temperature scale, in which the freezing point of water is 0° and the boiling point 80°. In...

• Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad see Roentgen.

• Rabi, Isidor Isaac 1898-1988, American physicist, b. Austria, grad. Cornell Univ., 1919, Ph.D. Columbia, 1927. A teacher at Columbia from 1929, he became professor of physics in 1937. He is known for his work in...

• Rainwater, James 1917-86, American physicist, Ph.D. Columbia, 1946. After working on the Manhattan Project as a student during World War II, he became a professor of physics at Columbia in 1952. His theory that not...

• Raman, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata 1888-1970, Indian physicist. He was professor of physics at Calcutta Univ. from 1917 to 1933. In Bangalore he directed the Indian Institute of Science and, from 1946, the Raman Institute. For his...

• Ramsey, Norman Foster 1915-, American physicist, b. Washington, D.C., Ph.D. Columbia Univ., 1940. A physics professor at Harvard after 1950, Ramsey also held several posts with such government and international agencies...

• Rayleigh, John William Strutt, 3d Baron 1842-1919, English physicist. He was professor at Cambridge (1879-84) and at the Royal Institution (1887-1905), and chancellor of Cambridge from 1908. He won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics for...

• Richter, Burton 1931-, American physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956. A professor at Stanford Univ., Richter built a particle accelerator (Stanford Positron-Electron...

• Ritz, Walter 1878-1909, Swiss physicist. He taught at the universities of Zürich and Göttingen. Ritz's combination principle, confirmed by later research, stated that the frequencies of spectral lines could be...

• Roentgen, Wilhelm Conrad 1845-1923, German physicist. His notable research in many fields of physics, especially thermology, mechanics, and electricity, has been overshadowed by his discovery (1895) of a short-wave ray,...

• Rohrer, Heinrich 1933-, Swiss physicist, Ph.D. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 1963. At the IBM Research Laboratory in Zürich, Rohrer and fellow researcher Gerd Binnig built the first scanning tunneling...