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Aage Bohr
Aage Niels Bohr (Danish: [ˈɔːʊ̯ ˌnels ˈboɐ̯ˀ] (
listen); June 19, 1922 – September 9, 2009) was a Danish nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate, and the son of the famous physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr.
Bohr was born in Copenhagen in 1922, and grew up surrounded by physicists such as Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg, who were working with his father at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) at the University of Copenhagen.
In 1940, shortly after the German occupation of Denmark, Bohr began his physics degree at the University of Copenhagen. In October 1943, shortly before he was to be arrested by the German police, Niels Bohr escaped to Sweden with his family, later travelling to London and on to work on the Manhattan Project. During this time, Aage Bohr travelled with his father, acting as his assistant and secretary.
The Bohrs returned to Denmark in 1945, and Aage returned to University, graduating with a master's degree in 1946, with a thesis concerned with some aspects of atomic stopping problems. Following graduation, he became an associate at the Niels Bohr Institute.
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Abdus Salam
Mohammad Abdus Salam,NI, SPk (Urdu: محمد عبد السلام, pronounced English pronunciation: /əbd̪ʊs səlɑm/, (29 January 1926 – 21 November 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the electroweak unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces. Salam, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel prize for this discovery. Salam holds the distinction of being the first Pakistani and the first Muslim Nobel Laureate to receive the prize in the sciences.
Salam was a science advisor to the Government of Pakistan from 1960 till 1974, a position from which he played a major and influential role in Pakistan's science infrastructure. Salam was responsible for not only major development and contribution in theoretical and particle physics, but as well as promoting scientific research at maximum level in his country. Salam was the founding director of Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), and responsible for the establishment of the Theoretical Physics Group (TPG) in Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). As Science Advisor, Salam played an integral role in Pakistan's development of peaceful use of nuclear energy, and directed the research on development of atomic bomb project of Pakistan in 1972; for this, he is viewed as the "scientific father" of this programme in the views of the scientists who researched under his scientific umbrella. In 1974, Salam left Pakistan in protest when Pakistan Parliament controversially passed a parliamentary bill declaring Ahmadiyya Muslim Community as Non-Muslims. Even after his death, Salam remained one of the most influential scientists in his country. In 1998, following the country's nuclear tests, the Government of Pakistan issued a commemorative stamp, as a part of "Scientists of Pakistan", to honour the services of Salam.
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Adam Riess
Adam Guy Riess (born 16 December 1969) is an American astrophysicist at The Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute and is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Riess was born in Washington, D.C., one of three children in a Jewish family. He grew up in Warren, New Jersey, where his father (a Naval engineer Michael Riess) owned a frozen-foods distribution company Bistro International and his mother (Doris Riess) worked as a clinical psychologist. Michael Riess (1931–2007) immigrated to the United States with his parents (journalist, war correspondent and author Curt Riess and Ilse Posnansky) from Germany on the ship SS Europa (1928) in 1936. Adam Riess has two sisters— Dr. Gail Michele Saltz, a psychiatrist, and Holly Hagerman, an artist.
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Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (
/ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.
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Albert Fert
Albert (Bert) Fert (born 7 March 1938 in Carcassonne, Aude) is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. He is currently an emeritus professor at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay and scientific director of a joint laboratory ('Unité mixte de recherche') between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Scientific Research Centre) and Thales Group. Also, he is an Adjunct professor of physics at Michigan State University. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.
Fert graduated in 1962 from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He received his master's degree in 1963 at the University of Paris, and earned his PhD in 1970 at the Université Paris-Sud.
In 1988 Fert discovered the Giant magnetoresistance effect (GMR) in multilayers of iron and chromium which is recognized as the birth of spintronics; GMR was simultaneously and independently discovered by Peter Grünberg from the Jülich Research Centre. Since 1988, Albert Fert has made contributions to the field of spintronics.
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Alexander Prokhorov
Alexander Mikhaylovich Prokhorov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Миха́йлович Про́хоров) (11 July 1916 – 8 January 2002) was a Soviet physicist known for his pioneering research on lasers and masers for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Charles Hard Townes and Nikolay Basov.
Prokhorov was born in 1916 in Atherton, Queensland, to a family of Russian revolutionaries who emigrated from Russia to escape repression by the tsarist government. In 1923, after the October Revolution, they returned to Russia. In 1934, Prokhorov entered the Saint Petersburg State University to study physics. He graduated with honors in 1939 and moved to Moscow to work at the Lebedev Physical Institute, in the oscillations laboratory headed by academician N. D. Papaleksi. His research there was devoted to propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere. At the onset of World War II in the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he joined the Red Army. During World War II, Prokhorov fought in the infantry, was wounded twice in battles, and was awarded three medals, including the Medal For Courage in 1946. He was demobilized in 1944 and returned to the Lebedev Institute where in 1946 defended his Ph.D. thesis on "Theory of Stabilization of Frequency of a Tube Oscillator in the Theory of a Small Parameter".
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Alfred Kastler
Alfred Kastler (May 3, 1902 – January 7, 1984) was a French physicist, and Nobel Prize laureate.
Kastler was born in Guebwiller (Alsace) and later attended the Lycée Bartholdi in Colmar, Alsace, and École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1921. After his studies, in 1926 he began teaching physics at the Lycée of Mulhouse, and then taught at the University of Bordeaux, where he was a university professor until 1941. Georges Bruhat asked him to come back to the École Normale Supérieure, where he finally obtained a chair in 1952.
Collaborating with Jean Brossel, he researched quantum mechanics, the interaction between light and atoms, and spectroscopy. Kastler, working on combination of optical resonance and magnetic resonance, developed the technique of "optical pumping". Those works led to the completion of the theory of lasers and masers.
He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1966 "for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms".
He was president of the board of the Institut d'optique théorique et appliquée.
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Andre Geim
Sir Andre Konstantin Geim, FRS (Russian: Андрей Константинович Гейм; born 21 October 1958) is a Russian-born British-Dutch physicist working at the University of Manchester. Geim was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Konstantin Novoselov for his work on graphene. He is the Langworthy Professor and director of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology at the University of Manchester.
Andre Geim was born to Konstantin Alekseyevich Geim and Nina Nikolayevna Bayer on October 21, 1958. Both his parents were Russian German engineers. Geim has stated, "My mother's grandmother was Jewish. I suffered from anti-Semitism in Russia because my name sounds Jewish". Geim has one brother, Vladislav. In 1965, the family moved to Nalchik, where he studied at an English-language high school. After graduation, he applied to the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He took the entrance exams twice, but was not accepted. He then applied to the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), where he was accepted. He said the students had to work extremely hard: "The pressure to work and to study was so intense that it was not a rare thing for people to break and leave, and some of them ended up with everything from schizophrenia to depression to suicide." He received an MSc degree in 1982, and in 1987 obtained a PhD degree in metal physics from the Institute of Solid State Physics (ISSP) at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) in Chernogolovka. He said that at the time he would not have chosen to study solid-state physics, preferring particle physics or astrophysics, but is now happy with his choice.
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Antony Hewish
Antony Hewish FRS (born Fowey, Cornwall, 11 May 1924) is a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 (together with fellow radio-astronomer Martin Ryle) for his work on the development of radio aperture synthesis and its role in the discovery of pulsars. He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969.
He attended King's College, Taunton. His undergraduate degree at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was interrupted by war service at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and at the Telecommunications Research Establishment where he worked with Martin Ryle. Returning to Cambridge in 1946, Hewish completed his degree and immediately joined Ryle's research team at the Cavendish Laboratory, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1952. Hewish made both practical and theoretical advances in the observation and exploitation of the apparent scintillations of radio sources due to their radiation impinging upon plasma. This led him to propose, and secure funding for, the construction of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, a large array radio telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO), Cambridge in order to conduct a high time-resolution radio survey of interplanetary scintillation.
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Arno Allan Penzias
Arno Allan Penzias (born 26 April 1933) is an American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.
Penzias was born in Munich, Germany. At age six he was among the Jewish children evacuated to Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation. Some time later, his parents also fled Nazi Germany for the U.S., and the family settled in the Garment District of New York City in 1940. In 1946, Penzias became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1951 and received a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1954. From Columbia University, he received his Master's degree in 1958 and his Ph.D. in 1962.
He went on to work at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where, with Robert Woodrow Wilson, he worked on ultra-sensitive cryogenic microwave receivers, intended for radio astronomy observations. In 1964, on building their most sensitive antenna/receiver system, the pair encountered radio noise which they could not explain. It was far less energetic than the radiation given off by the Milky Way, and it was isotropic, so they assumed their instrument was subject to interference by terrestrial sources. They tried, and then rejected, the hypothesis that the radio noise emanated from New York City. An examination of the microwave horn antenna showed it was full of pigeon droppings (which Penzias described as "white dielectric material"). After the pair removed the guano buildup, and the pigeons were shot (each physicist says the other ordered the deed), the noise remained. Having rejected all sources of interference, the pair published a paper announcing their findings. This was later identified by Robert Dicke as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the radio remnant of the Big Bang. This allowed astronomers to confirm the Big Bang, and to correct many of their previous assumptions about it.
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Arthur Compton
Arthur Holly Compton (September 10, 1892 – March 15, 1962) was an American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his discovery of the Compton effect. He served as Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1945 to 1953.
Arthur Compton was born in Wooster, Ohio in 1892 to Elias and Otelia Compton. They were an academic family. His father Elias was dean of Wooster University (later The College of Wooster), which Arthur attended, and also became a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. His eldest brother Karl also attended Wooster University, became a physicist, and was later president of MIT. His second brother Wilson Martindale Compton also attended Wooster University and became a diplomat and president of the State College of Washington, later Washington State University. All three brothers earned their Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University.
Around 1913, Arthur Compton devised a demonstration method for the Earth's rotation. In 1918, he began studying X-ray scattering. In 1922, while on faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, Compton found that X-ray wavelengths increase due to scattering of the radiant energy by "free electrons". The scattered quanta have less energy than the quanta of the original ray. This discovery, known as the "Compton effect," or "Compton scattering" demonstrates the "particle" concept of electromagnetic radiation and earned Compton the Nobel Prize in physics in 1927. Compton developed the method for observing at the same instant individual scattered X-ray photons and the recoil electrons (developed with Alfred W. Simon). In Germany, Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger independently developed a similar method.
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Ben Roy Mottelson
Benjamin Roy Mottelson (born July 9, 1926) is an American-born Danish nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei.
Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from Lyons Township High School in LaGrange, Illinois. He received a Bachelor's degree from Purdue University in 1947, and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Harvard University in 1950.
He moved to Institute for Theoretical Physics (later the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen on the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard, and remained in Denmark, becoming a professor at the newly formed Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) in 1957. In 1971 he became a naturalized Danish citizen.
In 1950–51, James Rainwater and Aage Bohr had developed models of the atomic nucleus which began to take into account the behaviour of the individual nucleons. These models, which moved beyond the simpler liquid drop treatment of the nucleus as having effectively no internal structure, were the first models which could explain a number of nuclear properties, including the non-spherical distribution of charge in certain nuclei. Mottelson worked with Aage Bohr to compare the theoretical models with experimental data. In three papers which were published in 1952–53, Bohr and Mottelson demonstrated close agreement between theory and experiment, for example showing that the energy levels of certain nuclei could be described by a rotation spectrum. This work stimulated new theoretical and experimental studies.
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Bertram Brockhouse
Bertram Neville Brockhouse, CC FRSC (July 15, 1918 – October 13, 2003) was a Canadian physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1994, shared with Clifford Shull) "for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter", in particular "for the development of neutron spectroscopy".
Brockhouse was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, and was a graduate of the University of British Columbia (BA, 1947) and the University of Toronto (MA, 1948; Ph.D, 1950).
From 1950 to 1962, Brockhouse carried out research at Atomic Energy of Canada's Chalk River Nuclear Laboratory.
In 1962, he became professor at McMaster University in Canada, where he remained until his retirement in 1984.
He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics with American Clifford Shull of MIT for developing neutron scattering techniques for studying condensed matter.
In 1982, Brockhouse was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion in 1995.
In October 2005, as part of the 75th anniversary of McMaster University's establishment in Hamilton, Ontario, a street on the University campus (University Avenue) was renamed to Brockhouse Way in honour of Brockhouse. The town of Deep River, Ontario has also named a street in his honour.
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Brian Schmidt
Brian P. Schmidt FRS (born February 24, 1967) is a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at The Australian National University Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He currently holds an Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship and was elected to the Royal Society in 2012. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Schmidt, an only child, was born on February 24, 1967, in Missoula, Montana, where his father Dana C. Schmidt was a fisheries biologist. When he was 13, his family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska.
Schmidt attended Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska, and graduated in 1985. He has said that he wanted to be a meteorologist "since I was about five-years-old" but "... I did some work at the USA National Weather Service up in Anchorage and didn't enjoy it very much. It was less scientific, not as exciting as I thought it would be—there was a lot of routine. But I guess I was just a little naive about what being a meteorologist meant." His decision to study astronomy, which he had seen as "a minor pastime", was made just before he enrolled at university. He earned his BS (Physics) and BS (Astronomy) from the University of Arizona in 1989. He received his MA (1992) and then PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Schmidt's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant.
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Burton Richter
Burton Richter (born March 22, 1931) is a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) team led by Samuel Ting. This discovery was part of the so-called November Revolution of particle physics. He was the SLAC director from 1984 to 1999.
A native of New York City, Richter was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn and was raised in the Queens neighborhood of Far Rockaway. He graduated from Far Rockaway High School, a school that also produced fellow laureates Baruch Samuel Blumberg and Richard Feynman. He attended Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, then continued on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1952 and his PhD in 1956. He was director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 1984 to 1999.
As a professor at Stanford University, Richter built a particle accelerator called SPEAR (Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring) with the help of David Ritson and the support of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. With it he led a team that discovered a new subatomic particle he called a ψ (psi). This discovery was also made by the team led by Samuel Ting at Brookhaven National Laboratory, but he called the particle J. The particle thus became known as the J/ψ meson. Richter and Ting were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.
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Carl David Anderson
Carl David Anderson (3 September 1905 – 11 January 1991) was an American physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the positron in 1932, an achievement for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics, and of the muon in 1936.
Anderson was born in New York City, the son of Swedish immigrants. He studied physics and engineering at Caltech (B.S., 1927; Ph.D., 1930). Under the supervision of Robert A. Millikan, he began investigations into cosmic rays during the course of which he encountered unexpected particle tracks in his cloud chamber photographs that he correctly interpreted as having been created by a particle with the same mass as the electron, but with opposite electrical charge. This discovery, announced in 1932 and later confirmed by others, validated Paul Dirac's theoretical prediction of the existence of the positron. Anderson obtained the first direct proof that positrons existed by shooting gamma rays produced by the natural radioactive nuclide ThC'' (208Tl) into other materials, resulting in creation of positron-electron pairs. For this work, Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1936 with Victor Hess.
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Carl Wieman
Carl Edwin Wieman (born March 26, 1951) is an American physicist at the University of British Columbia and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the production, in 1995 with Eric Allin Cornell, of the first true Bose–Einstein condensate.
Wieman was born in Corvallis, Oregon in the United States and graduated from Corvallis High School. Wieman earned his B.S. in 1973 from MIT and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1977; he was also awarded a Doctor of Science, honoris causa from the University of Chicago in 1997. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1998. In 2001, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Eric Allin Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle for fundamental studies of the Bose-Einstein condensate. In 2004, he was named United States Professor of the Year among all doctoral and research universities.
Wieman joined the University of British Columbia on 1 January 2007 and is heading a well-endowed science education initiative there; he retains a twenty percent appointment at the University of Colorado at Boulder to head the science education project he founded in Colorado.
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Carlo Rubbia
Carlo Rubbia Knight Grand Cross (born on 31 March 1934) is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN.
Carlo Rubbia studied at Scuola Normale in Pisa and graduated doing cosmic ray experiments at Pisa University in 1959. He then went to the United States where he spent about one and a half years at Columbia University performing experiments on the decay and the nuclear capture of muons. This was the first of a long series of experiments that Rubbia has performed in the field of weak interactions and which culminated in the Nobel Prize-winning work at CERN. He received his PhD in physics from Columbia in 1959.
In 1960 he moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded CERN, where he worked on experiments on the structure of weak interactions. CERN had just commissioned a new type of accelerator, the Intersecting Storage Rings, using counter-rotating beams of protons colliding against each other. Rubbia and his collaborators conducted experiments there, again studying the weak force. The main results in this field were the observation of the structure in the elastic scattering process and the first observation of the charmed baryons. These experiments were crucial in order to perfect the techniques needed later for the discovery of more exotic particles in a different type of particle collider.
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Charles Hard Townes
Charles Hard Townes (born July 28, 1915) is an American Nobel Prize-winning physicist and educator. Townes is known for his work on the theory and application of the maser, on which he got the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics connected with both maser and laser devices. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. The Japanese FM Towns computer and game console is named in his honour.
Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina on July 28, 1915, the son of Henry Keith Townes, an attorney, and Ellen (Hard) Townes. He attended the Greenville public schools and then Furman University in Greenville, where he completed the requirements for the Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and the Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Languages, graduating summa cum laude in 1935, at the age of 19. Physics had fascinated him since his first course in the subject during his sophomore year in college because of its "beautifully logical structure". He was also interested in natural history while at Furman, serving as curator of the museum, and working during the summers as collector for Furman's biology camp. In addition, he was busy with other activities, including the swimming team, the college newspaper and the football band.
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Chen Ning Yang
Chen-Ning Franklin Yang (simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng) (born October 1, 1922) is a Chinese-American physicist who works on statistical mechanics and particle physics. He and Tsung-dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel prize in physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction. Yang became a United States citizen in 1964.
Yang was born in Hefei, Anhui, China; his father Yang Ko-Chuen (Chinese: 楊武之; pinyin: Yáng Wǔzhī) (1896–1973) was a mathematician and his mother Luo Meng-hua (羅孟華) was a housewife. Yang attended elementary and high school in Beijing, and in the autumn of 1937 his family moved to Hefei after the Japanese invaded China. In 1938 they moved to Kunming, Yunnan, where the National Southwestern Associated University was located. In the same year, as a second year student, Yang passed the entrance examination and studied at the National Southwestern Associated University. He received his bachelor's degree in 1942, the thesis being about the application of group theory to molecular spectra, under the supervision of Wu Ta-you (吴大猷) (1907–2000). He continued to study graduate courses there for two years under the supervision of Wang Chu-hsi (王竹溪) (1911–1983), working on statistical mechanics. In 1944 he received his master's degree was awarded a scholarship known as the Boxer Indemnity (Chinese: 庚子賠款; pinyin: Gēngzǐ péikuǎn), a scholarship set up by the United States government using the funds raised from the money China was forced to pay out following the Boxer Rebellion. He was delayed for one year, during which time he taught in a middle school as a teacher and studied field theory.
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Clifford Shull
Clifford Glenwood Shull (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 23, 1915 – March 31, 2001) was a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist.
He attended Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, received BS from Carnegie Institute of Technology and PhD from New York University. He worked for The Texas Company at Beacon, New York during the war time, followed by a position in the Clinton Laboratory (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), and finally joined MIT in 1955, and retired in 1986.
Clifford G. Shull was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics with Canadian Bertram Brockhouse. This is the longest ever time after the original work was completed that the Nobel Prize was awarded. The two won the prize for the development of the neutron scattering technique. He also conducted research on condensed matter. Professor Shull's prize was awarded for his pioneering work in neutron scattering, a technique that reveals where atoms are within a material like ricocheting bullets reveal where obstacles are in the dark.
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Clinton Davisson
Clinton Joseph Davisson (October 22, 1881 – February 1, 1958), was an American physicist who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron diffraction. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction at about the same time as Davisson.
Davisson was born in Bloomington, Illinois. He graduated from Bloomington High School in 1902, and entered the University of Chicago on scholarship. Upon the recommendation of Robert A. Millikan, in 1905 Davisson was hired by Princeton University as Instructor of Physics. He completed the requirements for his B.S. degree from Chicago in 1908, mainly by working in the summers. While teaching at Princeton, he did doctoral thesis research with Owen Richardson. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1911; in the same year he married Richardson's sister, Charlotte.
Davisson was then appointed as an assistant professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1917 he took a leave from the Carnegie Institute to do war-related research with the Engineering Department of the Western Electric Company (later Bell Telephone Laboratories). At the end of the war, Davisson accepted a permanent position at Western Electric after receiving assurances of his freedom there to do basic research. He had found that his teaching responsibilities at the Carnegie Institute largely precluded him from doing research. Davisson remained at Western Electric (and Bell Telephone) until his formal retirement in 1946. He then accepted a research professor appointment at the University of Virginia that continued until his second retirement in 1954.
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David Gross
David Jonathan Gross (born February 19, 1941) is an American particle physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom. He is currently the director and holder of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also a faculty member in the UC Santa Barbara Physics Department.
He was born in Washington, D.C. in February 19th, 1941. His father was Bertram Myron Gross (1912–1998). Gross received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1962. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966 under the supervision of Geoffrey Chew.
He was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and a Professor at Princeton University until 1997. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987, the Dirac Medal in 1988 and the Harvey Prize in 2000.
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Dennis Gabor
Dennis Gabor CBE, FRS (original Hungarian name: Gábor Dénes; 5 June 1900 – 8 February 1979) was a Hungarian-Britishelectrical engineer and physicist, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics.
He was born as Günszberg Dénes, into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, as the first born son of Günszberg Bernát and Jakobovits Adél. In 1902, the family received the permission to change their family name from Günszberg to Gábor. He served with the Hungarian artillery in northern Italy during World War I. He studied at the Technical University of Budapest from 1918, later in Germany, at the Charlottenburg Technical University in Berlin, now known as the Technical University of Berlin. At the start of his career, he analysed the properties of high voltage electric transmission lines by using cathode-beam oscillographs, which led to his interest in electron optics. Studying the fundamental processes of the oscillograph, Gabor was led to other electron-beam devices such as electron microscopes and TV tubes. He eventually wrote his Ph.D. thesis concerning the cathode ray tube in 1927, and worked on plasma lamps.
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Douglas Osheroff
Douglas Dean Osheroff (born August 1, 1945) is an American physicist known for his work in experimental condensed matter physics, in particular for his co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3. For his contributions he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson.
Osheroff's father was the son of Jewish immigrants who left Russia and his mother was the daughter of Slovak immigrants. Osheroff, born in Aberdeen, Washington, earned his Bachelor's degree in 1967 from Caltech, where he attended lectures by Richard Feynman and did undergraduate research for Gerry Neugebauer.
Osheroff joined the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell University as a graduate student, doing research in low-temperature physics. Together with David Lee, the head of the laboratory, and Robert C. Richardson, Osheroff used a Pomeranchuk cell to investigate the behaviour of 3He at temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. They discovered unexpected effects in their measurements, which they eventually explained as phase transitions to a superfluid phase of 3He. Lee, Richardson and Osheroff were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 for this discovery.
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Edward Mills Purcell
Edward Mills Purcell (August 30, 1912 – March 7, 1997) was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery (published 1946) of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids.Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has become widely used to study the molecular structure of pure materials and the composition of mixtures. See also Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
Born and raised in Taylorville, Illinois, Purcell received his BSEE in electrical engineering from Purdue University, followed by his M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. He was a member of the Alpha Xi chapter of Phi Kappa Sigma while at Purdue. After spending the years of World War II working at the MIT Radiation Laboratory on the development of microwave radar, Purcell returned to Harvard to do research. In December 1946, he discovered nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) with his colleagues Pound and Torrey. NMR provides scientists with an elegant and precise way of determining chemical structure and properties of materials, and is widely used in physics and chemistry. It also is the basis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), one of the most important medical advances of the 20th century. For his discovery of NMR, Purcell shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in physics with Felix Bloch of Stanford University.
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English people
The English (from Old English: Englisc) are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens. Their ethnonym is derived from the Angles, a Germanic people originally from Northern Germany who migrated to Britain.
Historically, the English population is descended from several genetically similar peoples—the earlier Britons (or Brythons), the Germanic tribes that settled in the area, including Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons, who founded what was to become England (from the Old English Englaland), and the later Danes, Normans and other groups. Following the Act of Union in 1707, in which the Kingdom of England became part of the Kingdom of Great Britain, English customs and identity became closely aligned with British customs and identity.
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Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi (Italian pronunciation: [enˈriko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian-born, naturalized American physicist particularly known for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity.
Fermi is widely regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 20th century, highly accomplished in both theory and experiment. Along with J. Robert Oppenheimer, he is frequently referred to as "the father of the atomic bomb". He also held several patents related to the use of nuclear power.
Several awards, concepts, and institutions are named after Fermi, such as the Enrico Fermi Award, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, a class of particles called fermions, the synthetic element fermium, and many more.
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Eric Allin Cornell
Eric Allin Cornell (born December 19, 1961) is an American physicist who, along with Carl E. Wieman, was able to synthesize the first Bose–Einstein condensate in 1995. For their efforts, Cornell, Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001.
Cornell was born in Palo Alto, California, where his parents were completing graduate degrees at nearby Stanford University. Two years later he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT. Here he grew up with his younger brother and sister, with yearlong intermezzos in Berkeley, California and Lisbon, Portugal, where his father spent sabbatical years.
In Cambridge he attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. The year before his graduation he moved back to California with his mother and finished high school at San Francisco's Lowell High School, a local magnet school for academically talented kids.
After high school he enrolled at Stanford University, where he was to meet his future wife, Celeste Landry. As an undergraduate he earned money as an assistant in the various low-temperature physics groups on campus. He was doing well both in his courses and his jobs in the labs and seemed set for a career in physics. He however doubted whether he wished to pursue such a career, or rather a different one in literature or politics. Halfway through his undergraduate years he went to China and Taiwan for nine months as volunteer teaching conversational English and to study Chinese. He learned that this was not where his talents lay, and returned to Stanford with renewed resolve to pursue his true talent, physics. He graduated with honors and distinction in 1985.
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Ernest Lawrence
Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American physicist and Nobel Laureate, known for his invention, utilization, and improvement of the cyclotron atom-smasher beginning in 1929, based on his studies of the works of Rolf Widerøe, and his later work in uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project. Lawrence had a long career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a Professor of Physics. In 1939, Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in inventing the cyclotron and developing its applications. Chemical element number 103 is named "lawrencium" in Lawrence's honor. He was also the first recipient of the Sylvanus Thayer Award. His brother John H. Lawrence was known for pioneering in the field of nuclear medicine.
Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota. His parents, Carl Gustavus and Gunda (née Jacobson) Lawrence, were both the offspring of Norwegian immigrants who had met while teaching at the high school in Canton, South Dakota, where his father was also the superintendent of schools. Growing up, his best friend was Merle Tuve, who would also go on to become a highly accomplished nuclear physicist.
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Ernest Walton
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton (6 October 1903 – 25 June 1995) was an Irish physicist and Nobel laureate for his work with John Cockcroft with "atom-smashing" experiments done at Cambridge University in the early 1930s, and so became the first person in history to artificially split the atom, thus ushering the nuclear age. Walton is the only Irishman to have won a Nobel Prize in science.
Ernest Walton was born in Abbeyside, County Waterford, Ireland, to a Methodist minister father, Rev. John Walton (1874–1936) and Anna Sinton (1874–1906). In those days a general clergyman's family moved once every three years, and this practice carried Ernest and his family, while he was a small child, to Rathkeale in County Limerick (where his mother died) and to County Monaghan. He attended day schools in counties Down, Tyrone, and Wesley College Dublin before becoming a boarder at Methodist College Belfast in 1915, where he excelled in science and mathematics.
In 1922 Walton won scholarships to Trinity College, Dublin for the study of mathematics and science. He was awarded bachelor's and master's degrees from Trinity in 1926 and 1927, respectively. During these years at college, Walton received numerous prizes for excellence in physics and mathematics (seven prizes in all). Following graduation he was accepted as a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the supervision of Sir Ernest Rutherford, Director of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. At the time there were four Nobel Prize laureates on the staff at the Cavendish lab and a further five were to emerge, including Walton and John Cockcroft. Walton was awarded his Ph.D. in 1931 and remained at Cambridge as a researcher until 1934.
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Ernst Ruska
Ernst August Friedrich Ruska (25 December 1906 – 27 May 1988) was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in electron optics, including the design of the first electron microscope.
Ruska was born in Heidelberg. He was educated at the Technical University of Munich from 1925 to 1927 and then entered the Technical University of Berlin, where he posited that microscopes using electrons, with wavelengths 1000 times shorter than those of light, could provide a more detailed picture of an object than a microscope utilizing light, in which magnification is limited by the size of the wavelengths. In 1931, he demonstrated that a magnetic coil could act as an electron lens, and used several coils in a series to build the first electron microscope in 1933.
After completing his PhD in 1933, Ruska continued to work in the field of electron optics, first at Fernseh Ltd in Berlin-Zehlendorf, and then from 1937 at Siemens-Reiniger-Werke AG. At Siemens, he was involved in developing the first commercially-produced electron microscope in 1939. As well as developing the technology of electron microscopy while at Siemens, Ruska also worked at other scientific institutions, and encouraged Siemens to set up a laboratory for visiting researchers, which was initially headed by Ruska's brother Helmut, a medical doctor who developed the use of the electron microscope for medical and biological applications.
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Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger ( /ˈʃroʊdɪŋər/; German: [ˈɛʁviːn ˈʃʁøːdɪŋɐ]; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961) was an Austrian born physicist and theoretical biologist who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, and is famed for a number of important contributions to physics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. In 1935 he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.
In 1887 Schrödinger was born in Vienna, Austria to Rudolf Schrödinger (cerecloth producer, botanist) and Georgine Emilia Brenda (daughter of Alexander Bauer, Professor of Chemistry, Technische Hochschule Vienna).
His mother was half Austrian and half English; His father was Catholic and his mother was Lutheran. Despite having a religious background, he was later said to be an atheist.
In 1898 he attended the Akademisches Gymnasium. Between 1906 and 1910 Schrödinger studied in Vienna under Franz Serafin Exner(1849–1926) and Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874–1915). He also conducted experimental work with Karl Wilhelm Friedrich "Fritz" Kohlrausch 1884–1953.
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Eugene Wigner
Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Jenő Pál; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) FRS was a Hungarian American theoretical physicist and mathematician.
He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles"; the other half of the award was shared between Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen. Wigner is important for having laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics as well as for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus. It was Eugene Wigner who first identified Xe-135 "poisoning" in nuclear reactors, and for this reason it is sometimes referred to as Wigner poisoning. Wigner is also important for his work in pure mathematics, having authored a number of theorems.
Wigner was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, into a middle class Jewish family. He had two sisters, one of whom later married Paul Dirac. At the age of 11, Wigner contracted what his parents believed to be tuberculosis. They sent him to live for six weeks in a sanatorium in the Austrian mountains. During this period, Wigner developed an interest in mathematical problems. From 1915 through 1919, together with John von Neumann, Wigner studied at the Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium, where they both benefited from the instruction of the noted mathematics teacher László Rátz. In 1919, to escape the Béla Kun communist regime, the Wigner family briefly moved to Austria, returning to Hungary after Kun's downfall. Partly as a reaction to the prominence of Jews in the Kun regime, the family converted to Lutheranism.
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Felix Bloch
Felix Bloch (October 23, 1905 – September 10, 1983) was a Swiss physicist, working mainly in the U.S.
Bloch was born in Zürich, Switzerland to Jewish parents Gustav and Agnes Bloch. He was educated there and at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, also in Zürich. Initially studying engineering he soon changed to physics. During this time he attended lectures and seminars given by Peter Debye and Hermann Weyl at ETH Zürich and Erwin Schrödinger at the neighboring University of Zürich. A fellow student in these seminars was John von Neumann. Graduating in 1927 he continued his physics studies at the University of Leipzig with Werner Heisenberg, gaining his doctorate in 1928. His doctoral thesis established the quantum theory of solids, using Bloch waves to describe the electrons.
He remained in European academia, studying with Wolfgang Pauli in Zürich, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Enrico Fermi in Rome before he went back to Leipzig assuming a position as privatdozent (lecturer). In 1933, immediately after Hitler came to power, he left Germany, emigrating to work at Stanford University in 1934. In the fall of 1938, Bloch began working with the University of California at Berkeley 37" cyclotron to determine the magnetic moment of the neutron. Bloch went on to become the first professor for theoretical physics at Stanford. In 1939, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. During WW II he worked on nuclear power at Los Alamos National Laboratory, before resigning to join the radar project at Harvard University.
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Frank Wilczek
Frank Anthony Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is a theoretical physicist from the United States and a Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.
Born in Mineola, New York, of Polish and Italian origin, Wilczek was educated in the public schools of Queens, attending Martin Van Buren High School. It was around this time Wilczek's parents realized that he was exceptional - in part as a result of Frank Wilczek having been administered an IQ test.
He received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1970, a Master of Arts in Mathematics at Princeton University, 1972, and a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1974. Wilczek holds the Herman Feshbach Professorship of Physics at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Frederick Reines
Frederick Reines (March 16, 1918 – August 26, 1998) was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment, and may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties".
Reines was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Jewish emigrants to the US from Russia and a paternal relative of the Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines, as the youngest of four children. Reines and his family moved to upstate New York, where he spent much of his childhood in a small town where his father ran a country store. Looking back, Reines said: "My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including fourth of July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand."
Reines was an Eagle Scout, and also participated in singing in a chorus, performing solo roles in pieces, including Händel's Messiah. He was encouraged to take lessons with a well-known voice coach at the Metropolitan Opera, where they were provided for him free of charge, since he could not afford to pay for them.
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Frits Zernike
Frits Zernike (/ˈzɜrr.nɪ.kiː/; July 16, 1888 – March 10, 1966) was a Dutch physicist and winner of the Nobel prize for physics in 1953 for his invention of the phase contrast microscope, an instrument that permits the study of internal cell structure without the need to stain and thus kill the cells.
Zernike was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands to Carl Frederick August Zernike and Antje Dieperink. Both parents were teachers of mathematics, and he especially shared his father's passion for physics. He studied chemistry (his major), mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam. In 1912 he was awarded a prize for his work on opalescence in gases. In 1913 he became assistant to Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn at the astronomical laboratory of Groningen University. In 1914, he was responsible jointly with Leonard Salomon Ornstein for the derivation of the Ornstein-Zernike equation in critical-point theory. In 1915, he obtained a position in theoretical physics at the same university and in 1920 he was promoted to full professor of theoretical physics.
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Gabriel Lippmann
Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann (16 August 1845 – 13 July 1921) was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference.
Gabriel Lippmann was born in Bonnevoie, Luxembourg, on 16 August 1845. At the time, Bonnevoie was part of the commune of Hollerich which is often given as his place of birth. His father, Isaïe, a French Jew born in Ennery near Metz, managed the family glove-making business at the former convent in Bonnevoie. In 1848, the family moved to Paris where Lippmann was initially tutored by his mother, Miriam Rose Lévy, before attending the Lycée Napoléon (now Lycée Henri-IV). He was said to have been a rather inattentive but thoughtful pupil with a special interest in mathematics. In 1868, he was admitted to the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris where he failed the agrégation examination which would have enabled him to enter the teaching profession, preferring instead to study physics. In 1872, the French government sent him on a mission to Heidelberg University where he was able to specialize in electricity with the encouragement of Gustav Kirchhoff, receiving a doctorate with the "summa cum laude" distinction in 1874. Lippmann then returned to Paris in 1875, where he continued to study until 1878, when he became professor of physics at the Sorbonne.
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George Paget Thomson
Sir George Paget Thomson, FRS (3 May 1892 – 10 September 1975) was an English physicist and Nobel laureate in physics recognised for his discovery with Clinton Davisson of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.
Thomson was born in Cambridge, England, the son of physicist and Nobel laureate J. J. Thomson and Rose Elisabeth Paget, the daughter of the professor of medicine at the University of Cambridge. Thomson went to The Perse School, Cambridge before going on to read mathematics and physics at Trinity College, Cambridge, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he was commissioned into the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment. After brief service in France, he worked on aerodynamics at Farnborough and elsewhere. He resigned his commission as a Captain in 1920.
In 1924, Thomson married Kathleen Buchanan Smith, daughter of the Very Rev. Sir George Adam Smith. They had four children, two sons and two daughters. Kathleen died in 1941.
After briefly serving in the First World War Thomson became a Fellow at Cambridge and then moved to the University of Aberdeen. George Thomson was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for his work in Aberdeen in discovering the wave-like properties of the electron. The prize was shared with Clinton Joseph Davisson who had made the same discovery independently. Whereas his father had seen the electron as a particle (and won his Nobel Prize in the process), Thomson demonstrated that it could be diffracted like a wave, a discovery proving the principle of wave-particle duality which had first been posited by Louis-Victor de Broglie in the 1920s as what is often dubbed the de Broglie hypothesis.
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George Smoot
George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20, 1945) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and $1 million TV quiz show prize winner (Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?). He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the measurement "of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation."
This work helped further the Big Bang theory of the universe using the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE). According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science." Smoot donated his share of the Nobel Prize money, less travel costs, to a charitable foundation.
Currently he is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and since 2010, a professor of physics at the Paris Diderot University, France. In 2003, he was awarded the Einstein Medal.
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Georges Charpak
Georges Charpak (1 August 1924 – 29 September 2010) was a French physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992.
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Gerd Binnig
Gerd Binnig (born 20 July 1947) is a German physicist, and a Nobel laureate.
He was born in Frankfurt am Main and played in the ruins of the city during his childhood. His family lived partly in Frankfurt and partly in Offenbach am Main, and he attended school in both cities. At the age of 10, he decided to become a physicist, but he soon wondered whether he had made the right choice. He concentrated more on music, playing in a band. He also started playing the violin at 15 and played in his school orchestra.
In 1969, he married Lore Wagler, a psychologist, and they have a daughter born in Switzerland and a son born in California. His hobbies are reading, swimming and golf.
In 1978, he accepted an offer from IBM to join their Zürich research group. There, he met Heinrich Rohrer, with whom he shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) (the other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska).
The team included Christoph Gerber and Edmund Weibel, and they were soon recognized with a number of prizes: the German Physics Prize, the Otto Klung Prize, the Hewlett Packard Prize, the King Faisal Prize and, ultimately, the Nobel Prize.
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Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi (Italian pronunciation: [ɡuʎˈʎɛːlmo marˈkoːni]; 25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and indeed he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy". Much of Marconi's work in radio transmission was built upon previous experimentation and the commercial exploitation of ideas by others such as Hertz, Maxwell, Faraday, Popov, Lodge, Fessenden, Stone, Bose, and Tesla. As an entrepreneur, businessman, and founder of the The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in 1897, Marconi succeeded in making a commercial success of radio by innovating and building on the work of previous experimenters and physicists. In 1924, he was ennobled as Marchese Marconi.
Marconi was born in Bologna on April 25, 1874, the second son of Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian landowner, and his Irish wife, Annie Jameson, daughter of Andrew Jameson of Daphne Castle in the County Wexford, Ireland and granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of whiskey distillers Jameson & Sons. Marconi was educated privately in Bologna in the lab of Augusto Righi, in Florence at the Istituto Cavallero and, later, in Livorno. As a child Marconi did not do well in school.Baptized as a Catholic, he was also a member of the Anglican Church, being married into it; however, he still received a Catholic annulment.
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Gustaf Dalén
Nils Gustaf Dalén (30 November 1869 – 9 December 1937) was a Swedish Nobel Laureate and industrialist, the founder of the AGA company and inventor of the AGA cooker and the Dalén light. In 1912 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys".
Dalén was born in Stenstorp, a small village in Falköping Municipality, Västra Götaland County. He managed the family farm, which he expanded to include a market garden, a seed merchants and a dairy. In 1892 he invented a milk-fat tester to check milk quality of the milk delivered and went to Stockholm to show his new invention for Gustaf de Laval. de Laval was impressed by the self-taught Dalén and the invention and encouraged him to get a basic technical education. He was admitted to the Chalmers University of Technology where he earned his Master's degree and a Doctorate on leaving in 1896. Dalén was much the same type of inventor as Gustaf de Laval, not afraid of testing "impossible" ideas, but Dalén was much more careful with the company economy. The products should have a solid market place before he introduced a new product.
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Gustav Ludwig Hertz
Gustav Ludwig Hertz (22 July 1887 – 30 October 1975) was a German experimental physicist and Nobel Prize winner, and a nephew of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.
Hertz was born in Hamburg, the son of Auguste (née Arning) and a lawyer, Dr. Gustav Hertz. He studied at the Georg-August University of Göttingen (1906–1907), the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (1907–1908), and the Humboldt University of Berlin (1908–1911). He received his doctorate in 1911 under Heinrich Leopold Rubens.
From 1911 to 1914, Hertz was an assistant to Rubens at the University of Berlin. It was during this time that Hertz and James Franck performed experiments on inelastic electron collisions in gases, known as the Franck–Hertz experiments, and for which they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925.
During World War I, Hertz served in the military from 1914. He was seriously wounded in 1915. In 1917, he returned to the University of Berlin as a Privatdozent. In 1920, he took a job as a research physicist at the Philips Incandescent Lamp Factory in Eindhoven, which he held until 1925.
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Hannes Alfvén
Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén (born 30 May 1908 in Norrköping, Sweden; died 2 April 1995 in Djursholm, Sweden) was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of aurorae, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial magnetosphere, and the dynamics of plasmas in the Milky Way galaxy.
Alfvén received his PhD from the University of Uppsala in 1934. His thesis was titled "Investigations of the Ultra-short Electromagnetic Waves."
In 1934, Alfvén taught physics at both the University of Uppsala and the Nobel Institute for Physics (later renamed the Manne Siegbahn Institute of Physics) in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1940, he became professor of electromagnetic theory and electrical measurements at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 1945, he acquired the nonappointive position of Chair of Electronics. His title was changed to Chair of Plasma Physics in 1963. In 1954-1955, Alfvén was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1967, after leaving Sweden and spending time in the Soviet Union, he moved to the United States. Alfvén worked in the departments of electrical engineering at both the University of California, San Diego and the University of Southern California.
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Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe (German pronunciation: [ˈhans ˈalbʁɛçt ˈbeːtə]; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and astrophysics. During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory which developed the first atomic bombs. There he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons, and did theoretical work on the implosion method used in both the Trinity test and the "Fat Man" weapon dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.
During the early 1950s, Bethe also played an important role in the development of the larger hydrogen bomb, though he had originally joined the project with the hope of proving it could not be made. Bethe later campaigned together with Albert Einstein in the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race. He influenced the White House to sign the ban of atmospheric nuclear tests in 1963 and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, SALT I. His scientific research never ceased even into the later years of his life and he was publishing papers well into his nineties. He is one of the few scientists who can claim a major paper in his field every decade of his career, which spanned nearly 70 years. Freeman Dyson called Bethe the "supreme problem solver of the 20th century."
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Hans Georg Dehmelt
Hans Georg Dehmelt (born September 9, 1922 in Görlitz, Germany) is a German-born American physicist, who co-developed the ion trap technique with Wolfgang Paul, for which they shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 (the other half of the Prize in that year was awarded to Norman Foster Ramsey). Their technique was used for high precision measurement of the electron g-factor.
At the age of ten Dehmelt enrolled in the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, a Latin school in Berlin, where he was admitted on a scholarship. After graduating in 1940, he volunteered for service in the German army, which ordered him to attend the University of Breslau to study physics in 1943. After a year of study he returned to army service and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge.
After his release from an American prisoner of war camp in 1946, Dehmelt returned to his study of physics at the University of Göttingen, where he supported himself by repairing and bartering old, pre-war radio sets. He completed his master's thesis in 1948 and received his Ph.D. in 1950, both from the University of Göttingen. He was then invited to Duke University as a postdoctoral associate, emigrating in 1952.
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Heinrich Rohrer
Heinrich Rohrer (born June 6, 1933) is a Swiss physicist who shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd Binnig for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) (the other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska).
Rohrer was born in St. Gallen half an hour after his twin sister. He enjoyed a carefree country childhood until the family moved to Zürich in 1949. He enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1951, where he studied with Wolfgang Pauli. His doctoral dissertation was on his work measuring the length changes of superconductors at the magnetic-field-induced superconducting transition, a project begun by Jörgen Lykke Olsen. In the course of his research, he found that he had to do most of his research at night after the city was asleep because his measurements were so sensitive to vibration.
His studies were interrupted by his military service in the Swiss mountain infantry. In 1961, he married Rose-Marie Egger. Their honeymoon trip to the United States included a stint doing research on thermal conductivity of type-II superconductors and metals with Bernie Serin at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
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Hendrik Lorentz
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (Arnhem, 18 July 1853 – Haarlem, 4 February 1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He also derived the transformation equations subsequently used by Albert Einstein to describe space and time.
Hendrik Lorentz was born in Arnhem, Gelderland (The Netherlands), the son of Gerrit Frederik Lorentz (1822 – 1893), a well-off nurseryman, and Geertruida van Ginkel (1826 – 1861). In 1862, after his mother's death, his father married Luberta Hupkes. Despite being raised as a Protestant, he was a freethinker in religious matters. From 1866-1869 he attended the newly established high school in Arnhem, and in 1870 he passed the exams in classical languages which were then required for admission to University.
Lorentz studied physics and mathematics at the University of Leiden, where he was strongly influenced by the teaching of astronomy professor Frederik Kaiser; it was his influence that led him to become a physicist. After earning a bachelor's degree, he returned to Arnhem in 1872 to teach high school classes in mathematics, but he continued his studies in Leiden in addition to his teaching position. In 1875 Lorentz earned a doctoral degree under Pieter Rijke on a thesis entitled "Over de theorie der terugkaatsing en breking van het licht" (On the theory of reflection and refraction of light), in which he refined the electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell.
In 1881 Hendrik married Aletta Catharina Kaiser, niece of Frederik Kaiser. She was the daughter of Johann Wilhelm Kaiser, director of the Amsterdam's Engraving School and professor of Fine Arts, and designer of the first Dutch postage stamps (1852). Later Kaiser was the Director of the National Gallery of Amsterdam. Hendrik and Aletta's eldest daughter Geertruida Luberta Lorentz was to become a physicist as well.
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Henri Becquerel
Antoine Henri Becquerel (15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French physicist, Nobel laureate, and the discoverer of radioactivity along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, for which all three won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Becquerel was born in Paris into a family which produced four generations of scientists: Becquerel's grandfather (Antoine César Becquerel), father (Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel), and son (Jean Becquerel). He studied engineering at the École Polytechnique and the École des Ponts et Chaussées. In 1890 he married Louise Désirée Lorieux.
In 1892, he became the third in his family to occupy the physics chair at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. In 1894, he became chief engineer in the Department of Bridges and Highways.
Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity is a famous example of serendipity, of how chance favors the prepared mind. Becquerel had long been interested in the phosphorescence, the emission of light of one color following a body's exposure to light of another color. In early 1896, in the wave of excitement following Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's discovery of X-rays the previous fall, Becquerel thought that phosphorescent materials, such as some uranium salts, might emit penetrating X-ray-like radiation when illuminated by bright sunlight. His first experiments appeared to show this.
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Henry Way Kendall
Henry Way Kendall (December 9, 1926 – February 15, 1999) was an American particle physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 jointly with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."
Kendall was born in Boston to Evelyn Way and Henry P. Kendall, an industrialist. Kendall grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts and attended Deerfield Academy. He enrolled in the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1945, and served on a troop transport on the North Atlantic in the winter of 1945 - 1946.
In 1946, he enrolled at Amherst College where he majored in mathematics, graduating in 1950. While at Amherst, he operated a diving and marine salvage company during two summers. He co-authored two books, one on shallow water diving and the other on underwater photography.
He did graduate research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, involving an experimental study of positronium, and he obtained his PhD in 1955. He then spent then next two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He then spent five years in Robert Hofstadter's research group at Stanford University in the late 50's and early 60's, where he worked with Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor, studying the structure of protons and neutrons, using the university's 300 feet long linear electron accelerator. He developed a close working relationship with Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky at Stanford.
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Herbert Kroemer
Herbert Kroemer (born August 25, 1928), a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor, setting the stage for a career in research on the physics of semiconductor devices. In 2000, Dr. Kroemer, along with Zhores I. Alferov, was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics". The other co-recipient of the Nobel Prize was Jack Kilby for his invention and development of integrated circuits and micro-chips.
He had an early success in a rather different subject, when together with Burgess and Houston in 1953, he detected a mathematical error in Nordheim's theory of electron tunneling through the image-force rounded barrier used in the theory of field electron emission. Between them, they generated tables of correction-factor values that are still in use over 50 years later.
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Hideki Yukawa
Hideki Yukawa FRSFRSE (湯川 秀樹, Yukawa Hideki?, 23 January 1907 – 8 September 1981), was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate.
Yukawa was born in Tokyo and grew up in Kyoto. In 1929, after receiving his degree from Kyoto Imperial University, he stayed on as a lecturer for four years. After graduation, he was interested in theoretical physics, particularly in the theory of elementary particles. In 1932, he married Sumi (スミ?); they had two sons, Harumi and Takaaki. In 1933 he became an assistant professor at Osaka University, at age 26.
In 1935 he published his theory of mesons, which explained the interaction between protons and neutrons, and was a major influence on research into elementary particles. In 1940 he became a professor in Kyoto University. In 1940 he won the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy, in 1943 the Decoration of Cultural Merit from the Japanese government. In 1949 he became a professor at Columbia University, the same year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, after the discovery by Cecil Frank Powell, Giuseppe Occhialini and César Lattes of Yukawa's predicted pion in 1947. Yukawa also worked on the theory of K-capture, in which a low energy electron is absorbed by the nucleus, after its initial prediction by G. C. Wick.
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Horst Ludwig Störmer
Horst Ludwig Störmer (born April 6, 1949 in Frankfurt, Germany) is a German physicist who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics with Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin. The three shared the prize "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations" (the fractional quantum Hall effect). He and Tsui were working at Bell Labs at the time of the experiment cited by the Nobel committee, though the experiment itself was carried out in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Laughlin did not participate in the experiment but was later able to explain its results).
Störmer studied physics at the J.W. Goethe-Universität at Frankfurt am Main and completed a PhD at the University of Stuttgart in 1977. After working at Bell Labs for 20 years, he became the I.I. Rabi professor of physics and applied physics at Columbia University in New York City. Perhaps as important as the work for which he won the Nobel prize is his invention of modulation doping, a method for making extremely high mobility two dimensional electron systems in semiconductors. This enabled the later observation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
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Hugh David Politzer
Hugh David Politzer (born 31 August 1949) is an American theoretical physicist. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.
Politzer was born in New York City the son Drs Alan and Valerie Politzer who immigrated to the US after World War 2. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1966, received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1969, and his PhD in 1974 from Harvard University, where his graduate advisor was Sidney Coleman.
In his first published article, which appeared in 1973, Politzer described the phenomenon of asymptotic freedom: the closer quarks are to each other, the weaker the strong interaction will be between them. When quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost like free particles. This result—independently discovered at around the same time by Gross and Wilczek at Princeton University—was extremely important in the development of quantum chromodynamics. With Thomas Appelquist, Politzer also played a central role in predicting the existence of "charmonium", a subatomic particle formed of a charm quark and a charm antiquark.
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Igor Tamm
Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm (Russian И́горь Евге́ньевич Тамм; 8 July 1895 – 12 April 1971) was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for their 1934 discovery of Cherenkov radiation.
According to Russian sources, Tamm was born in Vladivostok, Russian Empire (now Russia) into a noble family of German extraction. His grandfather Theodor Tamm emigrated from Thuringia), and other sources describe him as Jewish. He studied at a gymnasium in Elisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad, Ukraine). In 1913-1914 he studied at the University of Edinburgh together with his school-friend Boris Hessen.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he joined the army as a volunteer field medic. In 1917 he joined the Revolutionary movement and became an active anti-War campaigner, serving on revolutionary committies after the March Revolution. He returned to the Moscow State University from which he graduated in 1918.
Tamm married Nataliya Shuyskaya in September of 1917. She belonged to an old princely family of Rurikid descent . Their daughter Irina eventually became a noted chemist.
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Ilya Frank
Ilya Mikhailovich Frank (Russian: Илья́ Миха́йлович Франк) (23 October 1908 – 22 June 1990) was a Soviet winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1958 jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Igor Y. Tamm, also of the Soviet Union. He received the award for his work in explaining the phenomenon of Cherenkov radiation. He received Stalin prize in 1946 and 1953 and the USSR state prize in 1971.
Ilya Frank was born on 23 October 1908 in St. Petersburg. His father, Mikhail Lyudvigovich Frank, was a talented mathematician, while his mother Yelizaveta Mikhailovna Gratsianova, was a physician. His father participated in the student revolutionary movement, and as a result was expelled from Moscow University. After the October Revolution, he was reinstated and appointed professor. Ilya's uncle, Semen Frank, a noted Russian philosopher, wasn't as fortunate and was expelled from the USSR in 1922 together with 160 other intellectuals. Ilya had one elder brother, Gleb Mikhailovich Frank, who became an eminent biophysicist and member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R..
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Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 [NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived." His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.
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Isidor Isaac Rabi
Isidor Isaac Rabi ( /ˈrɑːbi/; 29 July 1898 – 11 January 1988) was a Galician-born American physicist and Nobel laureate recognized in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance.
Rabi was born into a traditional Jewish family in Rymanów, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Poland), and was brought to the United States as a child the following year. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry degree from Cornell University in 1919, continuing his studies at Columbia University and received his Ph.D. in 1927. A fellowship enabled him to spend the next two years in Europe working with such eminent physicists as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Otto Stern. He then joined the Columbia faculty and never left.
In 1930 Rabi conducted investigations into the nature of the force binding protons to atomic nuclei. This research eventually led to the creation of the molecular-beam magnetic-resonance detection method, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944.
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Ivar Giaever
Ivar Giaever (Giæver, born April 5, 1929, in Bergen, Norway) is a physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson "for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids". Giaever's share of the prize was specifically for his "experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors". Giaever is an institute professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, and the president of Applied Biophysics.
Giaever earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1952. In 1954, he emigrated from Norway to Canada, where he was employed by the Canadian division of General Electric. He moved to the United States two years later, joining General Electric's Research and Development Center at Schenectady, New York, in 1958. He has lived in Niskayuna, New York, since then, taking up US citizenship in 1964. While working for General Electric, Giaever earned a Ph.D. from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964.
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Jack Kilby
Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was an American physicist who took part (along with Robert Noyce) in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2000. He is also the inventor of the handheld calculator and the thermal printer.
Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, Kilby grew up and attended school in Great Bend, Kansas, graduating from Great Bend High School. Road signs at the entrances to the town commemorate his time there, and the Commons Area at Great Bend High School has been named The Jack Kilby Commons Area.
Kilby received his bachelor of science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is an honorary member of Acacia Fraternity. In 1947, he received a degree in Electrical Engineering. He obtained his master of science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Extension in Milwaukee, which later became the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1950, while simultaneously working at Centralab in Milwaukee.
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Jack Steinberger
Jack Steinberger (born May 25, 1921) is a German-American physicist currently residing near Geneva, Switzerland. He co-discovered the muon neutrino, along with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for which they were given the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Steinberger was born in the city of Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, Germany, in 1921. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany, with its open anti-Semitism, prompted his parents to send him out of the country.
Steinberger emigrated to the United States at the age of 13, making the trans-Atlantic trip with his brother Herbert. Barnett Farroll cared for him as a foster child, the connection was made by Jewish charities in the United States. During this period, Steinberger attended New Trier Township High School, in Winnetka, Illinois.
Steinberger studied chemical engineering at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) but left after his scholarship ended to help supplement his family's income. He obtained a bachelor's degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, in 1942. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Signal Corps at MIT. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he returned to graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1946, where he studied under Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi. His Ph.D. thesis concerned the energy spectrum of electrons emitted in muon decay; his results showed that this was a three-body decay, and implied the participation of two neutral particle in the decay (later identified as the electron (ν
e) and muon (ν
μ) neutrinos) rather than one.
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James Chadwick
Sir James Chadwick CH FRS (20 October 1891 – 24 July 1974) was an English Nobel laureate in physics awarded for his discovery of the neutron.
Chadwick studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Cambridge. He was the primary British scientist who collaborated in the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was knighted in 1945 for achievements in his field.
Chadwick was born in Bollington, Cheshire to John Joseph Chadwick and Anne Mary Knowles. He attended Bollington Cross C of E Primary School and the Central Grammar School for Boys in Manchester, and studied at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge.
In 1913 Chadwick entered the Technical University of Berlin, working under Hans Geiger and Ernest Rutherford. He was in Germany at the start of World War I and was interned in Ruhleben P.O.W. Camp near Berlin. While he was interned, he was allowed to set up a laboratory in the stables. With the help of Charles D. Ellis he worked on the ionization of phosphorus and on the photo-chemical reaction of carbon monoxide and chlorine. He spent most of the war years in Ruhleben until Geiger's laboratory interceded for his release.
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James Cronin
James Watson Cronin (born September 29, 1931) is an American nuclear physicist.
Cronin was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. 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 examining the decay of kaons, that a reaction run in reverse does not merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the interactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered.
Cronin received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1976 for major experimental contributions to particle physics including fundamental work on weak interactions culminating in the discovery of asymmetry under time reversal. In 1999, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Cronin is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and a spokesperson emeritus for the Auger project. Cronin is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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James Franck
James Franck (26 August 1882 – 21 May 1964) was a German physicist and Nobel laureate.
Franck was born to Jacob Franck and Rebecca Nachum Drucker. Franck completed his Ph.D. in 1906 and received his venia legendi, or Habilitation, for physics in 1911, both at the University of Berlin, where he lectured and taught until 1918, having reached the position of extraordinarius professor. After World War I, in which he served and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, Franck became the Head of the Physics Division of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft for Physical Chemistry. In 1920, Franck became ordinarius professor of experimental physics and Director of the Second Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Göttingen. While there he worked on quantum physics with Max Born, who was Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics.
In 1925, Franck received the Nobel Prize in Physics, mostly for his work in 1912-1914, which included the Franck-Hertz experiment, an important confirmation of the Bohr model of the atom.
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James Rainwater
Leo James Rainwater (December 9, 1917 – May 31, 1986) was an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei.
Rainwater was born on December 9, 1917 in Council, Idaho, but later moved to Hanford, California, after the death of his father to the great influenza epidemic of 1918. He received his bachelor's degree from California Institute of Technology in 1939 as a physics major, then went on to earn a PhD at Columbia University in 1946, working with Enrico Fermi.
During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project, which was the nick-name given to underground research conducted to invent the first usable atomic bomb. In 1949, he began developing his theory that, contrary to what was then believed, not all atomic nuclei are spherical. His ideas were later tested and confirmed by Bohr's and Mottelson's experiments. Rainwater also contributed to the scientific understanding of X-rays and participated in the United States Atomic Energy Commission and naval research projects. He joined the physics faculty at Columbia in 1946, where he reached the rank of full professor in 1952. He was named Pupin Professor of Physics in 1982. Rainwater also received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for Physics in 1963. In 1975 Rainwater was awarded the Noble Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection".
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Jean Baptiste Perrin
Jean Baptiste Perrin FRS (30 September 1870 – 17 April 1942) was a French physicist and Nobel laureate.
Born in Lille, France, Perrin attended the École Normale Supérieure, the elite grande école in Paris. He became an assistant at the school during the period of 1894-97 when he began the study of cathode rays and X-rays. He was awarded the degree of docteur ès sciences (PhD) in 1897. In the same year he was appointed as a lecturer in physical chemistry at the Sorbonne, Paris. He became a professor at the University in 1910, holding this post until the German occupation of France during World War II.
In 1895, Jean Perrin showed that cathode rays were made of corpuscles with negative electric charge. He computed Avogadro's number through several methods. He explained solar energy by the thermonuclear reactions of hydrogen.
After Albert Einstein published (1905) his theoretical explanation of Brownian motion in terms of atoms, Perrin did the experimental work to test and verify Einstein's predictions, thereby settling the century-long dispute about John Dalton's atomic theory.
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Johannes Stark
Johannes Stark (15 April 1874 – 21 June 1957) was a German physicist, and Physics Nobel Prize laureate who was closely involved with the Deutsche Physik movement under the Nazi regime.
Born in Schickenhof, Kingdom of Bavaria (now Freihung), Stark was educated at the Bayreuth Gymnasium (secondary school) and later in Regensburg. His collegiate education began at the University of Munich, where he studied physics, mathematics, chemistry, and crystallography. His tenure at that college began in 1894; he graduated in 1897, with his doctoral dissertation titled Untersuchung über einige physikalische, vorzüglich optische Eigenschaften des Rußes (Investigation of some physical, in particular optical properties of soot).
Stark worked in various positions at the Physics Institute of his alma mater until 1900, when he became an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Göttingen. An extraordinary professor at Hanover by 1906, in 1908 he became professor at the RWTH Aachen University. He worked and researched at physics departments of several universities, including the University of Greifswald, until 1922. In 1919, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields" (the latter is known as the Stark effect). From 1933 until his retirement in 1939, Stark was elected President of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, while also President of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
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John Bardeen
John Bardeen FRS (May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer, the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, allowing the Information Age to occur, and made possible the development of almost every modern electronic device, from telephones to computers to missiles. Bardeen's developments in superconductivity, which won him his second Nobel, are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
In 1990, John Bardeen appeared on LIFE Magazine's list of "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."
John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin on May 23, 1908. He was the second son of Dr. Charles Russell Bardeen and Althea Harmer Bardeen. He was one of five children. His father, Charles Bardeen, was Professor of Anatomy and the first Dean of the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Althea Bardeen, before marrying, had taught at the Dewey Laboratory School and run an interior decorating business; after marriage she was an active figure in the art world.
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John Cockcroft
Sir John Douglas Cockcroft OM KCB CBE FRS (27 May 1897 – 18 September 1967) was a British physicist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atomic nucleus with Ernest Walton, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power.
Cockcroft was born in Todmorden, England the eldest son of a mill owner. He was educated at Todmorden Secondary School (1909–1914) (where his physics teacher, Luke Sutcliffe, would later tutor another future Nobel Prize-winner, Geoffrey Wilkinson) and studied mathematics at the Victoria University of Manchester (1914–1915). He was a signaller in the Royal Artillery from 1915 to 1918. After the war ended, he studied electrotechnical engineering at Manchester College of Technology from 1919 until 1920. Cockcroft received a mathematics degree from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1924 and began research work under Ernest Rutherford. In 1929 he was elected a Fellow of St. John's College.
In 1928, he began to work on the acceleration of protons with Ernest Walton. In 1932, they bombarded lithium with high energy neutrons, electrons and protons and succeeded in transmuting it into helium and other chemical elements. This was one of the earliest experiments to change the atomic nucleus of one element to a different nucleus by artificial means. This feat was popularly – if somewhat inaccurately – known as splitting the atom.
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Julian Schwinger
Julian Seymour Schwinger (February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.
Schwinger is recognized as one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, responsible for much of modern quantum field theory, including a variational approach, and the equations of motion for quantum fields. He developed the first electroweak model, and the first example of confinement in 1+1 dimensions. He is responsible for the theory of multiple neutrinos, Schwinger terms, and the theory of the spin 3/2 field.
Julian Seymour Schwinger was born in New York City, to a Polish Jewish family, who had immigrated to America. Both his father and his mother's parents were prosperous clothing manufacturers, although the family business declined after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The family followed the Orthodox Jewish tradition. He attended Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York as an undergraduate before transferring to Columbia University, where he received his B.A. in 1936 and his Ph.D. (overseen by I.I. Rabi) in 1939 at the age of 21. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley (under J. Robert Oppenheimer), and was later appointed to a position at Purdue University.
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Kai Siegbahn
Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn (20 April 1918 – 20 July 2007) was a Swedish physicist.
Siegbahn was born in Lund, Sweden, son of Manne Siegbahn the 1924 physics Nobel Prize winner. Siegbahn earned his doctorate at the University of Stockholm in 1944. He was professor at the Royal Institute of Technology 1951-1954, and then professor of experimental physics at Uppsala University 1954-1984, which was the same chair his father had held. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Schawlow for their work in laser spectroscopy.
Siegbahn obtained the Nobel Prize for developing the method of Electron Spectroscopy for Chemical Analysis (ESCA), now usually described as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). At the time of his death he was still active as a scientist at the Ångström Laboratory at Uppsala University.
Kai Siegbahn was one of the original editors of the Encyclopedia of Analytical Chemistry
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Karl Ferdinand Braun
Karl Ferdinand Braun (6 June 1850 – 20 April 1918) was a German inventor, physicist and Nobel laureate in physics. Braun contributed significantly to the development of the radio and television technology: he shared with Guglielmo Marconi the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Braun was born in Fulda, Germany, and educated at the University of Marburg and received a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1872. In 1874 he discovered that a point-contact semiconductor rectifies alternating current. He became director of the Physical Institute and professor of physics at the University of Strassburg in 1895.
In 1897 he built the first cathode-ray tube (CRT) and cathode ray tube oscilloscope. CRT technology has been replaced by flat screen technologies (such as liquid crystal display (LCD), light emitting diode (LED) and plasma displays) on television sets and computer monitors. The CRT is still called the "Braun tube" in German-speaking countries (Braunsche Röhre) and in Japan (Buraun-kan).
During the development of radio, he also worked on wireless telegraphy. In 1897 Braun joined the line of wireless pioneers. His major contributions were the introduction of a closed tuned circuit in the generating part of the transmitter, and its separation from the radiating part (the antenna) by means of inductive coupling, and later on the usage of crystals for receiving purposes. Wireless telegraphy claimed Dr. Braun's full attention in 1898, and for many years after that he applied himself almost exclusively to the task of solving its problems. Dr. Braun had written extensively on wireless subjects and was well known through his many contributions to the Electrician and other scientific journals. In 1899, he would apply for the patents, Electro telegraphy by means of condensers and induction colls and Wireless electro transmission of signals over surfaces.
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Klaus von Klitzing
Klaus von Klitzing (28 June 1943 in Schroda) is a German physicist known for discovery of the integer quantum Hall Effect, for which he was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1962, von Klitzing passed the Abitur at Artland Gymnasium in Quakenbrück, Germany, before studying physics at the Braunschweig University of Technology, where he received his diploma in 1969. He continued his studies at the University of Würzburg, completing his PhD thesis Galvanomagnetic Properties of Tellurium in Strong Magnetic Fields in 1972, and habilitation in 1978. This work was performed at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford and the Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratory in France, where he continued to work until becoming a professor at the Technical University of Munich in 1980. Von Klitzing has been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart since 1985.
The von Klitzing constant, RK = h/e2 = 25,812.807449(86) Ω, is named in honor of von Klitzing's discovery of the quantum Hall effect, and is listed in the National Institute of Standards and Technology Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty. The inverse of the von Klitzing constant is equal to half that of the conductance quantum value.
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Konstantin Novoselov
Sir Konstantin Sergeevich "Kostya" Novoselov, FRS, HonFRSC, FInstP (Russian: Константи́н Серге́евич Новосёлов; born 23 August 1974) is a Russo-British physicist, most notably known for his works on graphene together with Sir Andre Geim, which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Novoselov is currently a member of the mesoscopic physics research group at the University of Manchester as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. Novoselov is also a recipient of an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council.
Konstantin Novoselov was born in Nizhny Tagil, Soviet Union, in 1974 in a Russian family. He received a Diploma from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and undertook his Ph.D. studies at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands before moving to the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom with his doctoral advisor Andre Geim in 2001. He now holds both Russian and British citizenship.
Together with Geim, Novoselov has published more than 90 peer-reviewed research papers on several topics including mesoscopic superconductivity (Hall magnetometry), subatomic movements of magnetic domain walls, the discovery of gecko tape and graphene.
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Leo Esaki
Reona Esaki also known as Leo Esaki (江崎 玲於奈 Esaki Reona, born March 12, 1925) is a Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Ivar Giaever and Brian David Josephson for his discovery of the phenomenon of electron tunneling. He is known for his invention of the Esaki diode, which exploited that phenomenon. This research was done when he was with Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (now known as Sony). He has also contributed as a pioneer of the semiconductor superlattice while he was with IBM.
He was born in Osaka, Japan. Studying physics at the University of Tokyo, he received his B.Sc. in 1947 and his Ph.D. in 1959. Esaki was awarded the Nobel Prize for research had conducted around 1958 regarding electron tunneling in solids. He moved to the United States in 1960 and joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where he became an IBM Fellow in 1967. His first paper on the semiconductor superlattice was published when he was with IBM. A comment by Esaki in a 1987 number of Current Contents regarding the original paper on superlattices notes:
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Leon Cooper
Leon N Cooper (born February 28, 1930) is an American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, who with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, developed the BCS theory of superconductivity. He is also the namesake of the Cooper pair and co-developer of the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity.
Cooper graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1947 and received a B.A. in 1951, M.A. in 1953, and Ph.D. in 1954 from Columbia University. He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study and taught at the University of Illinois and Ohio State University before coming to Brown University in 1958. He is the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown, and Director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems.
He has carried out research at various institutions including the Institute for Advanced Study, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
The character Sheldon Cooper, featured in the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, is named after Leon Cooper.
Cooper is the author of an unconventional liberal-arts physics textbook, originally An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics (Harper and Row, 1968) and still in print in a somewhat condensed form as Physics: Structure and Meaning (Lebanon: New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1992).
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Lev Landau
Lev Davidovich Landau (Russian language: Ле́в Дави́дович Ланда́у; January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1908 – April 1, 1968) was a prominent Soviet physicist who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. His accomplishments include the independent co-discovery of the density matrix method in quantum mechanics (alongside John von Neumann), the quantum mechanical theory of diamagnetism, the theory of superfluidity, the theory of second-order phase transitions, the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, the theory of Fermi liquid, the explanation of Landau damping in plasma physics, the Landau pole in quantum electrodynamics, and the two-component theory of neutrinos. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity that accounts for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below 2.17 K (−270.98 °C).
Landau was born on January 22, 1908 to Jewish parents in Baku, in what was then the Russian Empire. Landau's father was an engineer with the local oil industry and his mother was a doctor. Recognized very early as a child prodigy in mathematics, Landau was quoted as saying in later life that he scarcely remembered a time when he was not familiar with calculus. Landau graduated at 13 from gymnasium. His parents considered him too young to attend university, so for a year he attended the Baku Economical Technicum. In 1922, at age 14, he matriculated at Baku State University, studying in two departments simultaneously: the department of Physics and Mathematics, and the department of Chemistry. Subsequently he ceased studying chemistry, but remained interested in the field throughout his life.
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Louis de Broglie
Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie, FRS (/dəˈbrɔɪ/; French: [də bʁœj] ( listen); Dieppe, France, 15 August 1892 – Louveciennes, France, 19 March 1987) was a French physicist and a Nobel laureate in 1929. He was the sixteenth member elected to occupy seat 1 of the Académie française in 1944, and served as Perpetual Secretary of the Académie des sciences, France.
Louis de Broglie was born to a noble family in Dieppe, Seine-Maritime, younger son of Victor, 5th duc de Broglie. He became the 7th duc de Broglie upon the death without heir in 1960 of his older brother, Maurice, 6th duc de Broglie, also a physicist. He did not marry. When he died in Louveciennes, he was succeeded as duke by a distant cousin, Victor-François, 8th duc de Broglie.
De Broglie had intended a career in humanities, and received his first degree in history. Afterwards, though, he turned his attention toward mathematics and physics and received a degree in physics. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he offered his services to the army in the development of radio communications.
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Louis Néel
Louis Eugène Félix Néel ForMemRS (22 November 1904 – 17 November 2000) was a French physicist born in Lyon. He studied at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He obtained the degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Strasbourg. He was corecipient (with the Swedish astrophysicist Hannes Alfvén) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his pioneering studies of the magnetic properties of solids. His contributions to solid state physics have found numerous useful applications, particularly in the development of improved computer memory units. About 1930 he suggested that a new form of magnetic behavior might exist; called antiferromagnetism, as opposed to ferromagnetism. Above a certain temperature (the Néel temperature) this behaviour stops. Néel pointed out (1947) that materials could also exist showing ferrimagnetism. Néel has also given an explanation of the weak magnetism of certain rocks, making possible the study of the history of Earth's magnetic field.
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Luis Walter Alvarez
Luis W. Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist and inventor, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez (1911–1988) was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968, and took out over 40 patents, some of which led to commercial products.
Alvarez was of Spanish descent from his paternal grandfather. Alvarez was the son of Walter C. Alvarez, a doctor who for a time was a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, and of Harriet Smythe, and a grandson of Luis F. Alvarez, a doctor living in Hawaii who found a better method for diagnosing macular leprosy. His aunt, Mabel Alvarez, was a California artist specializing in oil painting. Alvarez married Geraldine Smithwick in 1936 and had two children, Walter and Jean. In 1958, he married Janet L. Landis and had two more children, Donald and Helen.
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Manne Siegbahn
Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn FRS (3 December 1886 – 26 September 1978) was a Swedish physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924 "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy".
Siegbahn was born in Örebro, Sweden. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Lund University in 1911, his thesis was titled Magnetische Feldmessungen (magnetic field measurements). He was acting professor for Johannes Rydberg when his health was failing, and succeeded him as full professor in 1920.
Following his Ph.D., he started research on X-ray spectroscopy. This work continued when he moved to the University of Uppsala in 1923. He developed improved experimental apparatus which allowed him to make very accurate measurements of the X-ray wavelengths produced by atoms of different elements. He developed a convention for naming the different spectral lines that are characteristic to elements in X-ray spectroscopy, the Siegbahn notation. Siegbahn's precision measurements drove many developments in quantum theory and atomic physics.
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Marie Curie
Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a French-Polish physicist and chemist famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes—in physics and chemistry. She was the first female professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.
She was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska ([ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska]) in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Floating University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. She shared her 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with the physicist Henri Becquerel. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, would similarly share a Nobel Prize. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Skłodowska-Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to date to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences.
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Martin Lewis Perl
Martin Lewis Perl (born June 24, 1927 in New York) is an American physicist, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton. His parents were Jewish emigrants to the US from the Polish area of Russia.
Perl is a 1948 chemical engineering graduate of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (now known as NYU-Poly) in Brooklyn. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1955, where his thesis advisor was I.I. Rabi who won the Nobel Prize in Phyics for 1944 . He spent his career at the University of Michigan and then at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).
While at Michigan, Perl and Lawrence W. Jones served as co-advisors to Samuel C. C. Ting, who earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976.
He has currently joined University of Liverpool as a visiting professor. He also serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government.
In 2009, Perl received an honorary doctorate from the University of Belgrade.
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Martin Ryle
Sir Martin Ryle FRS (27 September 1918 – 14 October 1984) was an English radio astronomer who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems (see e.g. aperture synthesis) and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sources. In 1946 Ryle and Vonberg were the first people to publish interferometric astronomical measurements at radio wavelengths, although it is claimed that Joseph Pawsey from the University of Sydney had actually made interferometric measurements earlier in the same year. With improved equipment, Ryle observed the most distant known galaxies in the universe at that time. He was the first Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, and founding director of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. He was Astronomer Royal from 1972 to 1982.
Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first Nobel prize awarded in recognition of astronomical research.
He was born in Brighton, the son of Professor John Alfred Ryle and Miriam (née Scully) Ryle. He is also the nephew of the famous Oxford University Professor of Philosophy Gilbert Ryle (Gilbert Ryle and John Alfred Ryle were brothers).
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Masatoshi Koshiba
Masatoshi Koshiba (小柴 昌俊, Koshiba Masatoshi?) (born on September 19, 1926 in Toyohashi, Aichi) is a Japanese physicist. He jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002.
He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1951 and received a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Rochester, New York, in 1955. From July 1955 to February 1958 he was Research Associate, Department of Physics, University of Chicago; from March 1958 to October 1963, he was Associate Professor, Institute of Nuclear Study, University of Tokyo, although from November 1959 to August 1962 he was on leave from the above as Senior Research Associate with the honorary rank of Associate Professor and as the Acting Director, Laboratory of High Energy Physics and Cosmic Radiation, Department of Physics, University of Chicago. At the University of Tokyo he became Associate Professor in March 1963 and then Professor in March 1970 in the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, and Emeritus Professor there in 1987. From 1987 to 1997, Koshiba taught at Tokai University. In 2002, he jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos". (The other shares of that year's Prize were awarded to Raymond Davis Jr. & Riccardo Giacconi of the U.S.A.)
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Max Born
Max Born (11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Walther Bothe).
Max was born on 11 December 1882 in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), which at Born's birth was in the Prussian Province of Silesia in the German Empire, to a family of Jewish descent. He was one of two children born to Gustav Born, (b. 22 April 1850, Kempen, d. 6 July 1900, Breslau), an anatomist and embryologist, and Margarethe ('Gretchen') Kauffmann (b. 22 January 1856, Tannhausen, d. 29 August 1886, Breslau), from a Silesian family of industrialists.
Gustav and Gretchen married on 7 May 1881. She died when Max was four years old, on 29 August 1886.
Max had a sister Käthe (b. 5 March 1884), and a half-brother Wolfgang (b. 21 October 1892) from his father's second marriage (m. 13 September 1891) with Bertha Lipstein.
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Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS, (April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German physicist who discovered quantum physics, initiating a revolution in natural science and philosophy. He is regarded as the founder of quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen; his father was a law professor in Kiel and Munich; and his paternal uncle was a judge.
Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his second wife, Emma Patzig. He was baptised with the name of Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck; of his given names, Marx (a now obsolete variant of Markus or maybe simply an error for Max, which is actually short for Maximilian) was indicated as the primary name. However, by the age of ten he signed with the name Max and used this for the rest of his life.
He was the sixth child in the family, though two of his siblings were from his father's first marriage. Among his earliest memories was the marching of Prussian and Austrian troops into Kiel during the Danish-Prussian war of 1864. In 1867 the family moved to Munich, and Planck enrolled in the Maximilians gymnasium school, where he came under the tutelage of Hermann Müller, a mathematician who took an interest in the youth, and taught him astronomy and mechanics as well as mathematics. It was from Müller that Planck first learned the principle of conservation of energy. Planck graduated early, at age 17. This is how Planck first came in contact with the field of physics.
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Max von Laue
Max Theodor Felix von Laue (9 October 1879 – 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. In addition to his scientific endeavors with contributions in optics, crystallography, quantum theory, superconductivity, and the theory of relativity, he had a number of administrative positions which advanced and guided German scientific research and development during four decades. A strong objector to National Socialism, he was instrumental in re-establishing and organizing German science after World War II.
Laue was born in Pfaffendorf, now part of Koblenz, to Julius Laue and Minna Zerrenner. In 1898, after passing his Abitur in Strassburg, he entered his compulsory year of military service, after which he began his studies in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, in 1899, at the University of Strassburg, the University of Göttingen, and the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (LMU). At Göttingen, he was greatly influenced by the physicists Woldemar Voigt and Max Abraham and the mathematician David Hilbert. After only one semester at Munich, he went to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Berlin in 1902. There, he studied under Max Planck, who gave birth to the quantum theory revolution on 14 December 1900, when he delivered his famous paper before the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. At Berlin, Laue attended lectures by Otto Lummer on heat radiation and interference spectroscopy, the influence of which can be seen in Laue’s dissertation on interference phenomena in plane-parallel plates, for which he received his doctorate in 1903. Thereafter, Laue spent 1903 to 1905 at Göttingen. Laue completed his Habilitation in 1906 under Arnold Sommerfeld at LMU.
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Melvin Schwartz
Melvin Schwartz (November 2, 1932 – August 28, 2006) was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.
He grew up in New York City in the Great Depression and went to the Bronx High School of Science. His interest in physics began there at the age of 12.
He earned his B.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1958) at Columbia University, where Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi was the head of the physics department. Schwartz became an assistant professor at Columbia in 1958. He was promoted to associate professor in 1960 and full professor in 1963. Tsung-Dao Lee, a Columbia colleague who had recently won the Nobel prize at age 30, inspired the experiment for which Schwartz received his Nobel. Schwartz and his colleagues performed the experiments which led to their Nobel Prize in the early 1960s, when all three were on the Columbia faculty. The experiment was carried out at the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory.
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Nevill Francis Mott
Sir Nevill Francis Mott, CH, FRS (30 September 1905 – 8 August 1996) was an English physicist. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors. The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck, who had pursued independent research.
Mott was born in Leeds to Lilian Mary Reynolds and Charles Francis Mott and grew up first in the village of Giggleswick, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where his father was Senior Science Master at the local school. The family moved (due to his father's jobs) first to Staffordshire, then to Chester and finally Liverpool, where his father had been appointed Director of Education. Mott was at first educated at home by his mother, who was a Cambridge Mathematics Tripos graduate. His parents met in the Cavendish Laboratory, when both were engaged in physics research. At age ten, he began formal education at Clifton College in Bristol, then at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he read the Mathematics Tripos.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen
Nicolaas Bloembergen (born Dordrecht, March 11, 1920) is a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate.
He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Leiden in 1948; while pursuing his PhD at Harvard, Bloembergen also worked part-time as a graduate research assistant for Edward Mills Purcell at the MIT Radiation Laboratory [1]. He became a professor at Harvard University in Applied Physics.
Bloembergen enrolled in 1938 at the University of Utrecht to study physics. Bloembergen left the war ravaged Netherlands in 1945 to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University. Six weeks before his arrival, Harvard Professor Edward M. Purcell (along with his graduate students Torrey and Pound) discovered nuclear magnetic resonance. Bloembergen was hired to develop a first NMR machine. While at Harvard he enjoyed classes from J. Schwinger, J. H. van Vleck, and E. C. Kemble. His thesis Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation was submitted in Leiden, where he passed qualifying criteria. After a brief postdoctoral appointment with C. J. Gorter in the Netherlands, he joined Harvard where he was named a junior fellow of Society of Fellows in 1949 and Associate Professor in 1951.
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Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish pronunciation: [ˈniːls ˈboɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in Copenhagen. He was part of the British team of physicists working on the Manhattan Project. Bohr married Margrethe Nørlund in 1912, and one of their sons, Aage Bohr, grew up to be an important physicist who in 1975 also received the Nobel Prize. Bohr has been described as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.
Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1885. His father, Christian Bohr, was professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen (it is his name which is given to the Bohr shift or Bohr effect), while his mother, Ellen Adler Bohr, came from a wealthy Jewish family prominent in Danish banking and parliamentary circles (in 1891, Bohr was baptized a Lutheran, his father's religion).Despite having a religious background, he later became an atheist.His brother was Harald Bohr, a mathematician and Olympic footballer who played on the Danish national team. Niels Bohr was a passionate footballer as well, and the two brothers played a number of matches for the Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub, with Niels in goal.
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Nikolay Basov
Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov (Russian: Никола́й Генна́диевич Ба́сов; 14 December 1922 – 1 July 2001) was a Soviet physicist and educator. For his fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics that led to the development of laser and maser, Basov shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Alexander Prokhorov and Charles Hard Townes.
Basov was born in the town Usman, now in Lipetsk Oblast in 1922. He finished school in 1941 in Voronezh, and was later called for the military service at Kuibyshev Military Medical Academy. In 1943 he left academy and served in the Red Army participating in the Second World War with the 1st Ukrainian Front.
Basov graduated from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI) in 1950. He then held a professorship at MEPhI and also worked in the Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI), where defended a dissertation for the Candidate of Sciences degree (equivalent to PhD) in 1953 and a dissertation for the Doctor of Sciences degree in 1956. Basov was the Director of the LPI in 1973–1988. He was elected as a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Russian Academy of Sciences since 1991) in 1962 and an Full Member of the Academy in 1966. In 1967 he was elected a Member of the Presidium of the Academy (1967—1990), and since 1990 he was the councillor of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was an honorary member of the International Academy of Science. He was the head of the laboratory of quantum radiophysics at the LPI until his death in 2001.
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Otto Stern
Otto Stern (17 February 1888 – 17 August 1969) was a German physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.
Stern was born into a Jewish family (father Oskar Stern and mother Eugenia née Rosenthal) in Sohrau (now Żory) in Upper Silesia, the German Empire's Kingdom of Prussia (now in Poland). He studied at Breslau, now Wrocław in Lower Silesia.
Stern completed his studies at the University of Breslau in 1912 with a doctor's degree in physical chemistry. He then followed Albert Einstein to Charles University in Prague and in later to ETH Zurich. Stern received his Habilitation at the University of Frankfurt in 1915 and in 1921, he became a professor at the University of Rostock, which he left in 1923 to work at the newly founded Institut für Physikalische Chemie at the University of Hamburg.
After resigning from his post at the University of Hamburg in 1933 because of the Nazis' Machtergreifung (seizure of power), he became professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and later professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Owen Chamberlain
Owen Chamberlain (July 10, 1920 – February 28, 2006) was an American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his discovery, with collaborator Emilio Segrè, of antiprotons, a sub-atomic antiparticle.
Born in San Francisco, California, Chamberlain graduated from Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia in 1937. He studied physics at Dartmouth College, where he was a member of Theta Chi Fraternity, and at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in school until the start of World War II, and joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, where he worked with Segrè, both at Berkeley and in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He married Beatrice Babette Copper (d. 1988) in 1943, with whom he had four children.
In 1946, after the war, Chamberlain continued with his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago under legendary physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi acted as an important guide and mentor for Chamberlain, encouraging him to leave behind the more prestigious theoretical physics for experimental physics, for which Chamberlain had a particular aptitude. Chamberlain officially received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1949.
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Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS ( /dɪˈræk/ di-RAK; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, was a member of the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami, and spent the last decade of his life at Florida State University.
Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation, which describes the behaviour of fermions, and predicted the existence of antimatter.
Dirac shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents' home in Bristol, England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland, who worked in Bristol as a French teacher. His mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, née Holten, the daughter of a ship's captain, was born in Cornwall and worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library. Paul had a younger sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix, who committed suicide in March 1925. Dirac later recalled: "My parents were terribly distressed. I didn't know they cared so much. /.../ I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew."
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Pavel Cherenkov
Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov (Russian: Павел Алексеевич Черенков, 1904–1990) was a Soviet physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1958 with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934.
Cherenkov was born in 1904 to Alexey Cherenkov and Mariya Cherenkova in the small village of Novaya Chigla in present day Voronezh Oblast, Russia.
He graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Voronezh State University in 1928, and in 1930 he took a post as a senior researcher in the Lebedev Institute of Physics. That same year he married Maria Putintseva, daughter of A.M. Putintsev, a Professor of Russian Literature. They had two children, a son, Alexey, and a daughter, Yelena.
Cherenkov was promoted to section leader, and in 1940 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Physico-Mathematical Sciences. In 1953 he was confirmed as Professor of Experimental Physics. Starting in 1959, he headed the institute's photo-meson processes laboratory. He remained a professor for fourteen years. In 1970 he became an Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
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Peter Grünberg
Peter Andreas Grünberg (born 18 May 1939) is a German physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Albert Fert of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives.
Grünberg was born in Pilsen, Bohemia, which at the time was in the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic) to the Sudeten German family of Anna and Feodor A. Grünberg which first lived in Dysina (Dýšina) to the East of Pilsen.
After the war, the family was interned, the parents were brought to a camp. His father, a Russia-born engineer who since 1928 worked for Škoda, died on 27 November 1945 in Czech imprisonment and is buried in a mass grave in Pilsen which is also inscribed with Grünberg Theodor † 27. November 1945. His mother Anna (who died in 2002 aged 100) had to work in agriculture and stayed with her parents in the Petermann house in Untersekerschan (Dolní Sekyřany), where her children (a sister was born in 1937) were brought to later. The remaining Grünberg family, like almost all Germans, was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1946. Seven year old Peter came to Lauterbach, Hesse where he attended gymnasium.
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Philipp Lenard
Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard (June 7, 1862 – May 20, 1947), -German physicist and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays and the discovery of many of their properties. He was also an active proponent of Nazi ideology.
Philipp Lénárd was born in Bratislava, Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian-Hungarian Empire (since 1993 in Slovakia) on July 7, 1862, as the son of a wine merchant. Lenard's parents were German-speakers, and the Lenard family had originally come from Tyrol in the 17th century. His father Philipp von Lenardis (1812-1896) was a wine-merchant in Bratislava. His mother was Antoine Baumann (1831-1865). The young Lenard learned in Hungarian in the Royal Hungarian Gymnasium, and as he writes it in his autobiography this made a big impression on him (especially the personality of his teacher, Virgil Klatt). In 1880 he studied physics and chemistry in Vienna and in Budapest. In 1882 he left Budapest and returned to Bratislava but in 1883 Lenard moved to Heidelberg after his tender for an assistant job in the University of Budapest was refused. In Heidelberg he studied under the illustrious Robert Bunsen, interrupted by one semester in Berlin with Hermann von Helmholtz, and obtained his doctoral degree in 1886. In 1887 he worked again in Budapest under Loránd Eötvös as a demonstrator. After posts at Aachen, Bonn, Breslau, Heidelberg (1896–1898), and Kiel (1898–1907), he returned finally to the University of Heidelberg in 1907 as the head of the Philipp Lenard Institute. In 1905 Philip Lénárd became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 1907 of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
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Pierre Curie
Pierre Curie (15 May 1859 – 19 April 1906) was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity, and Nobel laureate. In 1903 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Salomea Skłodowska-Curie, and Henri Becquerel, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".
Born in Paris, France, Pierre was the son of Dr. Eugène Curie (28 August 1827 – 25 February 1910)' and Sophie-Claire Depouilly Curie (15 January 1832 – 27 September 1897). He was educated by his father, and in his early teens showed a strong aptitude for mathematics and geometry. When he was 16, he earned his math degree. By the age of 18 he had completed the equivalent of a higher degree, but did not proceed immediately to a doctorate due to lack of money. Instead he worked as a laboratory instructor.
In 1880, Pierre and his older brother Jacques (1856–1941) demonstrated that an electric potential was generated when crystals were compressed, i.e. piezoelectricity. To aid their work, they invented the Piezoelectic Quartz Electrometer. Shortly afterwards, in 1881, they demonstrated the reverse effect: that crystals could be made to deform when subject to an electric field. Almost all digital electronic circuits now rely on this in the form of crystal oscillators.
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Pieter Zeeman
Pieter Zeeman (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈzeːmɑn]) (25 May 1865 – 9 October 1943) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect.
Pieter Zeeman was born in Zonnemaire, a small town on the island of Schouwen-Duiveland, Netherlands, to Catharinus Forandinus Zeeman, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Willemina Worst.
He became interested in physics at an early age. In 1883 the Aurora borealis happened to be visible in the Netherlands. Zeeman, then a student at the high school in Zierikzee, made a drawing and description of the phenomenon and submitted it to Nature, where it was published. The editor praised "the careful observations of Professor Zeeman from his observatory in Zonnemaire".
After finishing high school in 1883 he went to Delft for supplementary education in classical languages, then a requirement for admission to University. He stayed at the home of Dr J.W. Lely, co-principal of the gymnasium and brother of Cornelis Lely, who was responsible for the concept and realization of the Zuiderzee Works. While in Delft, he first met Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who was to become his thesis adviser.
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Polykarp Kusch
Polykarp Kusch (January 26, 1911 – March 20, 1993) was a German-American physicist. In 1955 he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics with Willis Eugene Lamb for his accurate determination that the magnetic moment of the electron was greater than its theoretical value, thus leading to reconsideration of—and innovations in—quantum electrodynamics.
He received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1931 from Case Western Reserve University. From the University of Illinois, he received his master's degree in 1933 and his Ph.D. in 1936. He spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University in New York City, and served as the university's provost for several years before departing for the newly-created University of Texas at Dallas. During his tenure at Columbia, he was the doctoral supervisor for Gordon Gould, the inventor of the laser.
A residential dormitory for undergraduate students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio on the South Campus is named after Dr. Kusch. The building is named Kusch House. It is located on Carlton Road in Cleveland Heights.
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Pyotr Kapitsa
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (Russian Пётр Леони́дович Капи́ца) (8 July [O.S. 26 June] 1894 – 8 April 1984) was a leading Soviet physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate.
Kapitsa was born in Kronstadt, Russian Empire to Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa, a military engineer who constructed fortifications, and Olga Ieronimovna Kapitsa. Kapitsa' studies were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an ambulance driver for two years on the Polish front. He graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918. He subsequently studied in Britain, working for over ten years with Ernest Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1929 and was the first director (1930–34) of the Mond Laboratory in Cambridge. In the 1920s he originated techniques for creating ultrastrong magnetic fields by injecting high current for brief periods into specially constructed air-core electromagnets. In 1928 he discovered the linear dependence of resistivity on magnetic field for various metals in very strong magnetic fields.
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Riccardo Giacconi
Riccardo Giacconi (born October 6, 1931) is an Italian-born, naturalized American Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid the foundations of X-ray astronomy. He is currently a professor at the Johns Hopkins University.
Born in Genoa, Italy he received a degree from the University of Milan before moving to the US to pursue a career in astrophysics research. He became an American citizen.[not in citation given]
Cosmic X-ray radiation is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, and so space-based telescopes are needed for X-ray astronomy. Giacconi worked on the instrumentation for X-ray astronomy, from rocket-borne detectors in the late 1950s and early 1960s, through to Uhuru, the first orbiting X-ray astronomy satellite, the Einstein Observatory, the first fully imaging X-ray telescope put into space, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory which was launched in 1999 and is still in operation. Giacconi also transferred his expertise to other fields of astronomy, including being the first director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the science operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman ( /ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.
He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard Chace Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.
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Robert Hofstadter
Robert Hofstadter (February 5, 1915 – November 17, 1990) was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Rudolf Mössbauer) "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons."
Hofstadter was born in New York City on Feb. 5, 1915, to Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and the former Henrietta Koenigsberg. He attended elementary and high schools in New York City and entered City College of New York, graduating with a B.S. degree magna cum laude in 1935 at the age of 20, and was awarded the Kenyon Prize in Mathematics and Physics. He also received a Charles A. Coffin Foundation Fellowship from the General Electric Company, which enabled him to attend graduate school at Princeton University, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1938. He did his post-doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania before joining Stanford University. Hofstadter taught at Stanford University from 1950 to 1985.
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Rudolf Mössbauer
Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer (German spelling: Mößbauer; January 31, 1929 – September 14, 2011) was a German physicist best known for his 1957 discovery of recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics. This effect, called the Mössbauer effect, is the basis for Mössbauer spectroscopy.
Mössbauer was born in Munich, where he also studied physics at the Technical University of Munich. He prepared his Diplom thesis in the Laboratory of Applied Physics of Heinz Maier-Leibnitz and graduated in 1955. He then went to the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. Since this institute, not being part of a university, had no right to award a doctorate, Mössbauer remained under the auspices of Maier-Leibnitz who was his official thesis advisor when he passed his PhD exam in Munich in 1958.
In his PhD work, he discovered recoilless nuclear fluorescence of gamma rays in 191 iridium, the Mössbauer effect. His fame grew immensely in 1960 when Robert Pound and Glen Rebka used this effect to prove the red shift of gamma radiation in the gravitational field of the earth; this Pound–Rebka experiment was one of the first experimental precision tests of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. The long-term importance of the Mössbauer effect, however, is its use in Mössbauer spectroscopy. Along with Robert Hofstadter, Rudolf Mössbauer was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Russell Alan Hulse
Russell Alan Hulse (born November 28, 1950) is an American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with his thesis advisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation". He was a specialist in the pulsar studies and gravitational waves.
Hulse was born in New York City and attended Bronx High School of Science and the Cooper Union before moving to University of Massachusetts Amherst (Ph.D. Physics 1975).
There he worked with Taylor on a large-scale survey for pulsars using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. It was this work that led to the discovery of the first binary pulsar.
In 1974, Hulse and Taylor discovered binary pulsar PSR B1913+16, which is made up of a pulsar and black companion star. Neutron star rotation emits impulses that are extremely regular and stable in the radio wave region and is nearby condensed material body gravitation (non-detectable in the visible field). Hulse, Taylor, and other colleagues have used this first binary pulsar to make high-precision tests of general relativity, demonstrating the existence of gravitational radiation. An approximation of this radiant energy is described by the formula of the quadrupolar radiation of Albert Einstein (1918).
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Saul Perlmutter
Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is an American astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Saul Perlmutter was born one of three children in the Jewish family of professor emeritus of chemical and biomolecular engineering at University of Pennsylvania Daniel D. Perlmutter and professor emerita of Temple University’s School of Social Administration Felice (Feige) D. Perlmutter (née Davidson). His maternal grandfather, the Yiddish teacher Samuel Davidson (1903–1989), immigrated to Canada (and then with his wife Chaika Newman to New York) from the Bessarabian town of Floreşti in 1919.
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Sheldon Lee Glashow
Sheldon Lee Glashow (born December 5, 1932) is a Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Higgins Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
Sheldon Lee Glashow was born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Russia. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950. Glashow was in the same graduating class as Steven Weinberg, whose own research, independent of Glashow's, would result in the two and Abdus Salam sharing the same 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (see below). Glashow received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1959 under Nobel-laureate physicist Julian Schwinger. After graduation, Glashow joined the University of California, Berkeley and worked as an Associate Professor from 1962-66. He joined the Harvard physics department as a professor in 1966, and was named Higgins Professor of Physics in 1979; he became emeritus in 2000. Glashow has been a visiting professor or scientist at CERN, the University of Marseilles, MIT, Brookhaven Laboratory, Texas A&M, the University of Houston, and Boston University.
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Simon van der Meer
Simon van der Meer (24 November 1925 – 4 March 2011) was a Dutch particle accelerator physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Carlo Rubbia for contributions to the CERN project which led to the discovery of the W and Z particles, two of the most fundamental constituents of matter.
One of four children, Simon van der Meer was born and grew up in The Hague, the Netherlands, in the family of teachers. He was educated at the city's gymnasium, graduating in 1943 during the German occupation of the Netherlands. He studied Technical Physics at the Delft University of Technology, and received an engineer's degree in 1952. After working for Philips Research in Eindhoven on high-voltage equipment for electron microscopy for a few years, he joined CERN in 1956 where he stayed until his retirement in 1990.
He married Catharina M. Koopman in the mid-1960s; they had two children: Esther van der Meer (daughter) and Mathijs van der Meer (son). He also had a sister: Ge van der Meer, and a granddaughter.
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Steven Chu
Steven Chu (Chinese: 朱棣文; pinyin: Zhū Dìwén) is an American physicist and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. Chu is known for his research at Bell Labs in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, he was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research was concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. Previously, he had been a professor of physics at Stanford University. He is a vocal advocate for more research into renewable energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combating climate change. For example, he has conceived of a global "glucose economy", a form of a low-carbon economy, in which glucose from tropical plants is shipped around like oil is today.
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Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City to Jewish immigrants Frederick and Eva Weinberg. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950 in the same graduating class as Sheldon Glashow, whose own research, independent of Weinberg's, would result in them (and Abdus Salam) sharing the same 1979 Nobel in Physics (see below).
Weinberg received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1954, living at the Cornell branch of the Telluride Association. He left Cornell and went to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen where he started his graduate studies and research. After one year, Weinberg returned to Princeton University where he earned his Ph.D. degree in Physics in 1957, studying under Sam Treiman. Weinberg is an atheist.
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Toshihide Maskawa
Toshihide Maskawa (or Masukawa) (益川 敏英, Masukawa Toshihide?, born February 7, 1940 in Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese theoretical physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
A native of Aichi Prefecture, Maskawa graduated from Nagoya University in 1962 and received a Ph.D in particle physics from the same university in 1967. At Kyoto University in the early 1970s, he collaborated with Makoto Kobayashi on explaining broken symmetry (the CP violation) within the Standard Model of particle physics. Maskawa and Kobayashi's theory required that there be at least three generations of quarks, a prediction that was confirmed experimentally four years later by the discovery of the bottom quark.
Maskawa and Kobayashi's 1973 article, "CP Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction", is the fourth most cited high energy physics paper of all time as of 2009. The Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix, which defines the mixing parameters between quarks was the result of this work. Kobayashi and Maskawa were jointly awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, with the other half going to Yoichiro Nambu.
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Val Logsdon Fitch
Val Logsdon Fitch (born March 10, 1923, Merriman, Nebraska, USA) is an American nuclear physicist. A native of Merriman, Nebraska, he graduated from Gordon High School and attended Chadron State College for three years before being drafted into the U.S. army in 1943. He later graduated from McGill University with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948 and completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1954 from Columbia University. In World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. He is a member of the faculty at Princeton University.
Fitch and co-researcher James Watson Cronin were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered.
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Victor Francis Hess
Victor Francis Hess (24 June 1883 – 17 December 1964) was an Austrian-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics, who discovered cosmic rays.
Hess was born to Vinzens Hess and Serafine Edle von Grossbauer-Waldstätt, in Waldstein Castle, near Peggau in Styria, Austria. His father was a royal forester in Prince Louis of Oettingen-Wallerstein's service. He attended secondary school at Graz Gymnasium from 1893 to 1901.
From 1901 to 1905 Hess was an undergraduate student at the University of Graz, and continued postgraduate studies in physics until he received his PhD there in 1910. He worked as Assistant under Stefan Meyer at the Institute for Radium Research, Viennese Academy of Sciences, from 1910 to 1920. Hess took a leave of absence in 1921 and travelled to the United States, working at the US Radium Corporation, in New Jersey, and as Consulting Physicist for the US Bureau of Mines, in Washington DC. In 1923, he returned to the University of Graz, and was appointed the Ordinary Professor of Experimental Physics in 1925. The University of Innsbruck appointed him Professor, and Director Institute of Radiology, in 1931.
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Vitaly Ginzburg
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS (Russian: Вита́лий Ла́заревич Ги́нзбург; October 4, 1916 – November 8, 2009) was a Soviet theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, a member of the Soviet and Russian Academies of Sciences and one of the fathers of Soviet hydrogen bomb. He was the successor to Igor Tamm as head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Academy's physics institute (FIAN), and an outspoken atheist.
He was born to a Jewish family in Moscow in 1916, the son of an engineer Lazar Efimovich Ginzburg and a doctor Augusta Felgenauer, and graduated from the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University in 1938. He defended his candidate's (Ph.D.) dissertation in 1940, and his doctor's dissertation in 1942. He worked at the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow from 1940. In 1944, he became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Among his achievements are a partially phenomenological theory of superconductivity, the Ginzburg-Landau theory, developed with Lev Landau in 1950; the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation in plasmas (for example, in the ionosphere); and a theory of the origin of cosmic radiation. He is also known to biologists as being part of the group of scientists that helped bring down the reign of the politically connected anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko, thus allowing modern genetic science to return to the USSR.
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Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (8 January 1891 in Oranienburg – 8 February 1957 in Heidelberg) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physical and Technical Institute (PTR), where he remained until 1930, the latter few years as the director of the laboratory. He served in the military during World War I from 1914, and he was a prisoner of war of the Russians, returning to Germany in 1920. Upon his return to the laboratory, he developed and applied coincidence methods to the study of nuclear reactions, the Compton effect, cosmic rays, and the wave-particle duality of radiation, for which he would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954.
In 1930 he became a full professor and director of the physics department at the University of Giessen. In 1932, he became director of the Physical and Radiological Institute at the University of Heidelberg. He was driven out of this position by elements of the deutsche Physik movement. To preclude his emigration from Germany, he was appointed director of the Physics Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research (KWImF) in Heidelberg. There, he built the first operational cyclotron in Germany. Furthermore, he became a principal in the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club, which was started in 1939 under the supervision of the Army Ordnance Office.
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Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. In addition, he made important contributions to nuclear physics, quantum field theory, and particle physics.
Heisenberg, along with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, set forth the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics, and its application especially to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.
Following World War II, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which was soon thereafter renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He was director of the institute until it was moved to Munich in 1958, when it was expanded and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.
Heisenberg was also president of the German Research Council, chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics, chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group, and president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
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Wilhelm Röntgen
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (German pronunciation: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈʁœntɡən]; 27 March 1845 – 10 February 1923) was a German physicist, who, on 8 November 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as X-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
Röntgen was born in a traditional Catholic family in Lennep, Germany as the only child of a merchant and manufacturer of cloth. His mother was Charlotte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam. In March 1848, the family moved to Apeldoorn and Wilhelm was raised in the Netherlands. He received his early education at the boarding school, Institute of Martinus Herman van Doorn, in Apeldoorn. From 1861 to 1863, he attended the ambachtsschool in Utrecht. He was expelled for refusing to reveal the identity of a classmate guilty of drawing an unflattering portrait of one of the school's teachers. Not only was he expelled, he subsequently found that he could not gain admittance into any other Dutch or German gymnasium.
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Wilhelm Wien
Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (German pronunciation: [ˈviːn]; 13 January 1864 – 30 August 1928) was a German physicist who, in 1893, used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature.
He also formulated an expression for the black-body radiation which is correct in the photon-gas limit. His arguments were based on the notion of adiabatic invariance, and were instrumental for the formulation of quantum mechanics. Wien received the 1911 Nobel Prize for his work on heat radiation.
Wien was born at Gaffken near Fischhausen (Rybaki), Province of Prussia (now Primorsk, Russia) as the son of landowner Carl Wien. In 1866, his family moved to Drachstein near Rastenburg (Rastembork).
In 1879, Wien went to school in Rastenburg and from 1880-1882 he attended the city school of Heidelberg. In 1882 he attended the University of Göttingen and the University of Berlin. From 1883-85, he worked in the laboratory of Hermann von Helmholtz and, in 1886, he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on the diffraction of light upon metals and on the influence of various materials upon the color of refracted light. From 1896 to 1899, Wien lectured at the prestigious RWTH Aachen University. In 1900 he went to the University of Würzburg and became successor of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen.
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Willard Boyle
Willard Sterling Boyle, CC (August 19, 1924 – May 7, 2011) was a Canadian physicist and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. On October 6, 2009, it was announced that he would share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor".
Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, he was the son of a medical doctor and moved to Quebec with his father and mother Beatrice when he was three. He was home schooled by his mother until age fourteen, when he attended Montreal's Lower Canada College to complete his secondary education. Boyle attended McGill University, but his education was interrupted in 1943, when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. He was loaned to the Britain's Royal Navy, where he was learning how to land Spitfires on aircraft carriers as the war ended. He gained a BSc (1947), MSc (1948) and PhD (1950) from McGill University.
After receiving his doctorate, Boyle spent one year at Canada's Radiation Lab and two years teaching physics at the Royal Military College of Canada. In 1953 Boyle joined Bell Labs where he invented the first continuously operating ruby laser with Don Nelson in 1962, and was named on the first patent for a semiconductor injection laser. He was made director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at the Bell Labs subsidiary Bellcomm in 1962, providing support for the Apollo space program and helping to select lunar landing sites. He returned to Bell Labs in 1964, working on the development of integrated circuits.
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William Henry Bragg
Sir William Henry Bragg OM, KBE, PRS (2 July 1862 – 10 March 1942) was a British physicist, chemist, mathematician and active sportsman who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his son William Lawrence Bragg – the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics. The mineral Braggite is named after him and his son.
Bragg was born at Westward near Wigton, Cumberland, the son of Robert John Bragg, a merchant marine officer and farmer, and his wife Mary née Wood, a clergyman's daughter. When Bragg was seven years old, his mother died, and he was raised by his uncle, also named William Bragg, at Market Harborough, Leicestershire. He was educated at the Old Grammar School there, at King William's College on the Isle of Man, and having won an exhibition [scholarship], at Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1884 as third wrangler, and in 1885 was awarded a "first" in the mathematical tripos.
In 1885, (at the age of 23), Bragg was appointed Elder Professor of Mathematics and Experimental Physics at the University of Adelaide, and started work there early in 1886. Being a skilled mathematician, at that time he had limited knowledge of physics, most of which was in the form of applied mathematics he had learnt at Trinity. Also at that time, there were only about a hundred students doing full courses at Adelaide, of whom less than a handful belonged to the science school, whose deficient teaching facilities Bragg improved by apprenticing himself to a firm of instrument makers. Bragg was an able and popular lecturer; he encouraged the formation of the student union, and the attendance, free of charge, of science teachers at his lectures.
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William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation. In his later life, Shockley was a professor at Stanford and became a staunch advocate of eugenics.
Shockley was born in London, England to American parents, and raised in his family's hometown of Palo Alto, California, from age three. His father, William senior, was a mining engineer who speculated in mines for a living, and spoke eight languages. His mother, Mary, grew up in the American West, graduated from Stanford University, and became the first female US Deputy mining surveyor.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1932. While still a student, Shockley married Iowan Jean Bailey in August 1933. In March 1934 Jean had a baby girl, Alison; she also had a son, Richard (Dick) who also became a physicist. Shockley was awarded his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. The title of his doctoral thesis was Electronic Bands in Sodium Chloride, and was suggested by his thesis advisor, John C. Slater. After receiving his doctorate, he joined a research group headed by Clinton Davisson at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The next few years were productive ones for Shockley. He published a number of fundamental papers on solid state physics in Physical Review. In 1938, he got his first patent, "Electron Discharge Device" on electron multipliers.
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William Whewell
William Whewell ( /ˈhjuːəl/ HEW-əl; 24 May 1794 – 6 March 1866) was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Whewell was born in Lancaster. His father, a carpenter, wished him to follow his trade, but his success in mathematics at Lancaster and Heversham grammar schools won him an exhibition (a type of scholarship) at Trinity College, Cambridge (1812). In 1814 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry. He was Second Wrangler in 1816, President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1817, became fellow and tutor of his college, and, in 1841, succeeded Dr Christopher Wordsworth as master. He was professor of mineralogy from 1828 to 1832 and Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy (then called "moral theology and casuistical divinity") from 1838 to 1855.
Whewell died in Cambridge 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse.
Full bibliographical details are given by Isaac Todhunter, W. Whewell: an Account of his Writings (2 vols., 1876). See also Life of W. Whewell, by Mrs Stair Douglas (1881).
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Willis Lamb
Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 together with Polykarp Kusch "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb and Kusch were able to precisely determine certain electromagnetic properties of the electron (see Lamb shift). Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.
Lamb was born in Los Angeles, California, United States and attended Los Angeles High School. First admitted in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Mössbauer. Lamb was the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1962, and also taught at Yale, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Arizona. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.
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Wolfgang Ketterle
Wolfgang Ketterle (born 21 October 1957) is a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research has focused on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero, and he led one of the first groups to realize Bose-Einstein condensation in these systems in 1995.[1] For this achievement, as well as early fundamental studies of condensates, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, together with Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman.
Ketterle was born in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, and attended school in Eppelheim and Heidelberg. In 1976 he entered the University of Heidelberg, before transferring to the Technical University of Munich two years later, where he gained his master's diploma in 1982. In 1986 he earned a Ph.D in experimental molecular spectroscopy under the supervision of Herbert Walther and Hartmut Figger at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, before conducting postdoctoral research at Garching and the University of Heidelberg. In 1990 he joined the group of David E. Pritchard at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He was appointed to the MIT physics faculty in 1993. Since 1998 he has been John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics. In 2006, he was appointed Associate Director of RLE, and began serving as director of MIT's Center for Ultracold Atoms.
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Wolfgang Paul
Wolfgang Paul (August 10, 1913 – December 7, 1993) was a German physicist, who co-developed the non-magnetic quadrupole mass filter which laid the foundation for what we now call an ion trap. He shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for this work with Hans Georg Dehmelt; the other half of the Prize in that year was awarded to Norman Foster Ramsey.
Wolfgang Paul was born on 10 August 1913 in Lorenzkirch, Germany. He grew up in Munich where his father was professor for pharmaceutic chemistry. After the first few years at the Technical University of Munich he changed to the Technical University of Berlin in 1934 where he finished his Diploma in 1937 at the group of Hans Geiger. He followed his doctorate advisor Hans Kopfermann to the University of Kiel and after being drafted to the airforce he finished his PhD in 1940 at the Technical University of Berlin.
During World War II, he researched isotope separation, which is necessary to produce fissionable material for use in making nuclear weapons.
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Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after being nominated by Albert Einstein, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle," involving spin theory, underpinning the structure of matter and the whole of chemistry.
Pauli was born in Vienna to a chemist Wolfgang Joseph Pauli (né Wolf Pascheles, 1869–1955) and his wife Bertha Camilla Schütz. His middle name was given in honor of his godfather, physicist Ernst Mach. Pauli's paternal grandparents were from prominent Jewish families of Prague; his great-grandfather was the Czech-Jewish publisher Wolf Pascheles. His father converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism shortly before his marriage in 1899. His mother, Bertha Schütz, was raised in her mother's Roman Catholic religion; her father was Jewish writer Friedrich Schütz. Pauli was raised as a Roman Catholic, although eventually he and his parents left the Church.
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Yoichiro Nambu
Yoichiro Nambu (南部 陽一郎, Nambu Yōichirō?, born January 18, 1921) is a Japanese-born American physicist, currently a professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded a one-half share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. The other half share was split equally between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
Nambu was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1921. After graduating from the then Fukui Secondary High School in Fukui City, he enrolled in the Tokyo Imperial University and studied physics. He received his B.S. in 1942 and D.Sc. in 1952. In 1949 he was appointed to associate professor at the Osaka City University and promoted to professorship the next year at the age of 29.
In 1952, he was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, to study. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1954 and was promoted to professor in 1958. From 1974 to 1977 he was also Chairman of the Department of Physics. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970.
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Zhores Alferov
Zhores Ivanovich Alferov (Russian: Жоре́с Ива́нович Алфёров, [ʐɐˈrʲɛs ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ ɐlˈfʲorəf]; Belarusian: Жарэс Іва́навіч Алфёраў; born March 15, 1930) is a Soviet and Russian physicist and academic who contributed significantly to the creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics. He is an inventor of the heterotransistor and the winner of 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is also a Russian politician and has been a member of the Russian State Parliament, the Duma, since 1995. Lately, he has become one of the most influential members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
Alferov was born in Vitebsk, Byelorussian SSR, Soviet Union to a Belarusian father and a Jewish mother. In 1952 he graduated from V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad. Since 1953 he has worked in the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From the Institute he earned several scientific degrees: a Candidate of Sciences in Technology in 1961 and a Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics in 1970. He has been director of the Institute since 1987. He was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1972, and a full member in 1979. From 1989 he has been Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences and President of its Saint Petersburg Scientific Center. Since 1995 he is a member of the State Duma on the list of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. He received 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Herbert Kroemer, "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and optoelectronics".
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photo: AP / Echorouk Elyaoumi
21 Jan 2013
Algerian security forces on Sunday made grisly discoveries of dozens of bodies at a sprawling natural gas facility, a day after a violent showdown put an end to an international hostage crisis. But as Algeria tallied up the losses, a debate was emerging about whether the militant group linked to al-Qaida that seized the plant had been intent on a massacre or whether it had simply been after money ... ....(size: 2.9Kb)
photo: US Army / Sgt. 1st Class Abram Pinnington
20 Jan 2013
WASHINGTON -- The war rages about cities with names such as Goa and Timbuktu, in a sparsely populated, mostly flat, dusty and landlocked country in northwest Africa. The combatants include a nomadic Berber people known as Tuareg, the French Foreign Legion and a coalition of al-Qaida affiliates who identify themselves with the Maghreb, the desert region of Northwestern Africa ... Some U.S ... Afghanistan ... J ... "They go to where the fight is ... ....(size: 6.6Kb)
photo: WN / Imran Nissar
20 Jan 2013
The world's 100 richest people earned enough money last year to end world extreme poverty four times over, according to released by international rights group and charity Oxfam. The $240 billion net income of the world's 100 richest billionaires would have ended poverty four times over, according to the London-based group's report released on Saturday ... [...] We're anti-poverty agency ... You don't normally hear us talking about wealth ... ....(size: 18.5Kb)
photo: US Army / Tech Sergeant Brenda Nipper
21 Jan 2013
Click photo to enlarge. An Afghan security officer looks at smoke rising from a rocket fired by militants which landed near the Kabul traffic police headquarters during an attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Jan. 21, 2013 ... «1234» ... It was the second brazen raid inside the Afghan capital in less than a week, a sign that the insurgency is determined to keep carrying out such spectacular attacks even as the U.S ... ....(size: 5.4Kb)
photo: AP / Patrick Semansky
20 Jan 2013
US President Barack Obama has blamed "terrorists" for the death of 23 hostages at a besieged desert gas facility in Algeria. A four-day siege at the In Amenas site was ended on Saturday by an army raid. At least five Britons, five Norwegians and 10 Japanese are dead or missing, while Algeria said its troops had killed all 32 hostage-takers ... Continue reading the main story Foreign citizens involved ... Hostage crisis in Algeria ... ....(size: 5.9Kb)
New Scientist
22 Jan 2013
We shouldn't be obsessed with finding a theory of everything, says Lisa Randall, one of the world's most prominent theoretical physicists. Doesn't every physicist dream of one neat theory of everything?. There are lots of physicists! I don't think about a theory of everything when I do my research ... So is a theory of everything a myth?. It's not that it's a fallacy. It's one objective that will inspire progress ... Profile....(size: 4.2Kb)
Detroit Free Press
22 Jan 2013
"You have all these people arguing over the Web, but they are not looking at data," said Yunck, a physicist who worked for many years on climate applications at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif ... This app presents a video of global warming using data gathered by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group, which is led by University of California, Berkeley, physicist Richard Muller ... It works best with a tablet ... Free ... ....(size: 6.4Kb)
Houston Chronicle
22 Jan 2013
Home Local US & World Sports Business Opinion Arts & Entertainment Lifestyle. Sections. Sections. Home Local US & World Sports Business Opinion Arts & Entertainment Lifestyle ... All Opinion Editorials Outlook Letters to the Editor ... Share. Comments ... University of Houston physicists Lisa Whitehead and Kwong Lau were part of an international team of researchers involved in an experiment in China that made a critical measurement of neutrinos ... Top....(size: 16.1Kb)
The Times of India
22 Jan 2013
Members for the university's executive council include Gautam Barua, a computer scientist and director of IIT-G, Mihir Kanti Choudhury, academician in organic chemistry and vice chancellor of Tezpur University, Nirmal Choudhury, former vice chancellor of Gauhati University, BN Goswami, atmospheric physicist and director of Indian Institute of ......(size: 2.9Kb)
Zeenews
22 Jan 2013
London. A new study has suggested that a gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion known in the Universe, may have hit the Earth in the 8th Century ... Researchers suggest this collision would have hurled out vast amounts of energy, according to the BBC ... Another team of US physicists recently published a paper suggesting that an unusually large solar flare from the Sun could have caused the pulse of energy ... ANI ... First Published ... ....(size: 3.5Kb)
The Washington Times
22 Jan 2013
Facebook. Follow @washtimes. Do you think President Obama's second term will be better or worse for the economy than his first?. View results ... “This is commercial, off-the-shelf technology, it’s state of the art and almost all other foreign countries that are flying, they’re flying these very same systems,” said John Cardarelli II, a health physicist with the Environmental Protection Agency ... Mr ... Thomas said. ....(size: 3.9Kb)
The Daily Telegraph
22 Jan 2013
When you factor in the Radio 4 show The Infinite Monkey Cage (which Cox presents with the comedian Robin Ince) and television’s Stargazing Live with Dara O Briain you can see why it is so easy to forget that at heart Cox is a particle physicist, not a celebrity ... I wanted it to be a real physicist’s take on life....(size: 25.5Kb)
Yahoo Daily News
21 Jan 2013
"Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy," physicist Richard Feynman once said, according to legend. That situation hasn't changed much in the roughly 90 years since quantum mechanics was first introduced, as evidenced by a new poll, detailed online this month, showing that physicists are still divided over the theory's meaning....(size: 4.8Kb)
PhysOrg
21 Jan 2013
For several years, physicists have searched in vain for an explanation of dark matter – the invisible "stuff" that makes up what is believed to be approximately 86 percent of all matter, and dark energy – the mysterious force believed to be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. Because thus far no evidence has been found to support any theory that explains either, new theories continue to develop ... ....(size: 1.9Kb)
Newsvine
21 Jan 2013
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has long relied on technology to help him connect with the outside world despite the degenerative motor neuron disease he has battled for the past 50 years ... speed up the rate at which the physicist conveys his thoughts....(size: 1.3Kb)
The Guardian
21 Jan 2013
Physicist Sean Carroll at the Royal Institution reveals the truth about particles and fields ... There's something physicists haven't told you – until now ... Sean is a theoretical physicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California ... a programme of missions beyond low Earth orbit ... Email scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com ... ....(size: 3.2Kb)
Forbes
21 Jan 2013
Indian Express
21 Jan 2013
A gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion known in the Universe, may have hit the Earth in the 8th Century, according to a new study ... Another team of US physicists recently published a paper suggesting that an unusually large solar flare from the Sun could have caused the pulse of energy. But now German researchers have offered up another culprit ... ......(size: 1.6Kb)
For the album by Devin Townsend, see Physicist (album).
Not to be confused with Physician, a person who practices medicine.
A physicist is a scientist who does research in physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made (particle physics) to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole (cosmology).
Contents |
Etymology[link]
The term "Physicist" was coined by English philosopher, priest, and historian of science William Whewell in 1840, to denote a cultivator of physics.[2]
Education[link]
Most material a student encounters in the undergraduate physics curriculum is based on discoveries and insights of a century or more in the past. Alhazen's intromission theory of light was formulated in the 11th century; Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation were formulated in the 17th century; Maxwell's equations, 19th century; and quantum mechanics, early 20th century. The undergraduate physics curriculum generally includes the following range of courses: chemistry, classical physics, kinematics, astronomy and astrophysics, physics laboratory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, optics, modern physics, quantum physics, nuclear physics, particle physics, and solid state physics. Undergraduate physics students must also take extensive mathematics courses (calculus, differential equations, advanced calculus), and computer science and programming. Undergraduate physics students often perform research with faculty members.
Many positions, especially in research, require a doctoral degree. At the Master's level and higher, students tend to specialize in a particular field. Fields of specialization include experimental and theoretical astrophysics, atomic physics, molecular physics, biophysics, chemical physics, medical physics, condensed matter physics, cosmology, geophysics, material science, nuclear physics, optics, particle physics, and plasma physics. Post-doctoral experience may be required for certain positions.
Employment[link]
The three major employers of career physicists are academic institutions, government laboratories, and private industries, with the largest employer being the last.[3] Many trained physicists, however, apply their skills to other activities, in particular to engineering, computing, and finance, often quite successfully. Some physicists take up additional careers where their knowledge of physics can be combined with further training in other disciplines, such as patent law in industry or private practice. In the United States, a majority of those in the private sections having a physics degree actually work outside the fields of physics, astronomy and engineering altogether.[4]
Nobel laureate Sir Joseph Rotblat has suggested that physicists going into employment in scientific research should honour a Hippocratic Oath for Scientists.
Honors and awards[link]
The highest honor awarded to physicists is the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded since 1901 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
See also[link]
- American Institute of Physics
- Engineering physics
- History of physics
- Institute of Physics (UK & Ireland)
- List of physicists
- Nobel Prize in physics
- Professional physicist
References[link]
- ^ "Galileo and the Birth of Modern Science, by Stephen Hawking, American Heritage's Invention & Technology, Spring 2009, Vol. 24, No. 1, p. 36
- ^ http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=physics
- ^ AIP Statistical Research Center. "Initial Employment Report, Fig. 7". Archived from the original on January 13, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070113215906/http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/emp/figure7.htm. Retrieved August 21, 2006. Also relevant is: Institute of Physics. "Education Statistics, Graph 4.11". http://www.iop.org/Our_Activities/Science_Policy/Statistics/Education%20Statistics/page_2680.html. Retrieved August 21, 2006. [dead link]
- ^ AIP Statistical Research Center. "Initial Employment Report, Table 1". http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/emp/table1.htm. Retrieved August 21, 2006.
Further reading[link]
- Whitten, Barbara L.; Foster, Suzanne R.; Duncombe, Margaret L. (2003). "What works for women in physics?". Physics Today 56 (9): 46. Bibcode 2003PhT....56i..46W. DOI:10.1063/1.1620834. http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_56/iss_9/46_1.shtml.
- Kirby, Kate; Czujko, Roman; Mulvey, Patrick (2001). "The Physics Job Market: From Bear to Bull in a Decade". Physics Today 54 (4): 36. Bibcode 2001PhT....54d..36K. DOI:10.1063/1.1372112. http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_54/iss_4/36_1.shtml.
- Hermanowicz, Joseph C. (1998). The Stars Are Not Enough: Scientists--Their Passions and Professions. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-32767-9.
- Hermanowicz, Joseph C. (2009). Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-32761-7.
External links[link]
 |
Look up physicist in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
- Education and employment statistics from the American Institute of Physics
- Occupational Outlook Handbook
- Physicists and Astronomers; US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
- PhysicistTv
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
