Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology and is regarded as one of the most important astronomers of all time.
George Berkeley (/ˈbɑːrkli/; 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753) — known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne) — was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley is also
Ole Christensen Rømer (Danish pronunciation: [ˈo(ː)lə ˈʁœːˀmɐ]; 25 September 1644 – 19 September 1710) was a Danish astronomer who in 1676 made the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light.
James Clerk Maxwell FRS FRSE (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish scientist in the field of mathematical physics. His most notable achievement was to formulate the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first time electricity, magnetism, and light as manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics" after the first one realised by Isaac Newton.
Albert Abraham Michelson (surname pronunciation anglicized as "Michael-son", December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences.
Albert Einstein (/ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɛɐ̯t ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). Einstein's work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. Einstein is best known in popular culture for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"). He received the 1921 N
Jules Henri Poincaré (French: [ʒyl ɑ̃ʁi pwɛ̃kaʁe]; 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist by Eric Temple Bell, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial me
Ronald Lewis "Ron" Graham (born October 31, 1935) is a mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as being "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years".He has done important work in scheduling theory, computational geometry, Ramsey theory, and quasi-randomness .
Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann (also spelled Friedman or Fridman; Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Фри́дман) (June 16 [O.S. 4], 1888 – September 16, 1925) was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician. He is best known for his pioneering theory that the universe was expanding, governed by a set of equations he developed now known as the Friedmann equations.
Arno Allan Penzias (born 26 April 1933) is an American physicist, radio astronomer and Nobel laureate in physics who is co-discoverer of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which helped establish the Big Bang theory of cosmology.
Robert Woodrow Wilson (born January 10, 1936) is an American astronomer, 1978 Nobel laureate in physics, who with Arno Allan Penzias discovered in 1964 the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). The award purse was also shared with a third scientist, Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, for unrelated work.
Christian Andreas Doppler (/ˈdɒplər/; German: [ˈdɔplɐ]; 29 November 1803 – 17 March 1853) was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He is celebrated for his principle — known as the Doppler effect — that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer. He used this concept to explain the color of binary stars.
Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science. He is the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, as well as an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College.
Penrose is known for his work in mathematical physics, in particular for his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He has received several prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics, which h
George Gamow (March 4 [O.S. February 20] 1904 – August 19, 1968), born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov (Russian: Гео́ргий Анто́нович Га́мов; IPA: [ɡʲɪˈorɡʲɪj ɐnˈtonəvʲɪtɕ ˈɡaməf] ( listen)), was a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was an early advocate and developer of Lemaître's Big Bang theory. He discovered a theoretical explanation of alpha decay via quantum tunneling, and worked on radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis and Big Bang nucleosynthesis (which he
Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (/ləˈplɑːs/; French: [pjɛʁ simɔ̃ laplas]; 23 March 1749 – 5 March 1827) was an influential French scholar whose work was important to the development of mathematics, statistics, physics and astronomy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics) (1799–1825). This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the
John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh OM PRS (/ˈreɪli/; 12 November 1842 – 30 June 1919) was a physicist who, with William Ramsay, discovered argon, an achievement for which he earned the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904. He also discovered the phenomenon now called Rayleigh scattering, which can be used to explain why the sky is blue, and predicted the existence of the surface waves now known as Rayleigh waves. Rayleigh's textbook, The Theory of Sound, is still referred to by acoustic engineers today.
Sir James Hopwood Jeans OM FRS[1] (11 September 1877 – 16 September 1946[2]) was an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician.
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, FRS[3] (/plɑːŋk/; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose work on quantum theory won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as an originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. However, his name is also known on a broader academic basis, through the renaming in 1948 of the Ge
Werner Karl Heisenberg (German: [ˈhaɪzənbɛɐ̯k]; 5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, this matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. In 1927 he published his uncertainty principle, upon which he built his philosophy and for which he is best known. Heisenb
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (German: [ˈɛɐ̯viːn ˈʃʁøːdɪŋɐ]; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961), sometimes written as Erwin Schrodinger or Erwin Schroedinger, was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics: he formulated the wave equation (stationary and time-dependent Schrödinger equation) and revealed the identity of his development of the formalism and matrix mechanics. Schröding
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac OM FRS[4] (/dɪˈræk/; 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 was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, 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 d
William of Ockham (/ˈɒkəm/; also Occam, from Latin: Gulielmus Occamus; c. 1287 – 1347) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. He is commonly known for Occam's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, and also produce
Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish: [nils ˈb̥oɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.
Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but c
John Dalton FRS (6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist. He is best known for his pioneering work in the development of modern atomic theory; and his research into colour blindness, sometimes referred to as Daltonism, in his honour.
Sir Joseph John Thomson OM PRS[1] (/ˈtɒmsən/; 18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was an English physicist and Nobel laureate in physics, credited with the discovery and identification of the electron; and with the discovery of the first subatomic particle.
He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London and appointed to the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics at the Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory in 1884.
In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previo
Richard Phillips Feynman (/ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical 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 for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin'ichirō Tomonaga, received the Nobe
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867).
In early work, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the nuclear transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha
Sir James Chadwick, CH, FRS (20 October 1891 – 24 July 1974) was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atomic bomb research efforts. He was the head of the British team that worked on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. He was knighted in England in 1945 for his achievements in physics.
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian-born Swiss and American theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli 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". The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.
Murray Gell-Mann (/ˈmʌri ˈɡɛl ˈmæn/; born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at th
Mohammad Abdus Salam NI, SPk, KBE (Punjabi, Urdu: محمد عبد السلام; pronounced [əbd̪ʊs səlɑm]; 29 January 1926 – 21 November 1996), was a Pakistani theoretical physicist. A major figure in 20th century theoretical physics, he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. He was the first Pakistani and first Muslim to receive a Nobel Prize in science and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize
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.
Sheldon Lee Glashow (/ˈɡlæʃoʊ/; 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, and is a member of the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Carlo Rubbia, OMRI, OMCA (born 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.
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.
Chen-Ning Franklin Yang, also known as Yang Zhenning (simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng; born October 1, 1922), is a Chinese 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. The two proved theoretically that one of the basic quantum-mechanics laws, the conservation of parity, is violated in the so-called weak nuclear reactions,
Tsung-Dao Lee (T. D. Lee; Chinese: 李政道; pinyin: Lǐ Zhèngdào; born November 24, 1926) is a Chinese-American physicist, known for his work on parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) physics, nontopological solitons and soliton stars. He holds the rank of University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1953 and from which he retired in 2012.
In 1957, Lee, at the age of 30, won the Nobel Prize in Physics with Franklin C N Yang for their
Chien-Shiung Wu (simplified Chinese: 吴健雄; traditional Chinese: 吳健雄; pinyin: Wú Jiànxióng; May 31, 1912 – February 16, 1997) was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation
James Watson Cronin (September 29, 1931 – August 25, 2016) was an American particle physicist.
Cronin was born in Chicago, Illinois, and attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He 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
Val Logsdon Fitch (March 10, 1923 – February 5, 2015) was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was 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 retrace the path of the original reaction, w
Kip Stephen Thorne (born June 1, 1940) is an American theoretical physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, he was the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) until 2009 and is one of the world's leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein's general theory of relativity. He continues to do scientific research and scientific consult
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE FRAS (born 15 July 1943) is a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars while studying and advised by her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with astronomer Martin Ryle, while Bell Burnell was excluded, despite having been the first to observe and precisely analyse the pulsars. Bell Burnell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, pre
Maarten Schmidt (born December 28, 1929) is a Dutch astronomer who measured the distances of quasars.
Born in Groningen, The Netherlands, Schmidt studied with Jan Hendrik Oort. He earned his Ph.D. degree from Leiden Observatory in 1956.
In 1959, he emigrated to the United States and went to work at the California Institute of Technology. In the beginning, he worked on theories about the mass distribution and dynamics of galaxies. Of particular note from this period was his formulation of what has become
Roy Patrick Kerr CNZM FRSNZ (born 16 May 1934) is a New Zealand mathematician who discovered the Kerr geometry, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity. His solution models the gravitational field outside an uncharged rotating massive object, including a rotating black hole.
Brandon Carter, FRS (born 1942) is an Australian theoretical physicist, best known for his work on the properties of black holes and for being the first to name and employ the anthropic principle in its contemporary form. He is a researcher at the Meudon campus of the Laboratoire Univers et Théories, part of the CNRS.
He studied at Cambridge under Dennis Sciama. He found the exact solution of the geodesic equations for the Kerr/Newman electrovacuum solution, and the maximal analytic extension of this solu
Karl Schwarzschild (German: [ˈkaʁl ˈʃvaʁtsʃɪlt]; October 9, 1873 – May 11, 1916) was a German physicist and astronomer. He was also the father of astrophysicist Martin Schwarzschild.
He provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished in 1915, the same year that Einstein first introduced general relativity. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of Schwarzschild coordinates and
Werner Israel, OC FRSC FRS (born October 4, 1931) is a Canadian physicist.
Born in Berlin, Germany and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, he received his B.Sc. in 1951 and his M.Sc. in 1954 from the University of Cape Town. He received his Ph.D. in 1960 from Trinity College, Dublin.
In 1990, together with Eric Poisson, Israel pioneered the study of black hole interiors and, following up a suggestion of Roger Penrose, discovered the phenomenon of mass inflation (which should not be confused with inflation
Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. As the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer is among those who are called the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in
Lev Davidovich Landau (Russian: Лев Давидович Ландау; IPA: [lʲɛv dɐˈvidəvʲitɕ lɐnˈda.u] ( listen); January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1908 – 1 April 1968) was a 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 Ginz
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS[2] (Listeni/ˌtʃʌndrəˈʃeɪkər/; October 19, 1910 – August 21, 1995), was an Indian American astrophysicist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the best current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes. The Chandrasekhar li